Email Marketing Tips for Small Businesses - iContact

• Updated on: 2018-02-20
• Read original article here

As a business owner, you’ve no doubt heard all the commotion surrounding content marketing and using social media platforms to engage and interact with your customers or target audience. Despite changing trends and technological advances, email marketing remains a tried-and-true strategy that continues to drive success for marketers and businesses.

However, if you’re new to the world of email marketing, starting from scratch can seem overwhelming at first. Once you start diving in, you’ll quickly discover that email marketing is easy-to-implement and delivers measurable results.

Follow these seven important tips to create and launch an effective email marketing campaign for your small business.

Although this may sound obvious, selecting an email service is one of the best ways to take your email marketing campaign to the next level. When choosing an email marketing platform, look for some essential features such as: automated messages, autoresponders, personalized email creation, list management, analytics reports, and the ability to schedule messages on social channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Using an email solution like iContact makes creating and managing your email marketing campaign stress-free, and ensures it is optimized to perform as efficiently as possible.

After selecting the right tools, it’s time to sit down and determine why you’re emailing your customers and what you want them to do. For example, to encourage new email subscribers, create an automated “Welcome” message offering them an exclusive discount as a thank-you. To access the discount, they would click on a link that would direct them to a dedicated landing page.

Remember, your customers don’t want to have their inboxes flooded with emails. They only want to receive messages that provide them with value.

Don’t assume that potential customers are going to find your brand andwebsite all on their own. If you do, you’ll have a difficult time obtaining enough email addresses to grow a healthy email list. That means you need to look for ways to reach out proactively to these potential customers.

Here are some of the best ways to grow your email list:

You’ll find more great tips on building a list from scratch in this blog post.

“If your logo didn’t appear with your content, could your audience identify the content as coming from your brand? Would someone viewing your content on different channels know it all came from the same brand?” asks Erika Heald of the Content Marketing Institute.

“If you’re not careful, you can end up with a random assortment of voices and tones in the content produced across your marketing ecosystem that doesn’t provide a consistent picture of your brand or even use the same language consistently,” warns Heald.

Your brand’s voice creates consistency, and positions you as an identifiable and authoritative voice in your business sphere or area of expertise.

If you’re having difficulty finding your voice, Heald suggests you:

Remember: focus on creating quality content that provides your subscribers with value while matching your brand’s voice.

Bonus Tips:Speaking of content, don’t forget to create a content calendar, make great use of pre-header text, and perfect your subject lines by use of A/B split testing.

Arguably one of the most important components of an email marketing campaign is creating and maintaining segmented lists. A segmented list, for those unfamiliar, is defined in our previous post “The Power of Email Segmentation,”as one that “enables you to target a specific group of people in your email lists based on previous engagements.” Doing so allows you to launch more relevant campaigns because you’re delivering the right message to the right people.

The easiest way to segment lists is through data gathered fromsubscription forms on various landing pages or pulling information from your shopping cart. For example, if an eCommerce site that sells cookware and ingredients, you can segment lists by those interested in tools and ingredients or simply by those who have made purchases vs. those who have not. If you sell barbeque sauce, you can segment those who subscribe to your newsletter from your “Best BBQ Sauce” blog post.

There are a number of advanced segmentation techniques you can try, the point is: The better targeted your list is, the greater the chance your message will be opened, read, and acted upon.

With the passing of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, it’s the law to include an “unsubscribe” button. If you omit an “unsubscribe” button, you could get flagged as spam and have your account suspended.

Again, your customers don’t want to receive spam. Besides including an “unsubscribe” button, make sure you never add people to your email list if they have not explicitly given consent to receive emails.

Knowing this information will allow you to understand what’s working — and what’s not — in your email marketing campaign so you can adjust accordingly.

Email marketing is an ongoing endeavor that takes time. But once you get your campaign rolling, it’s one of the best ways to communicate with your audience.

What techniques have you used in your email marketing campaigns?