Sales and Marketing - Jen Jordan

Email Marketing Best Practices for Small Businesses: 3 Areas That Matter the Most

Customer relationships are essential for small businesses. Email as a marketing tool is a proven way to maintain customer communication that continues to grow.

Last year, people sent just over 333 billion emails. The expected ROI on marketing emails is $40 for every dollar spent, making the ROI on email marketing higher than most other advertising channels. Because email is such a strong marketing channel, 81% of small businesses use it for customer acquisition, and 80% rely on email marketing for customer retention.

Email marketing best practices for small businesses are essential. How you represent your small business can drastically affect your acquisition and retention, and it is all about building trustworthy customer relationships.

To make sure your small business is using essential email marketing best practices, let’s examine three key areas:

• Target audience
• Content
• Accessibility

Best Practices for Your Target Audience

Having a target audience is always first in best practices. Ensure that the people receiving your emails want to hear from you and are potential customers.

Strategies like a double opt-in signup process, a welcome email, and an opt-out option can ensure that the people receiving your emails are genuinely potential customers. These steps will yield a higher ROI and pave the way for loyal customer relationships.

Sending your marketing emails from a valid email address rather than a "no reply" address conveys a sense of validity and trust. This increases the odds of engaging with your email and helps your small business weed out invalid email addresses through bouncebacks. If your small business sells internationally, this step will also keep you in compliance in other countries.

Avoid purchasing lists and leads. Emails from a purchased list will have low conversions and likely wind up in spam folders. This wastes time and money and can undermine your organization’s reputation.

Best Practices for Conversion Content

Your email content is crucial to help build trust between you and your customers. Many CRMs (Customer Relationship Management Programs) will walk you through setting up your small business email marketing.

Regarding engagement, your email subject lines are your first impression. Resist using clickbait. Instead, creating the most personalized subject lines will resonate more with small business customers.

Consider using segmented email marketing campaigns with varied titles to appeal to different audiences. Here are some strategies for using segmentation for a variety of goals.

Once you grab a reader’s attention with your subject line, ensure your content connects with your ideal audience. The email content should correlate to the subject line and deliver value. This could be a whitepaper with detailed information, a coupon or sales announcement, testimonials, surveys, a link to your small business video, or a newsletter. This list of engaging ideas might help get your creative juices flowing.

Finally, ensure you have a clear call to action, a sales funnel, and optimized landing pages that make sense of your customer’s journey.

Best Practices for Accessible Emails

Ensuring that everyone who opens your emails can read and engage with the content is crucial.

Considering font size and readability, line spacing, paragraph alignment, color use, and contrast are just a fraction of the best practices for accessibility. Learning more about the options for tailoring your marketing emails for all people can widen your customer base while continuing to ensure your customers feel valued.

Since almost half of all emails are read on mobile devices, designing your emails for easy viewing on all devices will be a crowd-pleaser. Best practices like subject line length and button functionality are simple ways to keep your emails visible on small screens.

Remember to periodically clean up your small business email marketing list and consider ways you can continue to personalize your customer communication.

Email marketing best practices will optimize your marketing content, eliminate time wasters, and increase your ROI.