Essential Elements Of Email Marketing For Small Business

You will be surprised to know that, there are 3x more email accounts than Facebook & Twitter accounts combined. This reveals that email is a great channel to reach maximum people and relevant ones even in 2022.

Email marketing with relevant content is a key instrument in your marketing toolbox. Email marketing is relevant for all industries. Before talking further, let me show you some important stats of email marketing as we believe numbers speak more than words.

• Number of projected email users by 2022: 4.2 billion - Statista
• Email’s average ROI, compared to 7% for direct mail: 28.5% - Chief Marketer
• Increase in click-through rates when social sharing is included in a mail: 158% - Nonprofit Hub
• Amount of customers who check their mail at least once a day: 91% - ExactTarget
• Number of B2B and B2C companies using email marketing strategies: 82% - Ascend2

This is why we believe that building successful email marketing campaigns has never been more important before. I hope you already decided to include email marketing as one of your marketing strategies by now. So here are some tips to enhance email marketing for both manufacturers and service providers.

1. Ensure your campaign is relevant to every subscriber

Categorizing subscribers into different list segments is a great idea to make your email relevant to each subscriber. List segmentation is an easy way to choose what type of content to send to which subscriber list.

Why does email list segmentation matter? We know that beyond relevancy, list segmentation is important from a revenue perspective. Marketers who used segmented campaigns noted as much as a 76% increase in revenue. So it is important to make basic segmentation part of your email marketing strategy.

You can increase click-throughs in your email campaigns and plan more targeted content based on the following segments:

• Geographic location
• Demographics – any combination of age and gender ranges
• Market – industry/product/market specific content
• Past activity – subscribers by past open and click-through behavior
• Workflow activity – subscribers who fall within certain stages of your funnel
• Customer data – targeted campaigns to VIP customers as well as campaigns solely targeting customers who haven’t made a purchase within a specific time period.

2. Take a Strategic Approach to Timing Your Campaigns

Frequency matters! How often you send emails can have a major effect on your revenue and email engagement (and unsubscribe) rate. So, how often should you send emails? We have collected some data from MarketingSherpa which gives you an idea of optimal send frequency:

As the above chart shows subscribers' preferences. Your email marketing team also should be able to answer the below question while planning an email campaign.

• How many emails does it take to convert a sale for your business?
• How many emails do people receive before they click to unsubscribe?
• Why do people unsubscribe?

Use all of this information to create the right frequency for your business.

3. Marketing Offer: Use CTAs in your emails

A marketing offer is nothing but any campaign you design to send an email with the goal of driving a direct response. You need to have some sort of action available for the receiver to take once they go through your email. This can take a number of different forms, including:

1. A campaign offering discount for any service or product with an expiration date
2. A campaign offering a discount or special promotion on your products or services
3. A campaign offering an e-book that increases your authority as an expert & builds trust among your subscribers.

Studies show that people really like to click on buttons more than they do on the text that is hyperlinked. You can increase the click-through rate up to 127% by using a button instead of text with a hyperlink. This email from Campaign Monitor customer Pizza Hut is a great example of a marketing offer:

If your goal with email is to directly drive sales, the marketing offer email is a very effective technique. Email offer presents a product or discount offer and includes a direct call to action for people to click-through to your website and make a purchase.
As a marketer, you can also run a newsletter, blogs for user needs, an announcement for new products,s or event invitation campaigns.

4. Personalize Your Email Campaigns

Marketing experts say that the more personal that you can make your email, the better. Personalized emails deliver a 6x higher transaction rate and with the personalized subject line, you can achieve a 41% open rate. You increase the response rate when you personalize content and make it more relevant to your prospects/clients.
Below is a great example of personalized email. Warby Parker has run one email campaign where the subject line was: "Uh-oh, your prescription is expiring." It is really a clever email trigger. The client is going to like the reminder that their prescription needs updates, and they have clearly mentioned the expiration date.

For manufacturers and installers, you could run a campaign with a birthday email that warmly congratulates the client/customer for being a client for x many years. You can offer some birthday discounts as well to cross-sell or upsell. Provide these offers using a CTA, which will work better naturally.
This kind of unexpected, warm, customer service interaction will show your customers that you care and these happy customers will speak about you to their family and friends again. So this is a “Win-Win” for you and for your customers.

Email marketing is a powerful driver of sales & revenue for your small business, and has a greater reach and return on investment than any other channel available to marketers today. So don't forget to prepare a proper email marketing campaign to reach the customer as well as your prospects. If you are facing any problem in setting up an email campaign or in starting a new one, the Straight growth team will be happy to help.

We have helped multiple clients run successful email campaigns and we have email marketing experts to assist you in setting up a new campaign to optimize it for better performance. We help our clients automate the whole process so that it reaches more people and performs better. Let's get connected to discuss your email success!

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