Do you own a small business? If so, you’ve probably already experienced the struggle of trying to grow your email list. You’ve sent out countless sales letters, made use of many online services, and experimented with different tactics, all in the name of growing your business’ email list.
If you’re frustrated with the lack of results you’re seeing, you’re in luck because you’ve found the answer right here. In this blog post, you’re going to learn about five steps you can take to make your small business’ email marketing work for you.
1. Set Up Email Alerts.
As a business owner, sales manager, or marketing director, you’re probably already bombarded with emails everyday. But how effective is your email marketing? Does it work harder than you’d expect it to?
The answer is: maybe. Like most things in business, email marketing is more effective when you do it right. One of the first things you should do is set up email alerts on your favorite platforms. This way, you’ll get an instant notification whenever someone subscribes to your mailing list.
Setting up email alerts is as easy as going to your account settings on any platform and putting a check in the box next to “alert me when…” With these alerts set up, you’ll get an email every time someone subscribes to your email list.
2. Use Personalized, Unique Content.
You’ve probably seen this a million times before but it bears repeating: content is king. You need to create content that is of value to your audience and that they want to read, listen to, or see. The old adage ‘content is king’ applies when it comes to email marketing just as much as it does in regular ol’ blogging.
There are many successful businesses that operate solely on the strength of their valuable content; whether that’s a case study, an event recap, a how-to guide, or someone’s personal story.
The idea is to come up with content that is customized for each individual subscriber. If you want to grow your email list and make sure your email marketing is as effective as possible, you need to stand out from the crowd by providing unique and valuable content that they want to read.
3. Personalize Your Subject Lines.
Even if you create unique and valuable content, if you send out generic emails, you’re losing out on a huge chunk of potential subscribers. It’s all about keeping your emails interesting and valuable while still keeping things professional. Too many businesses try to be funny or quirky in their email subject lines but they lose sight of what made them popular in the first place.
To ensure that your small business’ email marketing is effective, you need to put in the time to personalize your subject lines. Use your email marketing software to craft individualized messages for every subscriber on your email list. Doing this manually is so much work and, let’s be honest, a little creepy. But it’s necessary if you want to see results from your email marketing efforts.
4. Measure The Results Of Your Email Marketing Efforts.
Even if you’ve done all the work to make your small business’ email marketing work, you should still measure the results of your efforts. You can’t expect to see instantaneous results, but you should see an increase in the number of leads or sales that you receive after you’ve implemented a marketing strategy using email.
Measuring the success of your email marketing is quite straightforward. First, you need to set a goal for your email marketing strategy. For example, you can decide that you want to grow your email list by 15% this month. To do this, you’ll need to send out 15 email campaigns, and you’ll need to track the results of those emails. Then, you can determine whether or not your strategy was successful.
You should also look at other metrics besides just the number of subscribers to determine the effectiveness of your email marketing. For example, you can look at the number of people who opened your emails and clicked on the links contained within them. Tracking these metrics will give you a good indication of the effectiveness of your strategy.
5. Automate As Much As Possible.
Nowadays, most businesses are turning to automation in one way or another to save them time and effort. Whether you use a tool like Airmail or Sendgrid, you’ll notice that most marketing automation platforms allow you to setup automated campaigns. Using automation to send out periodic emails is a proven strategy that has been used for years by many large and small businesses alike.
The key to making your small business’ email marketing work is in becoming as automated as possible. Set up automated emails to go out at pre-determined intervals. Then, monitor your emails’ open rates, clicks-throughs, and unsubscribe rates to determine the success of your strategy.
You must have a clear digital marketing strategy in place before you even think about implementing email marketing. From the platform that you’ll choose to deploy your emails from to how you’ll personalize your content, everything needs to be thought through and planned before you begin.
Make sure to follow up with new blog posts on this topic and to share what you’ve learned with your network. You can also use this blog post as a launching point to further discuss the topic with others.