If you’re a small business owner, free time is not a luxury you can enjoy.
With your never ending to do list, every minute counts so you don’t want to waste time creating emails that don’t help grow your business. What do you want to do? Increase sales? boost traffic to your website? Grow your social media following? Email marketing is extremely important since it provides a way for you to interact and create a relationship with your customers.
If you want even better results from your email marketing campaigns, check out the below tips, which will teach you how to plan, design, write your emails, measure success, and grow your audience.
1. Always Start with a Plan
You won’t fail at email marketing if you have an email marketing plan and strategy. Having a plan helps you stay focused, motivated, and accountable. If you have plan, you’ll never have to wonder what and when you’re going to send. I like to create an editorial calendar that includes the topic, visuals, target audience, and a specific date for each email.
Tip: Writing down your goals makes you 42% more likely to achieve them. (Source: Dominican University)
2. Get more action with amazing design
Emails underperform for several reasons, especially poor email design. The main purpose of design is to push the reader to take a specific action that benefits in a measurable way. If you’re not great at design, hire someone that is or use the templates and images provided by most email platforms.
Tip: Around two-thirds of email is opened on a smartphone or tablet. If your email design doesn’t look great and function flawlessly on mobile devices, you could be alienating more than 60% of your audience. (Source: Constant Contact)
3. Make it personal and valuable
I hate wasting time so I never write an email just to write one. Whether you’re sending the email to 5 people or 5,000, make sure you come across as if you’re talking to just that one person. Always write your email so that it greatly benefits them and their business. By creating value for your subscribers, they’ll want to open your email and not just see it as another email that they have to get through.
Tip: Don’t write a novel. A study found emails with 20 lines of text have the highest click-through-rates. (Source: Constant Contact)
4. Test, test and test again
Before you press that send button, don’t forget to test, test, test. Make sure your links go to the right page. Does the design look right? Do your images match the content? Don’t just test it yourself, send it to your colleagues and friends and ask them to test it too before you go for the big launch.
5. Always measure the impact
If you don’t measure the impact, you’ll never know if it’s working. By looking at the results of your email, you can find out some really cool things like, how many people opened it, who clicked through, when people open it, etc. With that knowledge, you can customize your next email or send a customized email to those that opened or did not open it. The world is your oyster!
6. Grow and segment your email list
A new customer comes into your brewery or tasting room and buys a couple pints. Woohoo! Whatever you do, don’t let them leave without finding a way to interact with them because you’ll probably never see them again. Find a way to drive them back. This is where your growing email marketing list comes in. Since repeat customers spend 67% more month than new customers, make sure you add them to your list and engage with them. (Source: www.bizjournals.com).
With email marketing, you need to target your message so you can get better results. In order to do this, you need to gather as much information and insight about your subscribers. Once you have enough information, you can segment your list and deliver a customized message to each segment.
Source: blogs.constantcontact.com and www.bizjournals.com
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