Tips For Effective Email Marketing For Small Businesses

There are many benefits of e-mail marketing for small businesses: low costs, high conversion rates and detailed tracking are all notable features. Consumers are becoming increasingly savvy on the differences between spam and permission-based emails, and more and more of them are accepting permission-based e-mail marketing as a positive replacement for direct mail.

Jupiter Research reports effective email marketing campaigns can produce nine times the revenues and 18 times the profits of broadcast mailings. But crafting an effective business email is both an art and a science. Here is a list of factors, potential problems and effective solutions to keep in mind:

Spam!
No one likes to open their inbox to email upon email of spam. So how can you avoid spamming your subscribers? Remind your subscribers to add you to their “safe senders” list. The second, and most important, tactic is to make sure your email marketing service provider has a good relationship with ISPs. This will ensure that your email marketing campaigns go into your subscribers’ inboxes, not their junk mail folders. When choosing an email marketing software, make sure the company has strict anti-spam policies and complies with the guidelines of Can-Spam.

Images and formatting
Some subscribers will not be able to see your images or their email provider may have images and HTML coding blocked. With many email marketing service providers, you have the option of sending the email with images and HTML coding or as plain text to avoid this problem. Also pay attention to the number of characters per line to avoid causing your subscribers to have to scroll from left to right to read your email.

Personalization and relevant content
In a business e-mail, one size does not fit all. Personalize the email to your subscribers and give them content they are interested in reading. Always make sure your company name is in the “from” field so subscribers know the email is being sent by you and your business. The subject line is also very important. Subscribers are more likely to open your email if the subject line contains discount offers and interesting news as the most compelling subject lines, or new product announcements and free shipping offers.

Click-through and conversion
So the user has opened your email and read the content. Great. But where’s the sale? There’s good news here. Consumers are increasingly likely to make purchases as a direct result of a business email campaign. This is especially more likely to occur when you have built a relationship with your subscribers.

Stats tracking
To know how effective your email campaigns are working, you need to have statistics to track. Real-time tracking is now an industry standard, and it’s highly valuable, as it allows you to see the exact moment a user opens your campaign, clicks on your link and makes that purchase. Studying your users can help you improve your communications efforts, so each campaign performs better than the last (several email service providers also let you compare the performance of your campaigns).

Following these essential rules of play, you should soon be reaping the same major results as so many other online and offline businesses.

Dynamic Web Options can provide customized online marketing solutions to help your small business marketing needs. Contact us today to find out more. Whatever your business goals may be, Dynamic Web Options can help you combine the power of internet marketing with offline marketing to increase sales and profit.