Email marketing is the cheapest and potentially profitable way to communicate with your audience. For example, MailCheck company has calculated the expenditure/income for email marketing as 1:38. It is likely you do not mind getting such a ROI for your small business email marketing campaign. So we decided to make this simple guide.
Do not ask too much
Work with each of your subscribers’ segments to ensure that each of them has the most relevant and personalized content based on previous activities and interests.
If the user has already rejected one of your offers, do everything possible to formulate a more attractive offer for him or her or give him or her the opportunity to evaluate the service free of charge during the trial period.
Specify the topic of newsletter and adhere it
Although you may not know everything about your subscribers, you can definitely see how they react to the different types of content you send. Make efforts to track key email marketing indicators like open rate. Try to determine the best time to send the next letter and the best topics for discussion. Divide the recipients of the letters based on their interest in personalizing your newsletter.
Internet Retailer has determined that Isotoner’s bookmaker company has increased its revenues from its e-mail marketing campaign by 7000% after enforcing mandatory analysis based on previously sent letters..
Add ‘ALT’ and ‘TITLE’ for images
MarketingCharts agency has established that we normally receive up to 400 business messages per month. Letters with images can help you attract more attention, especially if you manage to take a good one, which can cause an emotional response from the subscriber.
However, it should be kept in mind that almost half of all e-mails open on mobile devices. Although mobile devices provide faster response, small monitors are not always suitable for proper image display. Thus, if the recipient opens the e-mail only to see the blocked image, it will hardly be satisfied with your e-mail. The more often it happens, the more difficult it will be to create a positive reputation of you as a valuable sender.
Filling in ALT and TITLE tags can improve your conversion dramatically. Non-commerce organization WebAIM has pointed out that filled in ALT tag in the image provides more loyal attitude to the blocked images. Check whether the tag ALT is filled in your letters and make sure it reflects the content of the image.
Build relations with your clients
All letters from your company should be linked to each other and show what you know about the customer, based on their previous activities. However, do not make it look creepy to avoid calling opposite effect. Epsilon has found out that when sending letters to customers related to the previous ones, the open rate increased by 75%. If you can’t convince your subscribers to open emails, you won’t be able to convert them into emails to customers, even if you have a great service or offer.
Reputation and mailing services
If you use a dedicated service to send out newsletters you get a few points to your sender’s reputation in the eyes of the ESP. The higher is the deliverability rate, the more customers you can convert. so the services use warmed up IP addresses with the high IP rating which is crucial for big mailing lists.
Poor content
Make sure you make a proper proofread of the content you send. Your letters shouldn’t look like spam. Avoid different-color fonts, stop-words, excessive amount of images. Check the links as ESPs doesn’t like broken links. Also letters that contain nothing but a single image are not good, because images are not analized by ESP. And better not to use public services for shortcating links. Unfortunatley they usualy abused by spammers, and have bad influence on emails contatining those links.
Poor mailing list
It is better to have small mailing list containing the addresses of users that really want to get your newsletters than a huge base of barely real subscribers that did not confirm getting emails from you.
You can read about the way to keep your mailing list clean in article about emails deliverability. The main thing you need to know is to remove the user immediately if you get a hard bounce for his mail and the user which has caused a soft bounce more than 3 time a month.
Also remember that not following 2opt-in instructions in porcess of collecting mails could cause blocking your email sending account in 3rd party service, or even legal lawsuit according to US CAN SPAM act. Better not to play with illegally obtained subscriptions lists.
Poor product
If yours product sucks you can rewrite it form scratch with help of people who can build good product for you. But you need understand that even best email marketing wouldn’t save you if products is not competitive.
Make a content plan for your newsletter
Regular newsletters are a good way to get your users used to reading emails. Analyze your subscibers preferences and choose the best days to send emails.
Conclusion
Although e-marketing is a must for any small business to communicate, it still requires a lot of effort from you to make it personalized and profitable at the stage of building an email marketing campaign. If you adhere to the above guidelines, you will find it easy to get a great return on your investment.
