Email Marketing that Works for Small BusinessBEST PRACTICES TO MAXIMIZE ROI & RESULTS

Table of Contents

Building Email Marketing Programs that Work 3

Developing the Right Marketing Mix 4Setting Goals for Your Program 6

Growing Your Audience 7

List Management 7List Maintenance 8Beyond the Basics 10List Segmentation 11

Crafting the Perfect Email 12

Multipart/Alternative MIME Format 13The Nine Commandments of Email Formatting 14Mobile Devices and Smartphones 16Personalization 17Social Media 18Testing 18

Getting Emails into Inboxes 20

Improving Deliverability 20Anti-Spam Laws 21When to Send and How Often 23

Measuring Your Program’s Results 24

Deliverability Metrics 24Interaction Metrics 25Determining ROI 27Measuring Sales Influenced by Email 28Calculating ROI 29

Optimizing Your Program for Better Results 30

Tests to Try 30

Conclusion 31

3

Building Email Marketing Programs that WorkIf you’ve sent an email promoting your business or responded to an email offer yourself, then you’re familiar with the concept of email marketing. Successful email marketing doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does require some dedicated thought, effort, and planning to be a great relationship management and sales tool.

If you’re looking for ways to leverage best practices to build higher-performing email marketing programs and get the highest possible return for your investment, this eBook is for you.

We’ll cover some of the basics, such as how to best build an HTML email and manage marketing lists, but also share best practices on how to optimize for different types of goals, improve campaign performance, and analyze the results of your email campaign.

4

Developing the Right Marketing Mix

The best email marketing programs don’t set out to deliver a one-off (read: random) email every three months, but instead use a mix of email marketing types to create a great prospect and customer experience. While most small businesses start with lead generation in mind, consider how customer engagement and nurture marketing can play into your strategy.

Lead Generation

Clients or prospects can fill out a form to receive a quote or download content from your website, sign up for a newsletter, register for a contest or promotion, or attend an event. These subscribers have “opted-in” to your mailing list and have shown some level of interest in your company, products, or services. Email marketing can help you qualify those individuals as prospects or leads.

Customer Engagement

Email is a great way to communicate with customers and keep them engaged with your product or service. Sending regular emails will increase their trust in your brand and ensure that your company is top-of-mind when making another purchase decision. Examples of customer-facing email marketing include:

• Weekly, monthly, or quarterly newsletters

• Announcements of new products or services

• Promotions, discounts, or coupons

• Event invitations

• Customer surveys

• Renewal notifications

• Holiday, birthday, or anniversary greetings

A happy birthday message from Total Wine

A text-based email from The Nature Conservancy

5

Include dynamic content in your email campaigns for a personal touch. Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions often contain a wealth of information about your customers – location, gender, company size, buying preferences – that could be used to craft an email that is unique to each individual on your list.

For example, if you have a second store location opening in Las Vegas, use an email campaign to invite your Nevada-based prospects and customers to visit your grand opening. Running a summer promotion on swimsuits? Send an email to your list with a 10% discount.

Nurture Marketing

Email marketing can be set to run on “auto pilot” with nurture marketing (also known as drip marketing). Automated nurture programs send a series of emails to an individual or list over a period of time. However, the real power behind nurtures is the ability to include decision points and actions based on how the recipient interacts with your message, allowing for a customized experience. A well-built nurture program can increase rapport with your customers, grow trust in your brand, save valuable sales resources, and convert a higher percentage of leads into paying customers.

An example of a nurture email received after visting the kid’s menu on Studio Movie Grill’s website

6

Setting Goals for Your Program

The first step in improving your email marketing strategy is to revisit the goals you set when you first started. We often see customers who started out sending one-off email newsletters every few months, but are now ready to take a more focused and targeted approach. Setting goals will help you determine when you achieve success by setting metrics you can measure. You’ve heard the saying (usually around New Year’s when everyone’s on both a diet and a budget): what gets measured gets managed. The concept applies to your email program as well; knowing what you want to accomplish will help determine the appropriate target audience, content, send times, and frequency.

Different business will have different goals; while an ice cream shop may want to incentivize more in-store traffic with a newsletter that features new flavors or seasonal features, a cleaning service may want to drive more traffic to its website, with the goal of generating more requests for quotes.

Here are some examples of goals you could set for your email marketing program:

• Increase form completions - Track the number of submitted “contact us” or “request a quote” forms generated by your marketing emails.

• Increase store traffic - Send out updates about seasonal favorites, or when a new product arrives. You could also send offers for a free sample, consultation, or discount, depending on what’s appropriate for your business.

• Increase order size - Find out if customers who received a 5% off or free quote offer via email spend more with you than others.

• Increase customer loyalty and retention - Over time, you’ll collect enough data to measure the impact of your email marketing program on customer loyalty. For example, you may find that consistent communication with your clients leads to higher retention rates or more return visits and purchases.

• Increase attendance at an event - Generate awareness for an open house or trade show booth, send traffic to your event’s webpage, and collect RSVPs via event invites and reminders.

• Increase web traffic - If you are launching a new brand or offering, you’ll likely want to bring attention to it via your website. Set goals around traffic to your site overall, as well as page-specific metrics such as unique visits and number of pages viewed per visit.

Later on, you’ll also set specific goals for the performance of your emails, but for now, focus on the business objective.

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