An Effective Email Marketing Strategy for Small Business

An effective email marketing strategy does two things well: it’s consistent, and it’s focused.

Consistency is Key

Be consistent when you speak with your customers and prospects. Send emails on a regular schedule. If there’s value in the content, they will look for your emails. Imagine that. Your email isn’t Spam; it’s something they look forward to.

The “voice” you use in your emails should also be consistent. Write like a real person is talking. Write as if you know them because they know you. This is especially true for customer communication. For prospect emails, it’s ok to be a bit salesy, but customers expect and will value a friendlier voice. We dig into the broad topic of marketing a small business online in the Hub and Spoke Marketing Strategy.

You won’t get here just by being consistent. The value has to be there. The content needs to fit your audience’s interests and needs. But if the value is there, your audience will open and read the emails.

Stay focussed

Don’t be all over the map, focus your message. Don’t ask respondents to do too much mental sorting. Make the subject clear in the subject line. Use a preheader to convince your audience that the content is worth their time.

Effective segmentation is smart here. Track the links that your audience uses. Segment them based on behavior. Deliver content that fits with past activity. They clicked on golf, lead with more content about golf. Try to keep each email to no more than three subjects. Two is better.

None of this is hard, it takes some attention, some work, but the results will be worth it.

Here is a simple email marketing strategy a small business can start with. It’s focused on e-commerce. You can adapt the strategy to other business objectives, leads for example. Over time you will refine things to best suit your needs.

An effective email marketing strategy is consistent and focused

• Start with a welcome email with a limited time offer. Send it after the user’s first login
• Follow up with a thank-you email with a related product cross-sell. Send it after the first sale
• Send a reminder email if a user hasn’t logged in for a month
• Periodic, non-sales emails to purchasers. Design the content to add value to the business relationship
• Periodic and targeted sales-oriented emails to purchasers based on past purchases
• And sales-oriented emails to nonpurchasers

Your small business email marketing strategy will work hard for you if you work on it. Commit the time and resources and watch your results grow.