Small Business Tips: Best Practices for Email Marketing

Sep 20th 2011

Email marketing has a bad reputation with many people. They associate it with that dull, sinking feeling when they see hundreds of new spam emails awaiting them in their inboxes. But email marketing doesn’t have to be like that: it can be a useful way to directly connect with your customers, providing them with useful information about your latest offers or products. For small businesses, this is a great and relatively inexpensive way to get a message out to a large number of loyal customers.

It can also be a fantastic way to advertise and sell products or services outside of your local area. Email marketing, virtual offices in London and other big cities, remote working, and the use of social media for pushing out messages are all great ways to ensure that your business has as wide a geographic reach as possible. This is especially true as more small businesses are moving online – it has been claimed recently that small businesses that use the web are growing four times faster than offline companies.

If many other small business are operating online, that means you should be too if you want to stay on top and expand your customer base.

Top Five Tips For Email Marketing

1) Build a List – You’re going to need to build a list of email contacts who are willing to receive your newsletter. There are various good sources for obtaining this, from your pool of existing or potential customers. Make the sign up process easy and make sure it isn’t excessively pushy (but not too unobtrusive, or no one will sign up). Websites are a great place to get sign ups, and a small box in a side frame means that users have the opportunity to sign up on every page of your site. For more ideas, check out this article from dotMailer.

2) Keep it Simple – Keep the design simple, but also interesting. Break up the layout with the odd image and blocks of colour, to hold people’s attention without overwhelming them. Make bold, positive statements that put you and your products in a good light. Lastly keep it short; people don’t want to read about every little detail of your newest products on an email – just the key specifications, features and what’s makes it great. They can go to your website or retailers for more information.

3) Keep it Civil (and Legal) – Make sure you know what’s required of you by law. Direct marketing can be a tricky business on the legal front, so read up. There are many guides to UK email marketing law – this one from Website Law is a good place to start. The Wikipedia entry on email marketing is also good for a brief overview of the laws in several countries. To be safe, however, it is always advisable to consult a solicitor on these issues. Industry regulators, such as the Direct Marketing Association, also issue codes of practice, which it is advisable to follow.

4) Remember Your Call To Action – An attractive, informative email is great, but it won’t do you much good if your customers don’t act on it. A call to action – ‘Buy now’ or ‘Visit our website’, for example – encourages your customers to take action as soon as possible. If you don’t ask them to act, they will probably just treat it as a piece of reading material.

5) Track Actions and Conversions – So you’ve written your winning email marketing campaign, sent it out to your customers, and persuaded loads of them to take a look around your website or online store with your call to action – but how do you know it has really worked? Well, you need to track clicks from the email. If you’re not already using it, then you should implement Google Analytics on your website, or ask a developer to do it for you. In its statistics, Google Analytics will tell you how many people are coming to your website from email services like Gmail. But if you want to find out how individual emails, or even individual links within emails, are performing, you can do that with Google Analytics too. To do this, you need to ‘tag’ links in emails. For more information on how to do this, check out the Google Analytics blog.

At the end, go back and make sure you’ve got everything right before your campaign starts – you don’t want to send out an email to thousands of people, only to find out that you’re not tracking your links. This checklist infographic from Pure360 is a good way to make sure that you’ve remembered everything (click to open a larger image in a new tab):

Has your small business run a successful email marketing campaign? What tips would you offer to other SME owners trying to do the same thing? Let us know in the comments section below.