June 6, 2017

Email marketing is one of the most affordable forms of digital marketing available to small business owners. While other tactics such as SEO, remarketing and Google AdWords all have a fixed cost or require some technical knowledge, email marketing can be done by anyone and in most cases for free.

Given that I’m a small business owner myself, I thought it’d be fun to share a few email marketing tips with my fellow small business owners. These 6 tips are ideas I’ve put into practice in my own email marketing campaigns over the last few months.

1. Make Subscribing Simple

In order for your business to comply with CASL (Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation) anyone who you send a promotional email to must first subscribe to your email list. Make this process simple for your customers by adding a basic newsletter registration form to your website. This form shouldn’t require more than 3 pieces of information from the customer (eg. email address, name and company) and should be located in a high traffic area of your website. If you use a content management system like Joomla! or WordPress, there are several free and easy to integrate plugins to make this happen.

2. Make Unsubscribing Just as Simple

Make sure it’s easy for users to unsubscribe from your emails as well. Most of the email marketing software used today to deploy email marketing campaigns requires that you include an unsubscribe link. This mandate goes a step further when you consider that this is another strict requirement of CASL. Nothing frustrates a customer more than receiving communication they’re not interested in. Ensure that your unsubscribe link is functional so that any subsequent emails go un-sent to customers who unsubscribe.

3. Use Email Marketing Software to Deploy

There are several advantages to using email marketing software including: the ability to easily track open-rate, clicks and unsubscribes, organize segregated email lists and setup well-designed email blasts. There are several pay and free email marketing software options but my personal favourite is MailChimp. MailChimp allows you to send up to 12,000 emails a month or have a list of 2,000 subscribers totally free. As a small business owner trying to keep marketing costs down, MailChimp is perfect. Some pay email marketing software options include: Campaigner and GetResponse.

4. Include a Catchy Subject Line

The importance of a catchy email subject line has been outlined in several blogs throughout the web because it’s that important. Here’s a quick list of tips for catchy subject lines:

• Keep it short and sweet (50 characters or less)
• Tease what’s included in the email
• Use “action-oriented” verbs (eg. “capitalize”, “earn”, “spark” and “win”)
• Personalize the subject, make the customer feel special
• Create a sense of urgency (eg. “24-hour sale”, “register now”)

5. Match Your Email Campaign to Your Brand

Not all superheros wear capes… and not all small business owners are marketers but do your best to make the design of your email marketing campaign match your brand. This can be easily achieved by simply adding your logo to the header of your email, matching your colours and fonts to the colours and fonts of your other marketing material and writing the content of your email in the same “voice” that you’ve developed for your brand.

6. Test! Test! Test!

Of all 6 email marketing tips for small business owners I’ve listed in this blog, testing may be the most important. Similar to the old construction line “measure twice, cut once” you should always, always always “test twice, send once”. Each of the email marketing software options I mention in #3 have the ability for you to send yourself a test email. Read and review all images, links and content within your email to ensure everything is spelled correctly and linking properly. Once you’ve checked it on a desktop or laptop computer, send that same email to your mobile device and review how it appears there. Once that’s done – send away!