Email marketing is generally one of the best marketing tools for small businesses. It’s an effective, low-cost solution that is quite easy to implement and automate.
However, if you have no experience in using email marketing to grow your business, you might find yourself confused and unsure where to start. Don’t worry: in this article, we’ll help you figure everything out and will tell you about seven ways to use email marketing for small businesses.
Table of Contents
1. Drip campaigns.
These are automated email messages that subscribers receive after taking a particular action or on a specific schedule. Such campaigns help a company build initial communication with its customers and maintain it efficiently.
Here are a few examples of drip campaign emails:
- Welcome emails: such email is sent to those who register on your website or subscribe to your newsletter.
- Thank you emails: these emails are sent to the customers who completed a purchase/survey or engaged with your content in some other way.
- Cart abandonment emails: you send such emails when a customer adds products to their cart but doesn’t buy. Cart abandonment emails are a good reminder about the goods your customer left behind.
- Nudge emails: sometimes people register or subscribe but don’t buy. Nudge emails could gently guide your customers in purchasing something.
2. Promo campaigns.
Such campaigns could both benefit the existing customers and encourage the potential ones to buy. Most of your customer database wouldn’t want to miss a great deal, so informing them about one would be a good option.
Promo campaigns could inform the customers about:
- sales;
- special offers;
- personal discounts;
- gifts for certain types of purchases.
3. Content newsletters.
This could be an excellent option for those small businesses who already have a content creator or could afford investing into one. Every company doesn’t use content newsletters; however, this doesn’t mean that your customers won’t appreciate them, assuming that the content has value.
Content newsletters can focus on tips, news, industry insights, and so on. You could also invest in the creation of an eBook or PDF guide that would be available either to your loyal subscribers or to anyone who subscribes to your newsletter. This option is excellent for expanding your email database.
4. Product updates.
Such emails aren’t as engaging as the ones with content or promo offers. However, they could benefit your business as well, especially when you’re offering a specific type of product — a mobile app, for instance.
Product updates inform the customers of specific changes in the product. Not any change matters; however, those who could affect the user experience significantly definitely do. It’s better to make such emails as simple and clear as you can — after all, their main goal is to inform.
5. Launch emails.
This also won’t work well for every occasion. For instance, when you run a large online store with a variety of goods, there’s no need to inform your customers about every new product that starts selling. However, you can find something to tell about in this case as well: for instance, when a well-known brand starts selling in your store or when a particular seasonal product (like yearly planners) starts selling.
The same goes for tech stores: you can create emails that help build up anticipation for the new iPhone or another well-known gadget that is about to be released.
If you create your products, such emails could be a great option as well. Generally, they are one of the best tools to build up excitement and expectations. These also guarantee that sales will happen when a product is launched.
6. Dedicated emails.
You might think that your loyal customers will stay with you forever, but that won’t always be the case, especially if you stop caring for them.
Acknowledging those who are loyal to you and have been with you for a while is always a great practice. If you want to, you can offer something unique to loyal subscribers for their support, be it a discount code or a special offer. But even if you cannot afford to do that yet, even a thank you email could be enough.
7. Referral emails.
Your subscribers need a lot of various products and services. Unfortunately, you cannot offer all of such products and services to them.
However, this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, this could be an excellent opportunity for you to build up a network of partners and friendly companies for your mutual benefit.
For instance, your business offers clothes for every occasion. You could partner with a gift shop or with an accessorize shop to help your clients pick some additional goods in case they are going to a special event or a party. Most likely, they would appreciate the discounts.
Now that we’ve given you some advice on how to use email marketing to grow your small business, it’s up to you to pick the ones that seem the most appealing and start trying them on practice. Don’t hesitate to do that. These days, you have so many tools that could help simplify the email marketing process and maximize its impact.
You can use the best email signature software to generate professional email signatures for free and try using different email marketing automation tools to create big campaigns for your business.
With an email signature, any email campaign will be 10 times more effective! We wish you good luck with that!
About Carson Derrow
