If there’s something all SMBs have in common is they don’t have money to burn. And while some marketers might argue there is no such thing as expensive or cheap marketing – only marketing that works and marketing that doesn’t work –, some channels are definitely more cost-efficient than others. Email marketing is undoubtedly one of those.
Most other modern marketing strategies come with pre-loaded costs and a significant element of risk. Whether you are paying for paid search ads on a major search engine, sponsored social media posts, or more traditional print media or broadcast advertising, you commit budget upfront and have no guarantee of success. What’s more, the more competitive your industry, the more expensive those ads will be. This inconvenient fact is especially bad news for small companies trying to muscle their way into a market dominated by bigger players.
Email marketing is typically charged by either the number of emails a marketer sends or the size of their email lists. For small businesses just starting out, this means that costs can be incredibly low or even free. For example, a small business using Sinch Mailjet to power their email campaigns can send up to 6,000 emails to their customer base every month at zero cost. Then, as that small business grows, the next level (15,000 emails per month) starts at just $15 per month. If you think about that for a moment, that’s a whole month’s worth of marketing for the price of just a few clicks on a paid search campaign.
You can think of email marketing as a genuinely scalable marketing solution that grows with your business. Low costs are great, but for any marketing strategy to ever be considered useful, it needs to have real benefits for the marketer.
Thankfully, email delivers incredible benefits for marketers who follow some simple rules.
Email marketing’s superpower is based on the fact that it is a nurturing and retention marketing strategy. Most other forms of marketing are acquisition strategies. As anyone who has been in business for any length of time will tell you, it is always more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one.
With every great superpower comes great responsibility. The first rule of email marketing is that it should only be used to engage existing clients and subscribers who have given you permission to contact them using a signup form. Everything else is spam, and – trust us – it’s not worth it. Spam is illegal, will ruin your reputation, and never delivers on its promise.
The second rule of email marketing is that your campaigns should always be relevant, engaging, and timely. Essentially, this means sending the right message to the right person at the right time.
Get these two rules right, and email can deliver an incredible ROI for your small business. Some estimates suggest that email delivers an average ROI of $36 for every dollar spent. When you consider that average returns from paid search campaigns are estimated at just $2 for every dollar spent, you’ll begin to understand the power of email.
Suppose you spend money on potentially expensive acquisition marketing such as paid search or sponsored social media posts. In that case, email marketing will help you deliver a greater return on that investment by helping you drive repeat purchases and building customer lifetime value (CLV).
Due to the high cost of acquisition marketing, many businesses might not generate a profit from their initial engagement. Email marketing ensures that those expensively won customers become profitable in as short a period as possible. Remember, if you are paying to acquire the same customer every time you win a sale from them, long-term profitability might not always be a given. Email marketing will help you achieve this goal.
Great email starts with a solid list of subscribers. There are several methods small businesses can use to build out their lists. These include:
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Following a sale.
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Following a request for more information or newsletter subscription.
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Following the download of an ebook, whitepaper, online catalog, video, or podcast.
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Following the registration for an online event or webinar.
Important: Regardless of how you collect email addresses, you always need to ask your potential subscribers for their permission to join your lists. Your email subscribers should also be given the opportunity to leave your lists using an unsubscribe link with every subsequent send. These measures will ensure you stay compliant with global email regulations, including GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and CCPA.
You’re probably wondering – when should I send my first newsletter? Is it better to send my first email to a few subscribers or should I wait until my list has grown?
The answer is quite simple: If you’re asking people to join your mailing list, make sure you’re ready to start sending emails shortly after they join. Don’t wait until your email lists have reached a significant number of subscribers before sending their first campaign. When subscribers join your list, they have expressed an immediate desire to hear from you – so don’t let them down.
It’s also important to remember that email addresses may have a limited shelf life. The average age of an email address is only 16-months. People change jobs and email clients, and sadly nobody lives forever. If you wait too long before sending, your email bounce rate will be much higher than it should be.
Email marketing is mostly template-driven, which means new campaigns can be created and deployed quickly and efficiently. This will help your small business react to challenges and opportunities as and when they arise.
The ability to deploy a relevant, engaging, and timely email campaign means that if an email marketer can think of an email campaign, they can send it – quickly and efficiently.
For small business marketers, this ability to react quickly can offer a considerable advantage over larger organizations that may have to follow more bureaucratic procedures before a campaign is deployed.
Once you’ve got your first contacts and have developed a few templates to meet your email needs, you’ll be ready start sending. Here are a few tips to keep in mind for a successful email marketing strategy.
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Set your objectives: Every email you send should have an objective. Do you want to sell more, drive website visitors, or position your organization as a “thought leader” in your industry? If you don’t set an objective, you’ll never know if your campaigns have been successful or not.
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Segment your lists: List segmentation is a great early strategy for ensuring you only ever send relevant emails to your target audience based on the individual requirements of their demographic. Remember, email marketing success is all about sending the right message to the right person at the right time. Failure to follow this rule will cause subscribers to disengage from your lists quickly.
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Tell the full story with your subject lines: Your subject line is your first line of defense between your business and obscurity. You should write your subject lines with the same care as a newspaper editor writes their headlines – in a catchy, attention-grabbing way. A great subject line will tell the full story and let subscribers know precisely what they will get if they open the email.
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Get personal: A great way to make your emails stand out is to include your subscriber’s name in the subject line. This tactic is the first step on a wider email marketing personalization strategy that can evolve as your experience grows.
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Open your email with strong content: While you might be tempted to get creative with your design skills, the top section of your email body content should always include some powerful copy. This is because images may initially be blocked by your subscriber’s email client, leaving a big empty space at the top of your body content. Text will always render and encourage the subscriber to commit and download any unseen images.
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Remember less is indeed more: Get to the point. The average office worker receives more than 100 emails every day. They literally have seconds to make a decision about whether they want to engage with your campaign or not. So don’t waste their time with unnecessary text and irrelevant offers.
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Create a compelling call-to-action (CTA): Every email needs a compelling CTA. Don’t expect your subscribers to understand (or even care) what it is you want them to do after opening and reading your promotional emails. Instead, a compelling CTA should point them in the right direction by explaining exactly what will happen next on the customer journey.
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Perfect the landing page experience: It doesn’t matter how good your subject lines, body text, or CTAs are – if your website isn’t optimized for conversions, any investment in email marketing or any other form of marketing will be wasted.
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Analyze, test, and optimize: Take the time to learn what strategies work and optimize your campaigns accordingly. A/B testing is a great way to learn how small changes to your campaigns can increase open rates, click-through rates, and conversion metrics.
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Maintain good email list hygiene: While you will want to grow your list, it’s important to remember that old and unresponsive email addresses will never drive any revenue. They may also damage your ability to send future campaigns, as bounced emails are often an indicator of unscrupulous email practices used by potential spammers. That’s why list hygiene is essential. If a subscriber hasn’t opened a campaign in some time, it may be worth sending a re-engagement campaign and ultimately removing any deadwood from your list.
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Be persistent – it pays off: Too many marketers restrict their email campaigns to irregular newsletters, believing they might annoy their subscribers if they send too many messages. This is an unfound fear.As long as your emails are relevant, engaging, and timely, you’ll struggle to send too many emails. Remember, your subscribers have given you permission to contact them, so don’t waste that opportunity and keep in constant contact.
Many small business marketers will initially engage with email marketing with the idea of sending a weekly or monthly email newsletter. While regular newsletters are an important component of any email marketing strategy and are especially useful in driving traffic to other marketing channels, they are not the only campaign strategy small business marketers can deploy.
These campaigns include:
In many ways, the first email you send to an individual subscriber will always be the most important one. The moment following a subscription via a sale or registration is when that subscriber is at their most engaged. That’s why it’s always a good idea to create and send every new subscriber a welcome email automatically triggered by their subscription.