Top 10 Email Marketing Best Practices For Small Businesses

Written by neatly.io on 27th August 2020

Email marketing remains one of the most rewarding digital marketing channels for small businesses, and it forms the common link across all channels. As a small business, attempting everything on your own is both tempting and a necessity. But you shouldn’t do a Rambo when it comes to email marketing. It takes a lot of time, experience, and effort, like any other marketing activity. Still, these points shouldn’t stop you from kickstarting your online marketing journey, and we have come up with a list of top 10 email marketing best practices for small businesses in today’s blog. All of these are actionable and are time-tested approaches. Read more to know them:

Don’t Buy Email Lists

It is very tempting to buy an email list for beginners but be wary of it. IP warming is a time-consuming activity performed by professional email developers to build your sender reputation. Sending out unsolicited messages will land you in spam folders, and the complaints will dent your chances of getting any returns out of your efforts even in the future. Always send emails to relevant prospects that have signed up for your email list.

Leverage Sign Up Forms Proactively

Since you would be in your initial phase, make sure to give your audience enough chances to subscribe. Small details like using embedded signup forms, using appropriate CTAs, creating landing pages for each campaign, and assuring your subscribers-to-be that you won’t be spamming them come a long way. Being proactive with sign up forms should be on your web designing priority list, especially when you are a small business looking out for more customers.

Follow Privacy Control Regulations Strictly

Small businesses should learn and follow the privacy control regulations like CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL proactively. It is advisable to use double opt-in forms as they are accepted as legal proof in case of privacy breach suits. Also, make it easy for people to unsubscribe from your email list. Don’t forget to include footer compliance in all your email templates. Adhering to privacy regulations is a must for small businesses.

Utilise Personalisation And Segmentation Best Practices From Day One

Both personalisation and segmentation best practices are mandatory to make your email marketing campaigns successful. Generally, small businesses tend to know their clients personally, and they should use this to make their email messages more relevant. They are the best performing strategies, so never miss on using them.

Surf The Right Email Sending Frequency And Time

When you start email marketing, especially in the form of newsletters, make sure to use the right email sending frequency and timings. You can easily set the sending frequency and timings for each time zone via a little bit of market research. Even if you use the best looking email templates with rich content, you won’t get desired results if you send messages at the wrong time.

Optimise For Mobiles And Purchases

More than half of the people read emails on their smartphones and even go through it for the second time on their computers if found important. Also, the eCommerce ecosystem has made it necessary for other platforms to comply with a mobile-first strategy. Use mobile-first email templates and also optimise them for direct purchases.

Use Email Marketing Automation To Control Costs

As a small business, it is normal to work on tight budgets, but when it comes to email marketing, the high ROI of 4400% is very much dependent on harnessing email automation workflows. Every ESP provides a framework for automating emails through workflows. You can hire inhouse developers but the HR costs would be higher. However, if you hire professional email developers from an agency, it would save you not only money but all the development hassles too.

Make Extensive Use Of A/B Split Testing

Most small businesses don’t experiment enough with their emails. Without adequate information, optimizing would be as good as shooting in the dark, and with a limited budget, that’s not a good idea. Conducting A/B split testing allows you to understand which layout, subject line, salutation, and overall theme appeals the most. It saves a lot of money as you can send messages that are instantly liked by your audience, thus improving conversion rates.

Work On Your Email Copy

Emails are unique since they give you 100% visibility over the window. However, if you fail to pen engaging copies, it will all turn against you. Work on your email copy and emphasize on making it relevant to your email list. Share educational content as much as possible and try to stand out as a brand that connects to its audience’s problems and purposes.

Fulfil Sign Up Form Promises

It is important to fulfil the signup form promise you made, or else it would turn your subscribers against your business, and they may even take it to social media platforms. Don’t promise anything you can’t fulfil, be it a gated resource or discounts. Fulfilling your signup form promises is necessary to kickstart meaningful relationships.

Over To You

Remember that you need to approach email marketing strategically for getting results. Stick to relevancy and try to be as organic as possible when it comes to sourcing subscribers. For small businesses, emails should be a means to foster a community instead of becoming a medium for sending pushy sales pitches. Focus on being consistent and using automation, personalisation, and segmentation to build lasting relationships. I hope you find these 10 tips useful for your business.

Author Bio

Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specialises in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and Mailchimp Email Templates development. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.