By: Christie Woodhouse – Head of Email – Visualsoft

 

Email marketing runs a lot deeper than purely sending a sales email to your entire database – it’s more about curating one-on-one relationships with your audience and this is important, especially for small businesses.

There are many reasons why small businesses need email marketing and if you are a small business looking to dive into the email marketing world but are unsure where to start – we have some tips and tricks that you can use.

So first off, why?

Benefits of email marketing for small businesses

Here is a quick list of the benefits of email marketing and what they can help bring to your small business.

• Enhance brand awareness
• To create one on one relationships with your audience
• Have an engaged customer base who feel listened to
• To send timely messages to your audience
• Helps to drive more traffic to your site

Enhance brand awareness

Using email marketing to build brand awareness is a vital tactic for growth. Being in the inbox of potential customers and staying relevant will help you to grow and will be a reminder that you exist within your market. The content of your emails is a real opportunity to define yourself as a trustworthy source and with time, you can start to build relationships and trust with potential customers as a reliable industry figure. This means that when they need to buy from your sector, you’ll be their first port of call.

Create one on one relationships with your audience

Establishing a one on one relationship with your audience is beneficial to both parties. Building a relationship with your audience through email marketing can be a helpful way of gathering insights for small businesses. Using polls, personalised content and the promotion of social media channels, you can start to collect information about what your customers engage with and what they like to interact with.

Create an engaged customer base who feel listened to

Personalisation is your best friend with email marketing as a small business. Sending personalised content through segmentation is a trick that will enhance the engagement levels of your customer base.  Having a customer base that is engaged will not only help customers to convert but will provide customers with a positive brand experience that means they are more likely to purchase from you again.

The more personalised the content, the more engaged the subscriber – 72% of consumers will only engage with messages that are customised to their specific interests. Ensuring that your customers feel like they are being listened to and interacted with will certainly help you stand out from your competitors.

To send timely messages to your audiences

One benefit of email marketing for small businesses is the ability to communicate with your customers in a timely fashion. This gives your small business control over any impromptu strategic changes that you might want to utilise as a business. E.g., if you want to promote a certain product or line quickly, you can communicate this to your customers in a way that is relevant to the person on the other end of the inbox.

As you may have guessed, personalisation and content relevancy to audiences is an important part of email marketing in general and especially so for small businesses. One way that you can build on this further is through the use of dynamic content within emails. Dynamic content allows you to create a range of features, including dynamic call-to-actions, live weather feeds, time-based content, dynamic polling and enhanced personalisation.

Helps to drive more traffic to your website

Email marketing is an effective way to drive more traffic to your website. This will give you greater visibility and allow you to build wider brand recognition and conversions.

Types of email marketing

There are a few ways to send emails to your customers and each type has benefits and as a small business, it is up to you to decide which works best for you.

Generic one-off sends – these emails are best to promote any new products that you may have or to notify customers of an upcoming sale.

Automated journeys – having an automated journey that sends emails to subscribers at specific times (e.g., welcome emails, 3 months, 6 months, etc.) Automated journeys are important for small businesses as they help nurture and retain subscribers and once they have been set up, the work is pretty much done.

Transactional emails – these include emails such as order confirmation, payment complete and basket abandonment emails.

All 3 types of emails are important to small businesses and can be beneficial in boosting brand awareness, conversions and engagement.

One struggle that you may find yourself in as a small business is growing your email marketing database. Here are some quick tactics that you can use to help grow the number of sign-ups to your businesses email marketing database:

Tactics for growing email marketing databases for small businesses

• Run competitions on social media
• Optimise your website to feature sticky footers
• Optimise your social channels through paid ads
• Optimise transactional emails to encourage sign-ups

Email marketing is a wonderful way to enhance your brand value and can be beneficial in so many ways. Whether you want to create a customer base who are engaged and want to interact with your brand or are looking to boost revenue through dynamic and personalised content, email marketing has a lot to offer.