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Email marketing can be an effective way to connect with existing and potential customers to grow your small business. This form of marketing is an important addition to your brand’s online marketing toolbox and can help you drive more sales, build relationships with customers, and help customers feel connected to your business. Today, to help you navigate your email strategy with ease, we’ve compiled eight tips to help you master email marketing for your small business.
Start collecting customer email addresses
The first step to successful email marketing is building a robust subscriber list. If you haven’t yet, now is the time to start collecting email addresses from your existing customers. Try adding a simple form on your website to capture visitor information. You can also prompt customers who make a purchase to sign up for your emails at checkout. If you’re active on social media, ask your followers to sign up for your emails and include a sign-up form in an easy-to-access location.
Learn the types of emails
There are many types of emails you can send your customers, each varying by your desired outcome. Common marketing emails categories include:
- Welcome emails, sent when a customer first subscribes to your email list. These are a great place to give an overview of your business and even offer a small new subscriber discount.
- Product emails alerting customers of new or back in stock products, or creating urgency around low inventory items.
- Newsletters, sent on a regular basis to keep your subscribers updated on what’s new with your business, make any announcements, highlight exciting upcoming events, or even feature customer reviews.
- Promotional emails that let subscribers know about special offers or upcoming sales.
- Transactional emails that thank a customer for their purchase. Transactional emails can also include abandoned cart emails, sent to online shoppers who add an item to their cart but didn’t check out.
Use premade templates
Regardless of the types of emails you wish to send, finding a compelling easy-to-read, and mobile-friendly layout for your campaigns is important. Luckily, you don’t need to start your content from scratch each time you send a new marketing email. A great way to simplify your process starts with reusing designs that you’ve already created, or templates that are available for your use.
Depending on your email provider, you may be able to save previous email campaigns or create your own templates. Finding a consistent template will not only save you time in the future, it can also help create a cohesive look and feel for branding your business.
Better yet, you have access to free email templates in your Faire account. Through the Faire campaigns tool, you can edit and reuse custom, modular email templates for free. You can add your logo and imagery, pull in shoppable products directly from your Faire shop, and customize your email’s text. Then, you can send the email directly from Faire by adding recipients through a spreadsheet, a Mailchimp audience, or existing Faire contacts.
Lead with a compelling subject line
A good subject line should give your customers a specific reason to open your email. It’s best to avoid being too vague—instead, communicate the unique products you carry, or call attention to a particular selling point. For example, an email alerting customers to exciting new products with the subject line, “New eco-friendly sandalwood candles now available,” is much more compelling than, “New products now available.” Similarly, if you’re announcing an upcoming sale, a subject line stating, “15% off all handmade ceramic planters” more clearly states your intention than, “Sale next week.”
Use a clear call to action
One of the most important factors of email marketing for small businesses is the inclusion of a call to action. A call to action (CTA) is a phrase or sentence that clearly states the action you want a buyer to take after reading your email. In most cases, you’ll be asking customers to click through to your products to browse and purchase.
Your CTA should be directly tied to the goal of your email, whether it be to shop new inventory or take advantage of a discount offer. For example, a CTA stating, “Click here to receive 10% off” instructs the reader what to do next. Calls to action should always involve a clickable button or link that directs the buyer to your website. Consider having a call to action at both the top and bottom of your email, in case a customer doesn’t scroll down.
Segment your audience
To get the most success out of small business email marketing, it’s helpful to segment your audience as your subscriber list grows. Segmenting simply means creating categories for your customers depending on a variety of factors like location, age, or purchase history. The larger your email list, the more helpful segmenting becomes.
For example, if you’re offering customers a discount for in-person pick-up, emailing your contacts who live in different cities or countries won’t be effective. Similarly, if you’re sending an email about a discount for repeat buyers, you won’t want to email customers who have never made a purchase. Instead, target the email at customers who have made two or more purchases. Email segmentation not only helps your emails perform better, it also helps the emails feel more personal to customers.
To begin segmenting your audience, use Faire’s marketing tools in your brand portal. You can navigate to your “All Contacts” view to begin sorting your customers by a variety of factors, including last contact date, last order delivered, Faire Direct customers, and more. Once you’ve sorted through your contacts, you can save segments as custom lists.
Automate where possible
Automating recurring emails like abandoned cart emails or welcome emails is an easy way to save yourself time with email marketing. Many email providers offer automation tools with their business plans. These tools allow you to schedule automatic emails based on user activity. For example, you can create a welcome email campaign that is automatically sent to every new subscriber. You can also set up an email campaign that is sent every time a customer abandons their cart. This type of automation allows you to spend your time focusing on providing quality content in each email rather than focusing your time actually sending them.
You can easily set up a few simple automations for free through your Faire brand portal. For example, you can enable automatic emails to retailers who have unused credit to your line, buyers who are due for a reorder, or any prospective customers you’ve been in touch with.
Track your results
When it comes to mastering email marketing for your small business, it’s important to keep track of how your emails are performing. Most email marketing providers allow you to view basic information about your email performance. Start by checking to see how many people are opening your emails and clicking your call to action button. Tracking clicks and open rates will help you determine which of your emails are most effective, and enables you to tailor future marketing emails accordingly. It also allows you to perform tests to further improve your strategy.
For example, you can test sending your emails at different times or days of the week to see when you get the best open rate. Your email performance data is key to better understanding and serving your audience.
If you send an email campaign using Faire’s marketing tools, you can view deliverability insights at a customer level in your brand portal. Simply click into the recipients list from your campaigns page to see the status of each email.
