Email marketing is alive and well as a great method of reaching your audience. As a small business, it can be a challenge to develop professional email marketing. So, here are some tips on how to create your own effective email marketing campaigns.

First, start building your list. For a successful email campaign, you need people to email. You can create a signup form and place it on your website, social media, or anywhere else you see fit. Make sure you include some information on what your client is signing up for. If you have a physical shop, you can also ask customers if they would like to sign up for email notifications about deals and events at your business.

Decide what emails you want to send. There is a surprising variety of emails that you can send. This can range from promotional emails for special offers or sales, seasonal messages (for holidays or special events), loyalty programs for your most dedicated customers, or even transactional emails for ecommerce receipts or appointment notifications. The kind of email you will send is largely based on the kind of business you own.

Time to get creative. Once you have planned for what kind of email you want to send, you need to create the content and design of those emails. You can keep it as minimal or as flashy as you like but you’ll want to keep in mind the message you want to send and the action you want your readers to take.Writing your content can be challenging, especially if you have a larger pool of contacts to email. To make your emails more tailored to your audience you can look at is their demographics (think gender, age group, geography), past purchase behavior (preferred product categories, number of purchases, whether or not past purchases were during promotions or sales), brand loyalty (new leads, longtime customers, VIPs), email engagement (customers who click on all of your emails vs. those who have never opened an email). With this information, you can create emails that actually resonate with some of your subgroups rather than sending one universal email that only a small group care about.

Next is your design. Emails are meant to make your life easier so they should not take a long time to design. You will also want to include a very clear call-to-action button that corresponds to your offer in the email and tells readers what you want them to do. If you want them to go to your new products in your store, include a link to your store.  If you want them to read an article, include a clickable  link to the article.

Lastly, you need to check on how well your emails are doing. Are they being opened? Are the links being clicked? There are plenty of different pieces of software  (Hubspot, Infusionsoft, MailChimp etc.) that can help you find out how well your emails are performing so you can have the most effective campaign.

Does this all seem like a lot to consider? Automation of email campaigns is one way we can help. Contact us today.