Small businesses rely on email marketing just as much as major corporations, but they might not have access to the same resources. Fortunately, it’s possible to run a successful email campaign as a small business even without the marketing support that bigger brands have.
More than 293 billion emails are expected to be sent and received each day by the end of 2019. Because of this evolving digital marketing climate, email marketing is more lucrative than ever. And there are key ways your small business can utilize this trend to grow.
Segmenting emails can help increase conversions.
Segmenting contacts is one of the best ways that small businesses can improve email performance. You’ll take a look at your contact list and group your contacts into similar categories based on attributes such as demographics, purchase history, and overall engagement.
By segmenting your contacts, you’re able to send more relevant messages to these individual groups, rather than sending out a blanket email to everyone on your list. Segmentation means you’re sending the right message to the right people at the right time, and it can increase revenue by up to 760%.
Personalizing emails leads to greater engagement.
Delivering the right message at the right time is only half the battle. You still need to encourage your contacts to engage with your email.
Personalizing aspects of your content is an easy and effective way to improve engagement. Simply adding a contact name to a subject line is enough to boost open rates by more than 25%.
You should also add personalization and dynamic content in the body of your emails to improve engagement. This can be anything from location-specific images and copy or even recommended products based on prior purchases.
How to measure an email marketing campaign as a small business
Measuring the results of your email marketing campaign is essential for small businesses that want to grow. There’s a wide variety of data that will give you an accurate idea of how well your campaigns are performing. For the best high-level view, you should focus on these two important metrics:
- Open rate. This shows the number of people who opened the email out of all of the delivered messages. A low open rate could be indicative of a poor subject line and improper segmentation.
- Click-through rate. This shows the number of people who clicked on a link in your email out of everyone who opened it. A low click-through rate could mean you need to improve your email content, update your call to action (CTA), or fix your list segmentation.
If you have an email service provider, you can easily monitor these metrics on your campaign dashboard.
Does it really matter?
Small businesses can utilize email as a great way to stay in touch with existing customers and build brand awareness with new leads. However, all of the time and effort spent creating emails will be wasted if companies aren’t looking for ways to continually make their campaigns better and more relevant for their readers.
Email provides the best option for small businesses to make money with little investment. Email marketing still has the best ROI of all marketing activities, so small businesses could potentially turn a small operating cost into an impressive financial gain.
What now?
You should now understand how to improve your email marketing campaign to benefit your small business. In addition, you now know how to track your results to determine where you’re successful. Your next step is to put the plan into action.
Test your emails to determine what works best for your audience, and make changes to future campaigns based on those results.