Email marketing sounds like the boring side of marketing. Most people don’t even check their email, right? Just because you mark promotional emails as spam doesn’t mean that everyone has to. And even more importantly, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a way around this conundrum. A carefully crafted email can give you a surprisingly great response. Here are some tips and tricks you can start using for your small business email strategy.
Don’t just talk business
Yes, your business will only grow bigger if you talk about it more. Awareness is very important, we totally get it. But somewhere along the line businesses who are hyper fixated on sales end up losing out on valuable relationships with their customers. Every email doesn’t have to be an in-your-face marketing pitch. No one likes that anymore and honestly, it isn’t that effective either. Try your best to establish a balance between product-oriented and relationship-oriented emails.
The best way to achieve this goal is by personalizing your emails. Address your customers by name, check up on them, give out discount vouchers every now and then, the possibilities are endless. Ask for some additional information like date of births when customers are signing up to your newsletter. Then keep tabs and get creative with what to do with this extra insight. Send out special emails on birthdays offering exclusive discounts, send small gifts to your regular customers, and most importantly, keep a clear channel of communication open. It makes all the difference in the world if a customer feels like their input is valued.
Make your emails as visual as you can
Now that you know what to write in your emails, you also need to make sure they look good. An established and reputable business needs to have communication that reflects it.
Sometimes it gets difficult to manage all these fronts at once. Owning a small business means wearing a lot of different hats at the same time, so you need to work smart here. You don’t need to be a graphic designer to make your emails look pretty, the internet has got you covered. Simply look up small business email templates online, pick one that suits your aesthetic, and customize it according to your needs.
You can also use these templates to design posters, social media posts, flyers, and cover photos. It’s a wonderful hack to make use of, don’t ignore it!
Don’t just plan emails, plan campaigns
Planning a single email is just step one of a much larger marketing plan. Email campaigns are the real deal. Once you have your emails written down and good to go, you need to figure out when to send them, who to send them to (you may create different variants for new customers and loyal customers), and how frequently you should send them.
There’s no right or wrong answer to any of these questions, it completely depends on how well you know your customers and analyze the response they give you. You should spend your brain power on analyzing your audience and then create an email campaign using free online platforms. Don’t make your job any more difficult than it already is - use free resources as much as you can!
Read this blog post to get more insight on different types of email marketing campaigns.
Humor never hurt anybody
There is a great misconception among new business owners that business needs to be strictly formal. However, that is not the truth.
If you want to connect with your customers on a more relatable personal level then your tone and your choice of words make all the difference. You need to humanize your brand and give it a personality. This personality then needs to be reflected across all channels.
It always reflects in a good way when well-executed humor becomes a park of marketing campaigns. If your brand has a more serious personality, then you can make your one liners a little more sophisticated but trust me, a good joke will make you memorable. This helps especially in email subjects - the first shot you have at not being marked as spam.
Wrapping it up
Even though it might sound like the mundane part of running a small business, email marketing can be pretty fun. It depends entirely on you how innovative and interactive you are capable of portraying your business.
Experiment with different styles, let your creative side loose with the aesthetic, and most importantly, let people know they can depend on your business. A loyal customer goes a long way.
