18 December, 2014

9 Email Marketing Steps Small Businesses Should Follow

By Jason Seed

One of the best and most affordable ways of reaching your customers and attracting new customers to your business is email marketing, says Jason Seed, president of cloud Point of Sale platform for retail and hospitality stores, Kounta.

Although a customer only sees the tip of the iceberg, there’s a range of tools and tactics you can implement in the back-end, that will give you the power and potential to achieve really good results.

To get as much involvement, and as much success out of email marketing campaigns, you need to give people what they want, and make the experience really easy and enjoyable. Here are nine tips that will help you do this:

1. Make subscribing easy

The easier you make it to subscribe to your email, the more subscribers you will get – simple as that. Make sure it’s on your homepage.

2. Tell them what they’re in for

Tell your subscribers explicitly and simply what they can expect. Just a short statement about whether you intend to send them updates regarding the company, special offers, or anything else will suffice. It’s vitally important to tell your readers what to expect and how often to expect it. Don’t softsoap them, or take advantage of them in any way. Be straightforward and transparent.

3. Reward them for signing up

Send all of your customers a welcome email. This reminds people that they’re on their list, and reassures them that signing up was a worthwhile act. You could even send new subscribers a special offer or exclusive content, in order to welcome them on board.

4. Keep branding consistent

Branding is one of the biggest buzzwords in the world for a reason. It works. Your emails should not merely fit into the brand that your company is projecting, it should make a contribution towards building it. Make your emails match the colour scheme of your company, and ensure that the tone of the text is appropriate. If you don’t think you can write well enough to do this, hire someone.

5. Make your emails easy to read quickly

Make your emails easy to read via scanning. We’d all like to believe that information we produce and send out is of vital importance to people, but that’s not the case. People receive hundreds of emails a day, and can’t dedicate enough time for everything. You need to be able to grab people’s attention quickly with your emails, so break them up into manageable bite-sized pieces. Use headlines to tease the email, and make the subject line to the point and clear as well.

You should also make it really easy to read from any device. Optimise it for mobile and tablet devices, so people can read on the go. More than 60% of emails are read on a mobile device now.

6. Send them what they actually want

This might seem straightforward, put yourself in your customers shoes, and send them content that they will actually want. One of the most basic facets of consumer psychology is to make people feel as if they are getting something for nothing, and this should be the absolute by-word of your approach to email marketing.

7. Keep track and plan ahead

Keeping a publishing calendar will be extremely useful for you. Don’t underestimate the commitment required to produce a regular viral marketing campaign. If you send too many emails in too short a period of time then you will annoy your subscribers, but if you don’t send anything for months then you will be forgotten. Plan your time accordingly.

8. Check everything twice

There is nothing that screams amateurism more than basic spelling and grammatical errors. Make sure your work is proofread diligently, ideally by someone else, and ideally by someone else with editing skills and a proven reputation. If you can’t acquire such a person, make sure you run it through a suitable word processor spellchecker.

9. Test everything

Finally, test out whether your emails are working, and different approaches to the process, not to mention the visual appearance of your emails. Send test emails to colleagues, or use a testing program to make sure your emails are suitable. Try A/B testing, to see what works better. When you look at your test emails, consider what you’re trying to convey. Get the opinions of others, and encourage them to be constructive and objective.

These tips are simple when you know them, but a lot of it is about being diligent, focusing on the detail, and planning and testing everything you do. If you follow these tips, your customers will love you for it.

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