Top 5 Email Growth Hacks for Small Businesses

While social media marketing may be the in-thing, good old email marketing still leads when it comes to ROI.
What’s personalized, intimate, and confidential?

Email marketing, of course.

No wonder marketing experts still love using it as a tool to connect with their customers. When all else seems to fail, email marketing is the go-to answer as a way of promoting products, presenting special offers, and getting more abandoned cart checkouts. As per statistics, almost 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers.

A highly affordable tool, email marketing can be used by big and small businesses alike. It is also a highly flexible tool and can be scheduled based on the optimum time; your customers can respond to it.

However, like all marketing tools, email marketing has its limitations and shortfalls. Fortunately, these can be easily overcome by using well-devised growth hack that will soon have your coffers ringing.

Growth Hacks: The new-age term for cost-effective strategies that boost growth

Growth hacking refers to the concept of using creative ideas to achieve maximum gain with minimum budgets.

Growth hacking, as a concept, grew with the advent of startups. Since startups had limited funds, they were always looking for low-budget marketing ideas to promote their innovations and new ideas to the general public.

They often had to use out-of-the-box ideas to generate interest in their product or services to a broad audience and show fast growth to prospective investors.

Today growth hacking includes all promotional concepts and ideas that businesses use to grow their company.

Why is email marketing a good strategy for your business?

No other advertising medium is as personalized and confidential as compared to email marketing. It creates a connection between the sender and receiver, which is personal and direct, with no intermediaries in between. The customer can refer to the email anytime and multiple times as per their convenience.

As a written word, it also inspires confidence and trust amongst the email receiver. It stands as a guarantee of what is being promised and delivered. It is also an unobtrusive medium that does not disturb the receiver through any physical contact.

But the primary reason it is so successful and suitable for businesses is that it can connect with a large audience with minimal costs. For an effective email campaign, companies need to keep their email subscriber list up-to-date and ensure that the message they are sending is creatively crafted to connect with the intended audience.

As per the latest statistics, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42, which is quite substantial for small businesses.

As a small business owner, you need to ensure that you get the best ROI on every dollar you spend on marketing.

Be it on social media or email marketing.

Given the dynamics and how effective email marketing can be, we share the best email hacks for small businesses to help them achieve long-term, sustainable growth.

Digital marketing experts have developed the growth hacks mentioned in this blog after using the same success for their email marketing campaigns.

The Top 5 Email Growth Hacks for Small Businesses

1. Keep your content short & relevant

Given the short attention span, people generally have, most people skip through an email in less than twenty seconds. It’s the same as watching an ad spot on television.

That’s all the time you have to garner their attention and convince them to know more about you so that they are interested enough to visit your website.

Once the customer lands on your site, the job is half done. It’s then up to your product or service to present a suitable case for the customer to proceed with the purchase.

Your email marketing campaign needs to be relevant and highly informative for your customer to engage with it.

Email marketing experts suggest focusing on just one subject/topic in the email. It is best to avoid sharing any other content that may distract the customer from your main objective.

Using simple and short sentences often does the trick of holding their attention better than long lengthy paragraphs, which one may not be inclined to read.

Even the email layout needs to be simple, without too many flashy colors (unless, of course, you are in the lighting or neon business)

You could even outsource your content writing to an agency if you do not have a specialized team. Outsourcing your content writing will help you save time that you could use to grow your business.

2. Spend time on drafting a good subject line

A good subject line generates enough curiosity among the reader to make him open the mail and read more about your business.

With 21% being the average email open rate, marketers need to ensure they get their subject lines right in the first instance itself.

Avoid using words like Free, Best Offer, Surprise Gift Inside in the subject header. That would lead to the mail going to the spam folder. Instead, use a subject line that offers a specific benefit to the customer.

Make sure you always use pre-headers. It will add value to the subject header if it compliments it perfectly.

If you are not using pre-headers, ensure that there is no “Having trouble reading this mail? View it in your mobile/browser” message.

The best way to maximize the reach of your email marketing campaign is to conduct an A/B Split test. This is usually with different subject headers that will help you identify the subject header that works best for your campaign.

3. Personalize and customize your emails

Everyone loves a personalized greeting.

A warm hello addressed to the customer’s name can work wonders. Be it just an email or for your email campaign that ensures your customer goes through the mail.
In addition, it shows an effort on the advertiser’s part to know and address the customer correctly.

Similarly, if the mail is customized as per the customer’s specific needs or requirements, you could see a better Click Through Rate (CTR) for your mails.

Source: SocialStatus

For example, if you know the age range and gender distribution of your Facebook audience you could infer and apply these learnings to your email audience.

You can use a social media analytic tool to find out the preferences of your customers and segment them accordingly to aid personalization.

Segmented lists can play a significant role in customizing mails. For example, it ensures that customers get mails only about the specific products they have inquired about. Or mails only for the products they’ve shown an interest in.

It would be even better if you could tag your email list. The tagging could be as per the source from which you got the email address. It could also be from which ad had generated that particular email lead.
This will help you create better, personalized, and customized campaigns in the future.

4. Optimize your email campaign for mobile

With 59% of millennials checking their emails on smartphones, optimizing your email for mobile makes immense marketing sense.

Unfortunately, one out of 5 email campaigns is not optimized for mobile devices.

As per statistics, using a mobile-optimized design can increase unique mobile clicks by 15%. That is a substantial figure and could give a significant boost to your email marketing campaign.

As smartphones become the preferred means of all communication, the trend to check and reply to work emails on the mobile is bound to grow.

It, therefore, becomes imperative to ensure the next email marketing campaign your company sends out is optimized for the best display and visibility on the mobile screen.

Using CTA buttons is also a good option when designing emails for mobile screens, as it helps customers click the CTA easily on their mobile screen.

The CTA button could simply lead directly to the product/service or a response from that you would like the customer to fill up.

5. Maintain your email list proactively

Creating an email database should not be a one-time activity.

Your email list needs to be maintained periodically to ensure that it is relevant to your business and has the maximum number of active users.

It is no use to your business if you have 100,000 email addresses.
Imagine, 100,000 emails go out but only a few hundred people have replied to your mails once.

You would rather spend your energy and effort creating an email list with just 1,000 customers, with at least a couple of hundred people replying to your emails.

Getting customer feedback and responses helps you tailor your emails to their specific needs and gives you a better return on your advertising dollar.

Maintaining an active email list would also help you avoid penalties and avoid being blocked by internet service providers and email services.
Spam complaints, high bounce, and unsubscribe rates can cause email service providers to put your account on hold. Especially if it does not meet their service standards.

Email marketing is here to stay.

No matter how personalized or proficient the social media channels become, there will always be a place for email marketing. This always fits into every advertiser and digital marketer’s budget.

The reasoning is pretty simple.

No other medium offers flexibility and large-scale personalized communication with potential and existing customers customized as required.

With low investments and better ROI, email marketing will be the preferred communication channel for small businesses and startups.

However, email marketing can be effective only when appropriately channelized and ensuring that communication rules are followed.

Email Marketing Automation is another development in marketing that has significantly increased the value of returns Email Marketing Provides.

Use an up-to-date subscribers list and maintain it periodically by removing unsubscribed and inactive customers. That will ensure that your email marketing campaign reaches the relevant audience and delivers the desired results.