8 Strategies To Boost Email Marketing For Small Businesses

As a small business, it can be hard to keep up with an ever-changing marketing field. Email marketing and other types can be time intensive. But if you can make the time for them, they can really boost your business.

At Cohlab, we help our clients build and sustain email campaigns across multiple industries. If you need expert help, let us know, but we hope these strategies can help set you on the right course.

8 Strategies To Boost Email Marketing For Small Businesses

1. Make It Obvious

The first key to successful email marketing is getting subscribers. You may already have users heading to your website, landing pages, blog or Facebook; use this to your advantage and give them some way of signing up, whether you find a WordPress plugin, a Facebook feature, or just give them a link to send you a generic email opting in.

The most important part is to make it obvious. Put it at the top of your pages, make it part of your Facebook cover photo, do something to get the idea of being on your mailing list in front of them and easy to do. All they should need to do is give you their name and email, don’t confuse the issue by asking for anything else.

2. Keep Them Informed

Once you’ve begun building a list, let them know what you’re using it for. Send everyone a welcome email as they are added to the list letting them know you’re grateful and that they’ll be receiving Marketing/Coupons/Blog Summaries/Survey/Etc. emails from you.

Email services like MailChimp and HubSpot (which we’ll discuss later) have an option to automatically reply to someone when they sign up for your list.

3. Subject Lines Are Important

Subject lines are key. What are you trying to get them to do, and what information is inside? Readers should be able to know without even opening the email whether anything valuable is inside for them.

Technically speaking, emails with subject lines of less than 50 characters tend to be opened more often than any other length, while subject lines of more than 70 characters tend to have links or coupons inside clicked on more often.

4. Consider Using A Service

In point #2, we mentioned MailChimp and Hubspot. These companies provide email services, allowing you to create lists, email templates, as well as keep you on the right side of the law. These email marketing providers automatically put unsubscribe links at the bottom of every email, which allows readers to opt out at any time and saves you the hassle of breaking the law.

5. Be Brief

About half of all emails are read on mobile devices, which means people are on the move. Keep your emails brief. You should really have only one or at the maximum two focuses in a single email message, to prevent confusion and keep the length in line.

200 words is usually a good maximum. If you need more than 200 words to get your point across, write a blog post instead and link from a short summary on the email to the blog post.

6. Be Committed

Keep it steady. If you feel customers will benefit from one email a month, do that and stick to it, always hitting it on the same day at about the same time. Create a calendar if you have to.

If you are doing more than one email a month, you’ll probably need a calendar. Keep it steady, with one email a week or whatever you choose.

If you decide you absolutely need to change your emailing frequency, inform your email list so they aren’t confused, or create separate lists and encourage people to subscribe to both lists if interested.

7. Stats Are Important

With an email marketing service like MailChimp or HubSpot, it’s easy to watch your statistics roll in from your email campaign. Open rates (what percentage of subscribers have opened a particular email) as well as click rates (what percentage of subscribers have clicked a link within a particular email.)

Not seeing good results? It might be time to change the time/date of your emails (see point #6.)

8. Images Might Not Show Up

Alt tags. These are text descriptions of graphics (images, photos, videos, logos.)

Every graphic you put in your email should have an alt tag, not only for those who use software to read their email to them, but also for those whose email provider has blocked images from appearing. Otherwise your customers might not even know you included a valuable coupon, or what it’s worth!

We hope these strategies have helped you on your journey, and if you need anything else, we’re just an email away!