As a small business proprietor, just how important it is to stay in the front of your clients’ minds. And what’s the easiest manner to do that? running a successful and properly thought out email marketing campaign, of course!

Get a jump start on the competition via following our 8 email marketing guidelines for small businesses:-

Make it easy to subscribe

This appears obvious, but you would be surprised how many small companies have a regular email newsletter. However, do not have an area to subscribe to emails on their website. However not having a place to subscribe isn’t even the worse mistake a company could make. Of the most common mistakes, I’ve seen are having a broken subscribe hyperlink and requiring too much information upon sign up. People want a brief and easy newsletter signup. Instead of requiring their first name, last name, address, phone variety, and email, simply ask them for their name and email. This is an example where less is more.

Create a newsletter that matches your brand

Email newsletter templates are fantastic for one reason and one reason alone—they’re easy to use. Instead of the use of a templated newsletter, we recommend custom designing (or at least as much as possible) the template to ensure that it matches the appearance and feel of your brand. You have to be aiming for consistency among your email marketing campaigns and your website. Subscribers may be puzzled when they receive an email newsletter that seems to haven’t any tie to the company website they subscribed on.

Make it easily digestible

How many emails show up in your inbox on a daily basis? If I had to guess, I’d guess lots! I feel like everything I open my email there are 15 new emails waiting to be read. Due to this, you need your content to be engaging, however not only that, it needs to be easily digestible as properly. customers aren’t going to spend minutes analyzing via every detail in your email newsletter. It’s like that they’re going to open it. And skim via until they find the section that interests them the maximum. To ensure customers can discover what they need, when they want it, make certain your email newsletter has an easy design and is broken up into sections.

Don’t forget about mobile

Nearly 68 percent of emails opened on a mobile device—and that number only expected to continue rising. So, is your email marketing campaigned optimized for mobile devices? Or do you only look at it from a laptop or desktop computer? if you don’t layout your email for mobile gadgets—no matter how relevant your message is—you can find your self-dealing with minimal conversions.

Test your newsletter on different devices

Before you start to send out your email marketing campaign, send a few test emails to distinctive devices, such as an iPhone, iPad, Android, etc. These tests will help make certain that the consumer experience is top notch across all devices. You can just have a few easy fixes like making some cosmetic or template changes. However, you could discover that the template completely distorted on one device. Testing is one of the most effective steps you may take to avoid mistakes like this. Possibly saving you from sending out a poor converting email simply because people couldn’t access the information.

Include links to social and review platforms

If customers have subscribed to your small commercial enterprise email newsletter, it’s likely that they enjoy receiving regular updates. If you are active on social media, it’s a wonderful idea to consist of links within the email. Your newsletter subscribers won’t have realized you had a facebook where you publish different specials and are probably willing to “like” your web page since they’ve already committed to your newsletter. It’s also likely that the newsletter subscriber has previously engaged along with your company for a service or product. Because of this, providing links to review platforms like Google+ and Yelp is important.

Make the unsubscribe button accessible

We know you don’t need to lose readers, however, opt-outs will happen. And nothing frustrates newsletter subscribers more than being unable to unsubscribe from an email newsletter. Don’t attempt to trick the user and hide the unsubscribe button. White textual content on a white background is just plain old mean. As an alternative, make it accessible within the footer. So if a person should decide that they no longer need to receive your email, they can easily unsubscribe instead of sending you a (probably mean) email asking you to take them off your list.

Monitor your competitors

If you need to make your email campaigns more successful, it could be useful to see how your local competitors are handling their email marketing campaigns. Subscribe to their email lists and see what type of content they’re including, promotions they’re providing, what kind of emails they said, how often they send a newsletter, and what elements they included in their email template layout. Don’t take this tip the wrong manner—we are not saying to copy what other small businesses are doing! instead, use this tip to make certain you are sending emails that are different and more engaging than the competition.

While email marketing is a priority overall, the pressures driving the strategy differ slightly. 55% of B2B email marketers cited the need to hit annual organizational revenue goals as the number one priority, while 71 percent of B2C email marketers noted that measuring marketing’s contribution to revenue is strongly valued as a key performance indicator. Both groups reported low favorable effectiveness levels at connecting marketing efforts to revenue, indicating a skill gap that needs to be addressed.

While program goals may differ for B2B and B2C email marketers, there are some common best practices that top-performing email marketers use to achieve success. A few highlights:

Prioritize email marketing for a greater ROI

B2C marketers who prioritize email marketing average an 89 percent higher contribution to revenue, vs. marketers lacking such priorities. They also reported an email open rate that’s 167 percent higher. And click-through rate also 2.3 times higher compared to organizations lacking such prioritization. Those who don’t prioritize the program are seeing a decline in performance. It means that B2C email marketers have two options- either aim to master it on your own or find a trusted partner to manage the program for you.

Integrate data-driven campaigns for success

B2B email marketers will often test and optimize campaigns to distill distinct formulas for success. 59%  say they can duplicate the results of effective campaigns with this approach. 70% of B2B email marketers can identify the most profitable customers in their networks to maximizes the value of outreach. With data at their fingertips, B2B email marketers are more effective in developing repeatable processes and personalized campaigns. This presents a huge opportunity for B2C marketers to learn more about your customers, build behavioral profiles for them, and then deliver more relevant email marketing, such as what we’re bringing to customers with the acquisition of Tagga.

Personalization is key

Most B2B (55 percent) and B2C email marketers (69 percent) are effective at maintaining consistent, relevant, personalized communications with customers. 63% of B2B marketers segment email marketing efforts by industry, topic or vertical to avoid any unsegmented “blast” email campaigns.

Ignoring segmentation

Every week you design your emails (Email Marketing India) with the latest articles and promotions, you add all the content, and you send it to your entire email list. What’s wrong with that? Aren’t you supposed to send emails? Well, yes, but here’s the problem with sending your email to all your subscribers.

Since you have limited time, instead of forgetting about segmenting all together, you should at least separate your audience into different groups that have certain similarities. There are three main ways you can segment your audience:

Demographic

This includes information such as age, gender, company position, and income level. You can use demographic data to tailor your message and increase the relevance of your emails, which also increases the effectiveness of each email you send. You can get most of this information during the signup process.

Geolocation

Knowing where your subscribers are located can be powerful if you run a local business. You can use geolocation segmentation to send the following types of email campaigns:

Time-based. If you have customers across different time zones, you can send the emails to adapt to their local hour. Who likes to get a promotional email at 4 AM after all?

Regional promotions If you have several stores in different locations (within a city or region), you can send focused emails for discounts for people who are close to a store.

Location-specific content. You can use the subscriber’s location to use it in your content, subject line, and images.

Transactional

This represents those subscribers who have made past purchases and other related triggers related to their shopping behavior. Some examples of emails based on transactional segmentation include:
1. Sending upsells and cross-sells that reflect previous purchases.
2. Winback campaigns based on the time of last purchase.
3. Discounts based on the price sensibility of a segment.
4. Loyalty programs based on the number of purchases made.

That’s enough to make you want to start using segmentation in your emails.

Using a boring subject line

People get heaps of emails every day. How will your company stand out if your emails have unappealing subject lines?

The importance of subject lines isn’t a minor issue. 33% of email recipients decide whether or not to open an email based on subject line alone.

So making your subject lines click-worthy is a must-do.

One effective way to make your subject lines attractive is by using urgency. What drives the power of urgency is scarcity. If you specify that scarce object of desire, people will want it. In the case of subject lines, people will open the email to see how they can get what they don’t have.

You can also add urgency to your subject lines is by setting a specific deadline. If the offer lasts until a specific date, add it to the subject line.

Another effective way to add urgency to your subject lines is to include phrases such as:

Today only
Few products left
Last products available
For X hours only
24-hour giveaway
It’s also important not to promise something that you won’t deliver in your email. It’s an easy way to get ignored forever.

Get the How to Be an Email Subject Line Superhero guide

One of the hardest tasks any email marketer (Email Marketing India) has is to define how many emails to send their subscribers.

In 2015, TechnologyAdvice ran a survey in which they asked 472 U.S. adults, “For what reasons have you marked a business’ emails as spam?”

At first sight, you would have imagined their answers would include “irrelevant content” or “bad promotions.”

45% said it was because they received too many emails.

To test the point of saturation, you can start reducing the number of emails sent up to the point where you see a decrease in engagement and revenue. You can try the same but inversely: increase the amount sent up to the point the revenue decreases. Remember to communicate any changes in send frequency or cadence to your subscribers in advance.

Sending emails inconsistently

As observed previously, some companies send too many emails to their subscribers.

But there’s another common mistake that many companies make

They send too few emails

This may be due to the fact some companies don’t see the value of email. Some still have a hard time understanding the value of email marketing and why they should use it. Other companies may not have enough resources to spend on email marketing.

Whatever the case, if your company sends emails irregularly, your subscribers may forget you.

The key to a successful email marketing strategy is consistency. That means, sending emails regularly. Whether that’s once a week or twice a month; people should be able to expect your emails at a given frequency.

Overcomplicating the design

Instead of overcomplicating your email design (Email Marketing India), you need to make it simple. Check out our email design checklist for helpful tips to create emails that convert.

Your emails should always be in sync with your brand and your overall design aesthetics but if the design lessens the impact of the content within the email, you may not get the results you desire.

Remember that email is a communications channel; the goal is to talk to your customers, to educate them, and hopefully, motivate them to buy from you.

Images and visuals are absolutely a critical part of marketing your product or service. If you didn’t add any images to your emails, it could be fatal to your branding and your conversions. The key, however, is to hit the right balance of content and images in a way that will benefit both your email’s performance and your subscribers.