1. Give Away Something of Value

People are bombarded with email offers nowadays. Unless you’re offering something of real value, strangers who have never heard of you are not likely to give you their email address. We all know that often, opting to receive a newsletter will result in unwanted spam, so your offer had better be good. 

Freebies such as checklists, guides, or even email courses and challenges offer value. Just be sure to cater your offer to your audience. Your offer should either help your reader solve a problem or provide them with helpful information.

2. Be Sure to Optimize Your Emails for Mobile

The vast majority of your audience will see your emails on their smartphone. Be sure your offer will look good on a mobile device:

• Be sure the font is large enough to read. It’s frustrating to have to increase the size of your screen to read the page.
• Try to keep the content in one column to make it easier to see everything by simply scrolling down the page.
• Make sure your call to action is large enough to be seen
• Keep the important information near the top or middle of the page. Don’t let your audience leave the page before you can show them your most important content.

3. Leverage Social Media Traffic

Depending on the type of business you have and the social media platforms you are on, social media may not drive customers your way with social media posts, but it’s not a bad place to share links to your blog or offers. 

Share your offers and higher valued content with a link to your website in your bio. Social media is no different in that you will have to present an offer to attract new visitors to your business. 

Email Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

If you want to implement email marketing for your small business, these tips may do the trick. Host webinars to increase effective email marketing. Webinars do well when offered on social media. 

Be sure you are offering the right type of webinar to your audience. Use the relevant hashtags and implement a launch strategy that will have your audience anticipating your webinar.

Consider offering contests or giveaways. Prepare an attractive offer for the winner and use social media to drum up excitement. If you offer a course, offer free registration. 

If your business is new and you don’t have anything substantial to offer, that’s okay. You can offer a free consultation or a free month’s subscription. For example, if your audience consists of creators, you could offer the cash equivalent of a free month of Canva’s Pro membership or some other software they are likely to use. Think of the tools that are used by your audience. 

Let subscribers know you will announce the winner by email to encourage them to keep checking your emails. Choose the winner a few weeks or a month later to give yourself time to attract as many new subscribers as possible.  

Consider testing ads on social media networks. If you’re new to marketing ads on social media can be expensive and misdirected, but if you’re experienced with it, try your hand by placing ads on the platform(s) where your audience is engaged. Add a content upgrade or affiliate links on your landing page to offset the cost of the ads.

4. Scrubbing Email Lists

Inactive subscribers hurt your open rate and should be addressed when they become cold subscribers. If you have subscribers who haven’t opened an email in two months, consider creating a sequence that asks whether they want to stay on the list. Give them a chance to confirm they want to remain on your list and if you don’t receive a reply, consider deleting them. You want a list of engaged readers, not people who don’t open your emails.

If you don’t scrub your email list from time to time you end up paying for subscribers who aren’t engaging with your content and reducing your opcn rate. High unopen rates lead to more of your emails appearing as spam or promotions, which you don’t want.

5. Add a Picture to Email

Images can break up the text of your emails and make them more interesting. Create your own graphics using software like Canva and insert content upgrades for freebies or products. Adding links to the graphics gives them an opportunity to come to your site so don’t miss the opportunity to entice them in every email. 

6. Calls to Action

One of the biggest mistakes content creators make is failing to include a call to action in marketing emails. We’re emailing our readers to provide them with value and to remain in their minds, but don’t forget to tell them what you want them to do. We assume they know we want them to come to our website, but then what? Do you want them to read your latest blog post? Listen to our most recent podcast? Download a freebie? Don’t forget to let them know what their next step should be once they finish reading the email and make it easy for them to figure out how. Remember your subscriber is probably on their smartphone so make that call to action and button large enough for them to see it.

If you’re worried that your calls to action will bug your subscribers or that they’ll unsubscribe because you made an offer, don’t be. The whole point is to market to them. If they unsubscribe, good. That may increase your click-through rate (or CTR) and allow you to only connect with your tribe.

7. A/B Testing

Trial and error is the name of the game. Try different subject lines to see which performs better. If your subject line isn’t good enough to make someone open the email, all of your hard work will be in vain. Without being spammy, give enough information in the subject line to make them curious. Don’t reveal the whole point of the email because they may feel like they don’t need to read any further. Tease your content but no clickbait. Deliver what you promise.

8. Email Delivery Times

If your subscribers are not opening your emails try adjusting the days of the week and times you send them. There are so many studies out there on the best days and times to send emails and they vary widely. It depends on your audience so again, trial and error will be crucial. The consensus seems to be that weekends are not the best days, with Tuesday through Thursday being the best days. But if you see a higher open rate with Monday emails, stick with that!

9. Email Segmentation

One of the best ways to retain subscribers is by catering their emails to them. If you have subscribers who have signed up for different offers, segment your emails so you provide content related to the reason they signed up. Generic emails don’t offer as much value and they don’t make your subscribers feel as special as they would if you addressed their issues head-on.

10. Email Automation

Make your life easier with email automation. It’s not a necessity if you’re just starting out, but it should be something to work towards. Automation allows you to set up emails in a sequence ahead of time so they can go out automatically once a subscriber reaches a certain point in a sequence. Based on their responses you can direct them down different paths based on their interest. Rather than having to send several broadcast messages manually, set them up in advance and let your email marketing software do the rest.

Get Email Subscribers Fast

We all want to see instant results with our marketing efforts, that’s natural. Trial and error will be necessary to receive optimal results, but these 5 methods are proven to work when offered to the right audience.

Before you try any of these email marketing tips be sure your offer is catered to your target audience. If you have a food blog and offer a free income tax calculator it wouldn’t help you much. People may request the calculator but your subscriber list will consist of people interested in their income tax, not your food blog. It will be difficult to send them offers related to food or your blog’s content. Think of what your ideal audience wants or needs and come up with an offer that they will feel compelled to take. 

1. Email Courses

A short email course of three to five days can be the perfect way to grow your list and give you an opportunity to present a product at the end. If you offer your target audience a course teaching something specific, you can offer a product or service at the end of the course that will take them further. Instead of ending the course with a “thank you” you can end it with an offer to a complimentary product or service that flows naturally based on the content of your email course. 

If we stick with the food blog example, let’s say your email course teaches new cooks how to make the perfect hard-boiled egg. At the end, you could either offer a product that will tell them when the egg is done or an e-book with 100 egg recipes. They both flow naturally from the lessons in the course and you have a warm audience, ready to move forward with you, someone they trust a little more because you helped them.

When you have a captive audience, don’t squander that opportunity to invite them to make a purchase or at the very least, to look at other content on your website if you have one. 

2. Email Challenges

An effective email challenge is similar to a course, except a challenge is more action-oriented. Of all the email marketing tips, this is one of the most involved. Here you’re challenging your audience to do something, reach a milestone, or an accomplishment. There should be some movement with your subscriber from point A to B.

Challenges can be longer than an email course because you want to give your subscribers time to complete each step. If your challenge, for example, is to teach your beginner students how to knit a blanket, you want to give them more than three days.

Space out your emails to give them time to get through each step and keep up with you. Hopefully, by the end of the challenge, they have learned something new. Again, don’t say goodbye without a call to action. Do you want them to now purchase knitting patterns from you? Maybe you offer a more advanced course. Whatever it is, the end of the challenge is the perfect time to start pitching your idea.

3. Freebies

Of all the email marketing tips, this is probably the most commonly used. Freebies like checklists, guides, planners, and trackers are easy to make using software like Canva and can offer real value. Be sure to create freebies that your audience can really use. A blank, lined planner page won’t cut it. 

Think of your ideal subscriber. What is that person struggling with? What would make their lives easier? Create a simplified version of that and offer it as a freebie. Don’t copy what other people are offering, you’ll stand out by offering something unique. Once you think of something, Google the idea and see what comes up. If you find similar items out there, try to improve on it. 

There are a lot of people using freebies to attract subscribers so you’ll have to offer something that’s almost too good to be free! Your subscribers will be so impressed that the product you’re offering is free, that they’ll not only want it, you’ll gain their appreciation and improve your credibility in their eyes. Put your best foot forward and remember the expression: you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. 

4. Quizzes

Quizzes may be the most fun of all the email marketing tips. Make the title of your quiz properly and you’ve got an underutilized email marketing strategy that can attract your ideal subscriber. The quiz can ask just what you want to ask your prospective subscriber. Want to segment them to only attract one type of subscriber? Use the quiz to focus on that group of people.

Again with the food blog example, if you wanted to attract subscribers who may want to order your cookbook down the road you could offer a quiz titled “Are you a chef in the making? which celebrity chef are you”, or something like that. You can use the responses to market your cookbook, depending on the chef they resemble. Have fun with it but make sure to get helpful information for your business as well.

5. Webinars

The tried and true webinar is still a great way to attract subscribers. If you offer the right content, you will get people who will sign up. Whether it’s live or recorded, there are a lot of people who prefer to take in their content through any kind of video format. 

Before preparing for a webinar it may be a good idea to validate your idea first, if possible. Ask your current subscribers, social media followers, and people in related forums whether they would be interested in the topic you plan to cover. If you see there is interest, begin preparing your webinar, and send out your emails announcing the webinar.

Again, don’t forget to include a call to action. Once they complete the webinar, what do you want them to you? Don’t let them close your email without an offer to continue working with the subscriber you worked so hard to attract.

Why Automation is Important

In order to communicate effectively with your subscribers, automated email marketing is your best bet. This is one of the most important email marketing tips.  Automation allows you to set up and schedule email sequences ahead of time for subscribers who you can segment into different groups. Segmenting subscribers means separating your audience based on interest, time of subscription, the freebie that they clicked on, or however else you want to identify subscribers. Knowing what “bucket” to place each subscriber will make it easier to target later. 

If someone clicks on a freebie teaching how to make a printable could be added to a segment named “interested in printables”. Someone who clicks on a freebie teaching how to market on Facebook could be added to a segment named “ Facebook marketing”. Now you can draft and schedule a chain or sequence of emails for each group or segment of subscribers.

Your subscribers will be more likely to open the emails they receive because they’ll be catered to them.  Without automation, you will have to create and send out manual broadcast emails. This is definitely possible and maybe advisable if you’re just starting out, but once you know how you want to segment your subscribers, automation should be the goal. 

I’ve used several email marketing software and for email automation, Convertkit has been the easiest to use. They don’t give you as Kartra, for example, when it comes to customization, but it’s very reasonably priced and it’s effective. 

Best Email Marketing Software

Convertkit gives you all of the tools you need to set up sequences to our subscribers and to send them out using automation. You can set up A/B testing to test different subject lines, and their analytics give you information to let you know how many people opened each email, how many clicked on an offer in an email, and keeps track of cold subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in the past 90 days.

Regardless of the program you choose, the most important thing is to use one. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow your business. If your budget doesn’t allow you to purchase software, try Converkit’s free plan. 

It won’t allow for automation but you can still take advantage of the other awesome services they offer. You can always upgrade later if you want add the automation feature.

Are you using email marketing for your business already? What works best for you? Are you still considering email marketing? Which email marketing tip will you try first?