The idea of sending out emails to prospective customers is one that many small businesses have discovered to be highly effective in driving new business through small business email marketing. But, there are others who have not yet realized its potential. In this blog, we’ll look at five simple ways you can harness the power of – one of the most cost effective techniques in any company’s marketing arsenal.
1. Make sure you do your best to avoid spam filters. These have become incredibly good at detecting what is seen as spam by many email providers. Be careful when writing your subject lines, headers and content, don’t include such terms as ‘free’, ‘discount’, ‘£££’, ‘massive savings’, or similar terms. Make your header as human as possible, don’t go crazy with capitalizations and exclamation marks – all this looks very spammy and not ‘real’ at all.
2. Use their first name. This is not always possible, but if you have acquired a potential or existing customer’s email address because they actually signed up to receive your updates (which should be the case anyway), then you will know their name too. Hi John, for example, will always be better than simply Hi there. Why? Because the reader assumes you already have a relationship; that the sender knows the recipient.
3. Increase your conversions. Getting someone to open an advertising email is one thing, but getting them to read it and respond in the way you want is entirely different. Research has shown that people tend to click on simple blue-colored links within the text, in preference to large, flashy banner images.
Additionally, don’t waste the reader’s time with huge amounts of text – keep it simple and make sure you ask them to sign-up, browse or buy in the simplest way possible. You can improve conversion rates with a little focus and effort on the small things.
One of the best ways that you can increase your conversions with your email marketing, is to ensure that you have the best possible content written up for every single email that you send. Your SaaS content marketing has to be on point to be able to attract your audience and convince people to click what you need them to click.
Email marketing is going to help you to increase your conversions, but it’s also going to help you to build a great audience for your business. The better your email content is, the more people will want to click on the links that you add to each one, and the bigger your conversion rate will be. It’s vital that you are creating content that people will want to read, so the best way to do this is to ask the audience what they would like to see from you, and you can then go ahead and create it for them.
4. It’s important not to get accused of being spammy. To achieve this, make use of the double opt-in approach, which means when someone signs up to receive your emails, you immediately send a confirmation email with an activation link – once this is clicked then you know the person really does wish to receive your emails.
5. Send out your communications in the early part of the middle of the week, ideally on Tuesdays or Wednesdays. Research has shown that this is the time when people are most responsive to email marketing. Some say that avoiding Mondays is a good idea because people are still recovering from the weekend, although other research suggests that people search for products on Sundays, think it over, then buy on Mondays.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays are good bets because thoughts of the coming weekend are still quite distant. Crucially, do some testing to see which is the best time to send emails for your particular product or service.