In a crowded marketplace, capturing your customers’ attention is paramount to the success of your business. With the myriad of growth opportunities presented to business owners during the high retail traffic summer months, engaging compelling digital marketing strategies now can pay dividends for future revenue generation and customer retention.
Email marketing is a powerful tool in the small business owner’s marketing toolkit. Promoting products and services, highlighting store happenings, and increasing customer awareness of upcoming events are just a few of the ways email marketing can function to promote small business growth. When used effectively, email marketing can drive significant traffic to your website and other digital marketing channels, as well as increasing foot traffic in your store. In this blog, we will cover the basics of email marketing, important elements, and how to perfect your email marketing strategy.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing channel that involves sending emails to both prospects and existing customers. The look and feel of an email campaign can range significantly depending on the focus and goal of the sender. Small business owners may choose to utilize an email campaign to promote products or services available, highlight important information about their business, create and nurture relationships with customers, or any combination of these.
How Do I Build an Email Campaign?
Whatever goal a small business owner has in mind for their email marketing, building an email campaign effectively is important in achieving it. Here are several key elements that are important for small business owners to remember when crafting an email campaign.
Have a Clear Objective in Mind
Whether you’re promoting a product or service, highlighting a community engagement opportunity, or passing along store information, understanding the purpose of your email marketing endeavor is the first step in building a compelling campaign that will capture the attention of your customer.
Build an Email List
Building a robust email list is the foundation of successful email marketing. Implementing a strategy for collecting customers’ emails allows small business owners to target the customers most likely to engage with the campaign that they have built. Here are some key strategies for effective email list building:
Segmentation: Divide your email list into segments based on criteria such as demographics, purchase history, or engagement levels. Segmenting the wider audience helps small businesses to send targeted and relevant content to the customers or prospects it is most likely to resonate with.
Lead Magnets: Utilize lead magnets by offering valuable resources like eBooks, webinars, or exclusive discounts in exchange for email addresses. This encourages visitors to subscribe to your email list in return for being provided something additional of value.
Subscription Forms: Place easy-to-find subscription forms on your website, blog, and social media channels to grow your email audience. Make sure they are simple to fill out and clearly state the benefits of subscribing.
Craft Compelling Content
Once small business owners have a healthy email list to leverage, the next step is creating content that resonates with your target audience. With a clear objective in mind, content should increase customer awareness and urge them to take the desired action. Here are some tips for crafting compelling email content:
Personalization: Use the recipient’s name and tailor the content to their preferences and behaviors with the help of audience segmentation. Personalized emails can significantly improve open and click-through rates, meaning more customers taking more action based on your email campaign.
Engaging Subject Lines: Your subject line is the first thing recipients see, so make it attention-grabbing and relevant. Keep it short, clear, and compelling.
Clear Call-to-Action (CTA): Every email should have a clear call-to-action that tells the recipient what you want them to do next, whether it’s visiting your website, making a purchase, or signing up for an event. Take care to align your CTA with the previously decided objective of the campaign, providing a metric that the success of the campaign can be measured against.
Frequency and Timing
Strategizing frequency and timing for your email campaigns is crucial. Sending too many emails can overwhelm your subscribers, while sending too few can contribute to a decrease in customer awareness of your brand. When strategizing send time and frequency, consider these best practices:
Optimal Frequency: Test different frequencies to find the sweet spot that keeps your audience engaged without overwhelming them. For most businesses, one to two emails per week is a good starting point.
Timing: Analyze your audience’s behavior to determine the best times to send emails. Generally, mid-week and mid-morning tend to have higher open rates across industries.
Analyze Performance and Improve Future Campaigns
Email marketing efforts can be continuously improved, and it is essential to analyze the performance of past campaigns to determine the best strategies for moving forward. Pay attention to key metrics that alert the small business owner to the campaign’s performance, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. This data can then be used to refine your strategies and optimize future campaigns.
Why is Email Marketing Important?
Email marketing is an invaluable tool for businesses looking to connect with their audience and drive growth. By building a healthy email list, crafting personalized and engaging content, and optimizing send frequency and timing, small business owners can maximize the impact of their email campaigns and drive measurable results.
Email Marketing by The VAN LEUVEN Company
While email marketing is a key tool in the small business owner’s marketing toolkit, the prospect of designing and monitoring email campaigns and their performance may be overwhelming for some. Working with a full-scale marketing team that specializes in harnessing the power of digital marketing is a worthwhile investment for the small business owner looking to capture customer engagement in the high traffic summer months and beyond.
At The VAN LEUVEN Company, we specialize in helping small businesses with their email marketing by designing compelling email campaigns that place emphasis on real results for real people. By leveraging our unique email database and over 1.3 million email contacts, we can support your marketing efforts and drive measurable results that align with your overall marketing goals.
Experience the VLC TLC for yourself and see the difference a professional team can make for your business. Learn more about how The VAN LEUVEN Company can help to support your marketing efforts by contacting us today.