In today’s world of online marketing, email marketing continues to play an important role in a company’s online marketing efforts. For small and medium sized businesses trying to watch their marketing budget, email marketing is an affordable and quick way to connect with customers. Ultimately, an effective email marketing campaign can help a business build brand awareness, strengthen relationships with customers, generate leads, and increase sales.
Top 5 Email Marketing Tips For Small Businesses
Use a Customized Template
- Email marketing service providers (like HubSpot and Vertical Response) offer professional looking templates that your company can use for your email marketing campaign.
- There’s no need to recreate the wheel every time – once you find a template that you like, you can clone it and use it the next time you send out an email marketing message.
- To create brand awareness, it is important to customize the template by adding your company logo and using company colors in the template. Customizing the template helps to build familiarity with readers and ties the message to all of your company’s content.
Make It Easy To Read
- Include an eye catching title to grab the reader’s attention.
- Break up the text in an email marketing message by including images, subheadings, and read more links for customers to go to to read larger blocks of texts (i.e. blog posts)
- Include 1 Call to Action (CTA) button to engage readers. Remember to link the CTA button to a landing page that has a form so that you can collect information for lead generation purposes.
- Here’s an example of a CTA button that we have used in one of our email marketing newsletters:
Make It Shareable
- Include a link to the web-ready version of the email marketing newsletter so that readers can view the message outside of their email program.
- Include social share buttons to encourage readers to share your content with others via social media
- Here’s an example of what the social share buttons look like at the bottom of a Perpetual West email marketing newsletter:
Create a Publishing Calendar
- Map out your content and how often you are going to send out an email marketing message to your list of contacts.
- Allow time for revisions and for colleagues to review/critique all email marketing messages so that there are no spelling mistakes or grammatical errors.
Monitor Your Statistics
- Most email marketing service providers offer free reports to help you monitor how well your email marketing campaign performed.
- Familiarize yourself with the reports and keep an eye on your open and click rates to identify patterns so that you can make any necessary changes/tweaks to future email marketing campaigns.
For more information about email marketing design, HubSpot has a great design guide that they have summarized in an infographic. Click on the following infographic to enlarge the image:
