Want some email marketing ideas for small business? We all know small companies rely on marketing to reach new customers and expand their operations. It is one of the excellent ways to grow a loyal client list and make your brand stick.

However, while the idea behind email marketing seems simple enough, it takes a lot of work and strategy to get it to work for your business.

Email marketing goes back a long way. Before marketers could send their messages to your email address, direct mail was the preferred method to send out messages.

Email marketing has seen a tremendous and quicker alternative to sending out hundreds of letters to your ideal customers. The email has not replaced direct mail, but it is preferred over direct mail by most marketers today.

This guide will go deeper into the concept of email marketing. First, we will look at why small businesses need email marketing and the steps they can take to run successful email marketing campaigns. Then, stick around to learn some of the best email marketing strategies you can employ in your business.

What Is Email Marketing?

In 1978, a marketing manager named Gary Thuerk decided to try a new form of communication to send out promotional messages.

It was the world’s first email marketing campaign, and Thuerk had a modest list of only 400 contacts. Nevertheless, Thuerk managed to rake in 13 million in revenue for his company from that campaign.

On the 4th of July in ‘96, the first email platform was launched by Hotmail. It was free and web-based, so people were curious to figure out this new form of communication. By 2015, there were over two billion emails users globally, with half the emails sent being spam.

Email marketing has since taken off and remains one of the most stable forms of marketing products and services online.

Email marketing is when businesses use email to promote their products and services. We all have hundreds of emails from companies, some that we read, and the majority never opened.

How Does Email Marketing Campaigns Work?

Email marketing all begins with an email service provider. An email service provider is a software that allows businesses and individuals to build a mailing list, create email marketing campaigns, send newsletters, and manage their email marketing strategies.

ESPs are created to make email marketing more accessible and more organized using cutting-edge features. Signing up with an ESP is usually a quick and easy process, and most of these platforms have free plans and free trials.

Email marketing works by allowing you as the business owner to create and nurture relationships with your customers and have a one-way ticket to their inbox.

However, this does not mean that you should abuse the ability to contact prospects and customers by spamming them with promotional content all day long.

Email marketing provides you with a platform to build lasting relationships and hopefully make a ton of money without shoving your products down your customer’s throats.

Think of it as a platform to help your customers better understand your products and services and trust you. That takes consistency and a clear strategy that keeps your readers at the forefront.

Email marketing requires several skills that most marketers and business owners develop over time. It would help if you learned how to craft a strategy, write excellent copy, handle analytic data and test your emails to see what you should do.

Once you have this covered, stay consistent to see the results of what you started. Every business is unique, and the problems you have are equally unique.

Therefore, it is only fair to customize your strategy to fit your business structure and impress customers.

Why Is Email Marketing Useful?

Here is why email marketing is essential for small businesses;

Connect With the Customer Better

First, you get the opportunity to connect with your customers. If you buy and leave, chances are you will forget about the store.

However, if you saw their emails and they took the time to send you messages and update you on new products, chances are you will buy from them again.

Additionally, email marketing makes it easy for businesses to connect with their customers in real-time. More people use their mobile devices now to access their emails while on the go. This makes it easier for our business to reach customers when they check their emails.

Excellent ROI

Mail marketing has one of the best ROIs in the marketing field. When looking for ways to popularize your business, you need to reach the maximum number of people interested in what you have for the least amount of money.

People will usually opt into email lists to get messages from you. That makes email powerful as a marketing strategy.

Improve Customer Engagement

You can easily use your emails to create a great bond between you and your readers. Having a list of people who trust you is an asset that many businesses need to thrive and compete efficiently.

No one likes running blind, and it is imperative to understand what is happening when running a business.

You Can Measure Results in Real-time

Email marketing is measurable, and most ESPs offer analytics to their users. Analytics are helpful when it comes to measuring progress. That is one of the reasons email marketing is so beneficial, especially to small businesses.

It’s an Asset for the Company

Email marketing is essential for many entrepreneurs and businesses to build assets for their companies.

A mailing list that you own is cheaper than relying on paid platforms with large audiences. In addition, you can always reach your subscribers without paying hefty sums to get in front of them.

Benefits of Email Marketing For Small Businesses

While email is helpful, it comes with several unique benefits to email marketers. Let us look at the different uses of adopting email marketing.

Get Updates

How would you prefer brands to address or update you? Chances are, you thought email was an acceptable way for brands to send you messages.

Email is the preferred way for most customers to get updates from brands. At least 99% of consumers will check their emails daily, and this presents an excellent opportunity for you to reach your customers.

Personalization Boosts Conversions Rates

One of the primary benefits of email is creating personalized content to match your readers’ interests. With many great features at your disposal on most email software, you can personalize and customize your message to match what your customers need at the time.

For instance, you may want to send a message to all the people who did not open a message you had scheduled to send earlier. By segmentation, you can send personalized messages to the larger group.

Collect Feedback

When you know how your customer thinks, it is easier for you to figure out how to help them. Business is about solving problems, and understanding your customers’ problems is how you structure your business as the solution.

Therefore, email marketing is data-centered. One thing about data is that it does not lie, and you can use your data to help more and more people in your business.

Collecting feedback is vital to understanding what is happening in real-time. You hear terms like open rates and Cost per Mille (CPM).

Understanding this data is vital to creating informed campaigns. So, for example, when your campaigns flops and another goes well, you can quickly tell where you went wrong and what to improve.

Increase Sales

Every entrepreneur wants to sell more of their product and services. Email marketing is, after all, a form of promotion that brands, businesses, and entrepreneurs rely on to make more sales.

Mail marketing is an excellent way to promote new products, retarget old customers and ultimately sell more products.

Generate More Traffic

An additional benefit to email marketing is direct access to many interested people at the click of a button.

That means whenever you have a new post on your blog or a new product in your store, you can use your email list to drive traffic to these pages and, therefore, increase your chances of generating more income.

Send More Timely Campaigns

There is nothing worse than an irrelevant message from a brand. Imagine buying a product and receiving a welcome email to sell you the same thing.

It would be more okay to get a thank you email and review what you bought later. This is the power of excellent email marketing. All messages are relevant and timely, making it easy to nurture your audience.

Increase The Number of Leads

Lead generation is vital to business growth. You start with a large number of people that fit what you’re selling and end up with a smaller number of people every time they move down your sales funnel.

Email marketing is an excellent way of collecting new leads and nurturing them down your sales funnel.

Steps for a Successful Small Business Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing, like any other form of marketing, requires strategy. Of course, you can start by whipping out emails to your list at random, but this rarely works well, and you start losing subscribers on your list.

Here are some excellent email marketing strategies that you can use to get more people interested in what you have to say.

Use FOMO to Your Advantage

Fear of missing out has led many to make decisions they otherwise wouldn’t have made. Take advantage of this fact by ensuring that your email subject line is a catchy, exciting thing to get people to want to know more.

Once you have their attention, go further by using the time to entice them further. What I mean is that make your sales and offers time-bound. When users are limited, they try to take advantage of the opportunity as soon as possible to make sure they don’t miss out.

Remember always to keep your word. When you tell your subscribers a sale will end in 24 hours, make sure it ends 24 hours.

Otherwise, your customer will not trust you the next time you try to use FOMO as a strategy.

Strike a Balance Between Promotional and Nurturing Emails

Overselling yourself in every other email is what people call spamming. Don’t try to shove products and services down your customers’ throats every chance you get.

There is a time and place to promote your products and services using email through a sign-up form, and done right; email is a powerful sales tool.

Email marketing works better when you take the time to build a healthy relationship with your customers. You do this by ensuring you have the perfect balance between nurturing and selling to them.

Marketing is about forming relationships that outlast you. A brand can become a household name more quickly when its customers are more involved in their journey.

To create this positive engagement, it is vital that you educate, empower and solve your customers’ problems. Again, avoid spamming them with promotional emails every chance you get.

Create an Email Workflow

Imagine this, you’ve sent out your first email, and you have managed to keep people on the list interested in what you have to say. What do you do now?

Consistency is only tricky if you lack clarity in what you are doing. On the other hand, clarity is easy to acquire if you strategically plan what will go first and what follows what in the system you build.

This is how you build an email workflow, bit by bit until you have an entire ecosystem that is self-sustaining. Email workflows ensure you stay consistent and engage and nurture your audience between promotions.

Be Consistent with Your Emails

This point is vital to the success of any email marketer. Consistency leads to sales, and it takes time and effort to see your email marketing efforts through.

Typical email campaigns feature several emails within a series. Take the time to create several emails and follow-up emails to ensure you maximize your list’s potential.

With a great workflow on hand, you can easily stay on top of things and keep it going. Unfortunately, so many people claim that email marketing is dead when they have not repeatedly put in the work to make it work for them.

One way to beat procrastination and keep your emails going is to hire a virtual assistant or outsource to an email marketing expert. It might appear quite expensive at first, but it pays off when you start to see the ROI.

Email Niche and Unique Content

No one joins a mailing list to get general content. They enter because they believe the message you potentially have will benefit them one way or another. A niche is a subset of the market that you serve.

Niching down in email marketing is like choosing a market segment where you become the expert voice with your local customers. When you position yourself as the expert in your field, it becomes easier to draw in people looking for someone to guide them.

Niche markets have tons of products relevant to your list to promote in the future. That makes it the best strategy to keep an engaged audience.

Personalize Your Emails

What kinds of emails get your attention the most as a small business owner? For the most part, your name is a great way to capture your interest. This is the first step to customization that customers enjoy.

Customization is where you send relevant emails to relevant groups within the list. For example, with segmenting options offered by most email service providers, you can send very personalized messages to your list members.

Action-based emails are easy to set up for the most part, and this will show your readers that you are attentive to what they are doing. This makes it easier for most businesses to stay relevant long term.

Keep Your Emails Short

With more and more people accessing your emails on mobile, it shows that people prefer to keep up with brand messaging on the go. That said, ensure you avoid the fluff and say what you need to say in the most direct way possible.

Short emails get to read all the way through. That is precisely what you want to happen as a marketer. Write short emails that are captivating to your reader, and you stand a better chance of increasing click-through rates.

Long emails that never seem to end can be off-putting, especially if the receiver is checking on his emails between tasks. In addition, it would require more concentration and more effort to get through.

Optimize Email for Mobile Readers

Optimizing for mobile is a no-brainer at this point. How do you ensure all your readers are covered? A lot of templates that are optimized for mobile often look good, even on a desktop window.

The point of optimization is to ensure you make it more convenient for your readers to access your emails. For example, if users need to scroll back and forth to read sentences and can’t find where your buttons and links are, chances are they will leave without getting what you are trying to say.

Optimization is vital in a fast-paced world where convenience is the norm. Check across devices to see that your emails appear as you intend for them to be seen by your customers.

Segment Your Email List

We have touched on segmentation a little in one of the previous sections. Segmentation is where you create different lots within your list. You have many options for segmenting your list depending on your ESP.

You can segment your emails based on age, location, purchases, opened your last emails, and so on. The benefit of segmenting your list is to send more relevant messages to your customers.

Personalize

When there is personalization and customization in brand messaging, your readers start to feel like they are forming a more personal relationship with your business. In return, this increases trust in your business, which means more business down the road.

Use these email marketing ideas for small businesses to succeed in 2022 if you need fresh ways to vamp up your business marketing.

How Does Email Marketing Help Small Businesses?

Small businesses regularly look for ways to increase sales and grow their operations. Email marketing offers the perfect opportunity to do both of these things and then some.

In addition to that, email marketing is relatively cheap compared to the other forms of digital marketing and traditional marketing. So you can get a lot more for your money if you use email marketing appropriately in your business.

To succeed in marketing online, you need to be customer-obsessed. So, there isn’t any better way to nurture and learn about your customer than by looking at how they interact with your brand.

Email marketing offers the opportunity of a lifetime to businesses where business owners get a front-row seat to what is happening behind the scenes in their business.

An informed business owner is an empowered business owner. Knowing what to do and what to avoid goes a long way in ensuring you strike gold.

Benefits of Small Business Email Marketing

One of the primary benefits of email marketing in a small business is building trust. Customers often take time to develop a sense of confidence in any company, which impacts their ability to scale their operations. But, unfortunately, small businesses are faced with a lot of competition from more established brands.

Finding ways to get people to trust your brand is paramount to how steadily you rise in today’s competitive marketplace. Email marketing can help you create a lasting relationship with your customers.

Additionally, small businesses can benefit from the power of split testing, especially in the initial stages of their email marketing journey.

Learning what people prefer is, albeit a trial and error process. Email marketing makes it easier for you to understand what works and what doesn’t as far as your marketing efforts are concerned.

Examples of Email Marketing Service Providers

There are a couple of service providers available online today. However, before you set up your email strategy and see all these great benefits, you need to choose the ideal ESP for your brand.

Start by understanding exactly what you want your ESP to include. For example, if you’re going to focus on listing, building, and sending out newsletters, you won’t need a lot of complex features to cover your needs. Excellent email marketing platforms like Convertkit and AWeber are perfect for getting you started.

GetResponse can be a great contender if you intend to build multiple landing pages, have a website, and possibly even several sales funnels on a single platform.

A little bit of research on your computer will help to ensure you can choose the right platform.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Still on the fence about using email marketing for your business? Take this as your sign to take action. Email is a great way to market your business and communicate with customers online.

It has been proven time and again to have a high return on investment, and you can always find new tricks to take your business to the next level.

Start your email marketing journey today by implementing these email campaign tips for small business owners, and you will scale it faster.