Email marketing is one of the most valuable pieces of owned media that your small business can leverage. Unlike social media platforms which can be shut down at a moment’s notice, such as if there were widespread suspensions or Mark Zuckerberg just decided to close doors one day, email marketing is always yours.
In other words, if you lose your Instagram account, you can’t reach back out to your followers to keep in touch with them. However, if you have their emails, you can always send them a message.
Not to mention, email marketing has one of the highest returns on investment of any marketing channel. On average, e-commerce businesses can see a $36 return on $1 of investment, with a mix of regularly scheduled and automated messages.
Is email marketing worth it for small businesses?
If you want the Sparknotes version, YES! Email campaigns have a lot to offer to both you as a brand and your customers. For instance, email marketing can:
- Be highly personalized.
- Create brand awareness.
- Allow you to reach people right where they are (on their phones).
- Automate a large part of your marketing plan.
- Provide specific analytics and insights that can quickly show areas for future focus and improvement.
- Provide real-time updates directly to your customers’ inboxes when things change, or new products launch, and be a place to share large amounts of information (newsletters) regularly.
Convinced yet? We thought so. Here are five ways you can get started with email marketing for your small business:
1. Get Personal
When building your email list and integrating it with your website or e-commerce shopping cart, you gain a lot of insight into your customers: what they do, how they interact with your messaging and website, purchase habits, and more.
You can personalize your messages to connect with your customers in a way that works for them, addressing them by name, adding information that they will find helpful, and suggesting products or services that fit their needs are all options with a robust email program.
Those personalized abandoned cart emails or “How’d you like your recent purchase?” messages from brands that you get in your inbox are the ones that catch your eye when you’re sifting through hundreds of unread emails. (No judgment here! In fact, the average person receives 121 business emails a day…)
Use your next newsletter to humanize your brand! Introduce your subscribers to your team, your story, and why you do what you do.
2. Use Automation
Adding yet another channel to your mix of communications can sound overwhelming. However, there are many things that can be automated in your email marketing plan.
- Welcome Series: introduce subscribers to your brand and give them a more personal connection.
- Nurture Series: follow up about a purchase, download, or service booking and nurture your relationship with your audience by providing more value.
- Abandon Cart Emails: When your customers forget to complete check-out or take some time to ‘think about it,’ you can remind them to come back. These emails actually perform much better than all other marketing emails!
- Post-Purchase Series: Send messages to customers to remind them to review your products or experiences, let them know when it is time to reorder from you, relay important information about their purchase, and more.
Whether you offer a product or a service, brainstorm to see what type of automated series your brand could benefit from.
3. Share Your Brand
Getting people to order from your website or to walk through your doors is a challenge. Building brand awareness doesn’t happen overnight, but email can help speed up the process!
Through strategic emails, you can help your subscribers become familiar with who you are and what you have to offer from the minute they sign up for your list. In fact, a well-executed welcome series will give reminders to your subscribers automatically to keep them engaged as they join your list.
Staying relevant to your customers is essential in today’s overwhelming consumer landscape and email puts you top of mind with information at their fingertips.
See how you can share your brand and story in an engaging way through email. Try something new! Experiment with an email video series from your founder, share testimonials from early customers, and more. If you need ideas, check out our 5 Copywriting Tips to Send Better Newsletters article.
4. Measure Your Success
Email marketing offers some of the most robust reporting on subscriber trends. Depending on your email marketing platform of choice, you can get insights into people’s behaviors and interactions with your emails, how they are linking over to your website, and how they are making purchase decisions.
When it comes to email, you can test and customize every part of your messaging based on those insights. Learn more about what key performance indicators (KPIs) you can track to get started with our article, Email Marketing 101: Best Practices, KPIs, and Building Your List.
You can use this data to experiment and measure your success with email marketing. For example, you can A/B test elements of your email, such as subject line, preview text, header images, copy, and more.
Dig into your email analytics. Use what you know to leverage the things that work and experiment with what could be improved!
5. Share Time-Sensitive News
There is nothing more valuable than sharing a message in real-time. In the same way you want to pick up the phone and call someone special to celebrate when something good happens, you want to be able to let your customers know in real time when something exciting is happening in your business.
Whether you’re having a limited-time sale, up for a community-choice award, updating holiday hours, throwing events, or celebrating your own successes, you can quickly notify your email list with just the click of a button.
In addition to quick notifications, you can provide a forward-looking, information-packed message on a bi-weekly or monthly basis.
Take a look at your calendar and see what time-sensitive and exclusive news you can share with your email list. Create and schedule emails to help them stay in the loop!
Get started with email marketing for small businesses
Our team at Champ has extensive experience growing small businesses and brands through email marketing. With our data-driven approach, our digital marketing experts can provide you with the most robust strategies that translate directly to your bottom line.
Don’t waste another minute DIY-ing your email marketing. Contact us to get started on a project today.