Just as you are a small business doesn’t mean you do not have the resources to integrate email campaign tactics that are deployed by large organizations into your online marketing strategy. Email service providers are actually rendering it easier for companies to automate their emails and implement nurturing campaigns, despite having a one individual marketing team. All it takes is a little time and patience to outline a strategy, set your campaigns and analyze your results.
It is understandable that smaller businesses are overwhelmed with the amount of features that are now available to email marketers. It is easy to feel like you do not have the time to log into your system and build out a lifecycle campaign that may engage your audience for the next 6 months to a year. Heck, you can hardly find time to pay your vendors and follow-up together with your customers. But think about the extra staff you can hire after your email promotions get a 600% lift in performance.
It’s time to stop making excuses and dedicate time and energy to your e-mail marketing campaigns. Implement these steps into your e-mail marketing and it will start to reach its potential ROI.
Personalize Your Messages.
The cat has gone out of the bag, everyone now knows that when you sign up to receive something using an online form chances are the follow-up email, regardless of how personal it could appear, is generated via an automated process and not sent by the specific CEO of the business whose name is provided in the signature of the email.
So it will undoubtedly be no real surprise to your customer when you don’t personally respond to their online purchase or send a welcome email for joining your company. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make your client feel like your email is written for them specifically. Send a welcome message and merge their name in to the content. Most e-mail marketing tools let you do this with a very simple merge field, something similar to %%first.name%% or first name, you can usually find this in a quick start guide.
If you offer different products and services make sure your message is tailored towards exactly what the subscriber is interested in. automated marketing This is an easy task to do using drop down fields in the form or custom forms for every product on your own website. It is possible to trigger an email to send when a customer is added to your list, in addition it is possible to set a rule that tells your email software to utilize either dynamic content or choose a specific email template to send based on a certain criteria.
There are endless ways to personalize your data including collecting your clients preferences within their subscription form. The theory is to focus on what you have time to setup and incorporate changes since you can.
Test Your Content.
This one could be among the easiest to accomplish, yet often overlooked while you are just rushing to have a promotion into people’s inboxes. If this email fails you can always change it out the next time, right? Wrong. Every email will influence your subscribers’ behavior in the foreseeable future. If you send a contact that just does not miss the mark with them the chances they will unsubscribe is highly likely or maybe they will just disregard the next message that ends up in their inbox from you.
If you take the time to create 3 – 4 emails with different calls to actions and subject lines, you can send these varying campaigns to 10-20% of one’s list. The email with the most opens wins for the strongest subject line, and that with the most click-throughs wins for the best proactive approach. Make any necessary changes and deploy the winning email to the rest of your subscribers. Planning for a day or two in advance, adding just a couple extra steps and dedicating just a little more time it is possible to greatly increase your profit from this one campaign.
Better yet, based on your email company, you may even manage to choose the winning campaign and have it deploy automatically.
Grow Your List.
Chances are your list isn’t the size of a large corporation’s and it doesn’t have to be to be effective. A quality list takes time to create. Whether your list is 1,000 or 10 million subscribers, the steps you took to acquire your email list will determine how well it performs.
Use every opportunity to grow your list, but anything you do, think, maybe even three or four times before you purchase an email list. It is worth it to spend enough time growing your list organically. You will receive better response rates and keep your emails from potentially being marked as SPAM.
Online you can a subscribe form on your website, capture email addresses at checkout. Offline you can collect addresses at industry events and have customer support or sales always ask for a customer’s email and permission to send information to them when on the telephone. Consider supplying a relevant incentive, such as for example an email-only discount you need to include it in all your promotional material.
Never add an email address to your list without receiving permission. It isn’t worth the lasting unwanted effects it could have on your overall e-mail marketing campaigns.
Start Now.
These steps can help you get started towards email marketing like among the big guys. You shouldn’t be afraid to contact customer service and have them walk you through establishing a mail merge or your subscription form. You’re paying for your software and you should get the full benefits from it. Each day you wait you might be losing potential revenue.
Sure once you obtain the basics down and discover that these steps are working for you, you’ll want to implement even more changes into your email program, but at that time you may have more resources to focus on your email marketing strategy. For now just start with what you have the ability to do, but take time to properly manage your e-mail marketing campaigns. It’ll be worth the effort.