It’s not a hidden fact that emails perform better than social media.
60% of customers said that they have made purchase after receiving the marketing message via email.
Another reason for a small business to choose email marketing is because it’s budget-friendly. And spending money on marketing in the initial stages of a business is not possible for many businesses.
Now, it’s a common mistake to think that email marketing is equivalent to just sending emails. But that is not the case.
As one biggest constraint of small businesses is time, dealing with various issues related to establishing a business leaves small businesses with no time to spare.
On the other hand, email marketing requires time and effort for it to be successful. Tasks like growing email lists, creating multiple sequences, and reaching out to prospects with the right content take time.
But don’t you worry we have got your back, in this blog you will know the intricacies of email marketing and how you can do it. We will show you how you can utilize both social media and email marketing to connect with your prospect.
Below we have explained the steps that you should to take for marketing for the small businesses:
Step 1: Tool for emails marketing
Trying to do email marketing for small businesses manually takes a lot of time at the same time it limits the number of potential leads and prospects you can reachout. I guess this is not what any small business would prefer.
On the other hand there are some limitations that are posed by email service providers like (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook). Scheduling your emails is one of the possibilities but you should know how to use the BCC line to send emails in bulk.
Sending bulk emails should not be the ultimate goal, to get a high open rate it’s important that your emails are personalized (i.e) be relevant to the prospect.
Now, to enhance your approach you should know what are the best email platforms and what should you look for in an email marketing platform for small businesses.
Why is SendBuzz one of the best email marketing platforms for small businesses?
Generate more qualified leads with cold outreach!
Step2: Create a signup form to collect emails
The fact that there are certain rules regarding who you may and cannot send emails to presents another difficulty with email marketing.
According to various data laws around the world such as the CAN-SPAM Act in the US and the GDPR in the EU. you can send commercial or promotional emails to recipients who have given the consent to receive messages from you
When creating your sign-up form, check to see if it:- Have a clear headline and call-to-action.
- Only ask for the required contact information
- Have a double-opt in form so that you get high quality leads.
Because the audience’s opt-in is so crucial, some businesses even choose for a double opt-in structure, which requires those who sign up for your list to validate their email addresses.
Step 3: Use social media outreach to build email list
It’s time to start collecting signups now that you’ve finished building your signup form. Since email marketing cannot exist without an email list, you must use all available marketing channels to maximize the visibility of your signup form.
You need to generate relevant, eye-catching posts since your material on both networks acts as the huge inflatable wiggly person luring folks in from the street. Create an article on how eco-friendly clothing is created, for instance, if you are an eco-friendly clothing manufacturer and want to grow your mailing list of subscribers. Make sure the blog page has a pop-up signup form, and then promote it on social media by posting vibrant images that pique interest.
Social media users are already engaged in your content, so they follow you there. Gain direct access to the inboxes of your followers to strengthen that consumer relationship.
Step 4: Choose the right sequence of the emails you want to send
You can send many email formats to your email list. For example, Send them email with discount coupons or exclusive offers, or create more awareness of your company and company products. These kinds of strategies work best for email marketing for small businesses.
One mistake that most sales reps do is that they approach the prospects aggressively but this strategy may backfire as it can make you seem more pushy. With sales cadence you can plan to reach out to the prospect in a strategic way to increase the approach.
The majority of brands employ the following two emails and email sequence:
- Welcome email:
Send a welcome email as soon as you receive the email address of the prospects so that they are in sync with you.
Some businesses choose to use a little video to welcome their audience to their list, while others choose to offer new signups rewards and discounts. Whatever you choose, make sure your welcome email is relatable and encourages readers to learn more about your company and, eventually, to make a purchase. - Custom triggers:
With custom triggers you can plan your next move according to the prospects reaction to your email messages. This would help you personalize your engagement with the prospects at scale.
- Multi-channel outreach:
In todays market its important to reach out with your prospect where they are across the channels. The various channels where you can reach out to the prospect are SMS, Email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn.
Step 5: Make your email visually appealing but simple
There are two types of emails: plain text—literally just text—like the ones you send to your friends, and maybe branded HTML—like the majority of newsletters you’ll encounter.
Both email formats have advantages and disadvantages. The majority of consumers identify branded HTML emails with marketing automation and advertisements, therefore they rarely respond to overly polished, beautiful content. However, they do check your HTML emails for new merchandise and deals, which increases sales.
Contrarily, plain text emails are effective because they are more sincere and approachable. People eventually respond because they believe it to be from a real person. Plain text emails are more effective in establishing rapport and starting conversations.
Quick HTML Email Design Tips:
Be consistent with your design for HTML emails. For all of your emails, use the same font sizes, colors, and logos. Consistency will make it easier for your audience to connect your brand with specific colors and your logo.
Make your design “responsive,” which allows it to be viewed on desktop computers and mobile devices. Although most email solutions will make your design responsive for you, you should still double-check. To check how your email will appear on various devices, use the email preview option of your email program. By doing so, you’ll be able to adjust your design if anything that appears OK on your laptop but looks goofy on your phone.
Have a call to action (CTA) and a clear header. Your email’s header describes its subject to your viewers. Your call to action (CTA) is typically a button that instructs your audience what to do (for example, “Buy now!”)a test email is sent.
Send a test email after finishing your HTML or plain text email to ensure everything appears correctly for the recipient.
So that you don’t have to create each email from scratch, your email programme should let you save plain text and HTML templates.
Step 6: Observe your result
All of your emails are tracked by your email programme. Email analytics are crucial since the information reveals how well your emails are doing and how engaged your email recipients are.
Don’t get upset if your outcomes aren’t great. Take a deep breath and start over. You can gain insights about how to enhance performance by tracking your statistics. If your open rates are low, for instance, experiment with other subject lines or sender names. If your CTR is low, on the other hand, try repositioning your link higher in the email to improve visibility.
- Open rate: The percentage rate at which emails are opened is called open rate in email marketing.
- Click-through rate: This metric measures the number of people that click-through-number of people that click the links presented in the email as opened to the number of people that opened the email.
- Bounce rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of emails that are not received by the recipients in the email list because it was returned by a recipients mail server.
- Unsubscribe rate: to find unsubscribe divide the number of unsubscribe by the number of email delivered.
- Conversion rate: The number of prospects who completed the accepted action compared to the number of people who clicked on the links.
- Email deliverability: There is another aspect that is important for the success your emails marketing that is deliverability of your email campaign’s. To improve your email deliverability its important that you establish senders reputation. You can establish email reputation by updating domain authentication to using official emails addresses. Therefore, configure the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records.
What should you look for in an email marketing platform for small businesses?
There are various email marketing platforms for email marketing for small businesses that are available in the market to enable marketers with email ideas for businesses. But it’s important to know what to look for in an email marketing platform for small businesses to get the best out of it.
Here’s a list of important features you should look for in an email marketing platform:
- Personalization capabilities: When your email reaches the account of your prospects it has to compete with the other email for the attention of the prospect. Therefore, it’s important that your emails should be relevant to the prospect. If you add the first name of the prospect to your emails it significantly improves the open rate of the email blogs. Therefore, it’s important to look for the features that make your emails more personalized.
- A drag- and- drop editor: If you don’t know how to code then it would be difficult for you to put different elements to optimize your email. The drag-and-drop builder has a sidebar that has different elements that you can use to optimize your email.
- Custom branding capabilities: Some solutions will let you create your emails whatever you choose, while others feature email templates with little customization options. You must seek for a platform that provides you more control over your design if you want to incorporate a lot of branding into your emails.
- An A/B testing feature: Split testing is another name for A/B testing, which enables you to send several versions of your email to your list to see which works better. You can send an email to your email list with two distinct subject lines, for instance. 25% of your list will receive subject line 1 from your tool, and another 25% will receive subject line 2.The performance of each email will then be monitored by your tool over time in order to identify which one performed better. The better-performing email will then be sent to the remaining 50% of your list.
- Preheaders: Preheader is the text that appears with the subject line. If you don’t insert the prereader then it will take some random content within the email to show below the subject line. To insert the perheader you have to have a knowledge of the HTML. If you don’t know HTML then your platform should offer you to draft the pre header while you are drafting your mail.
- A form builder: It will assist you with adding a signup form to the homepage of your website, your social media pages, your blog, and each blog post so that visitors who are interested in your content can subscribe to your list.
- Responsive design feature: No matter the device your readers are using to receive your emails—mobile, laptop, or tablet—responsive design features automatically make them look excellent.
Now that you know what you should be looking for to automate in email marketing, lets see how SendBuzz an sales engagement software can help you.
Why is SendBuzz one of the best email marketing platforms for small businesses?
There are many platforms that help you build a business email marketing campaign. Some of the best email marketing platforms are:
SendBuzz is a sales engagement platform that helps businesses to boost their engagement with the prospect. It had features like:
- Multi-channel outreach: With multichannel outreach business can reach out to the prospects across various channels. This increases both the possibility of getting more replies and credibility of the business.
- Pre-headers: Pre-header give the gist to the prospect about what is in the email that they are going to open. Pre-header are one of the significant factors that affect the open-rate.
- A/B testing: With A/B testing, know which email message is working for you. As there is no set formula to draft email that works. Therefore, test your emails and reach out to the prospect with the best messages.
- Smart Sequences: Smart sequence lets you run campaign without worrying about scheduling the follow-ups with prospects manually across multiple channel.
- CRM integration: Customer relationship management platforms helps you manage your clients information. And SendBuzz lets you integrate your CRM software so that you can engage with the prospect without wasting time in transporting data from your CRM’s.
How can you use both social media and email marketing for small businesses?
Utilizing both your strong email conversion rates and your wide social media audience will give you the ideal marketing mix. Your followers on social media may be interested in your content, but they are unlikely to click through (particularly on Instagram because of their link restrictions) or become devoted clients.
You may create a dream team of marketing platforms if you use social media to expand your audience and email marketing to bring in new clients from your interested subscribers.
Conclusion:
Email marketing for small businesses can be a complex and time-consuming project for a small business, but with automated marketing for small businesses, it can be made easy. Try SendBuzz for smooth and cost-effective email marketing that gives you double the results. Get a 14-day free trial to see it for yourself.