23+ Best Email Marketing Tips & Tricks for Small Businesses

If you’ve ever sent an email and didn’t get a response at any point, you’re not alone. That begs a lot of questions, including: “did they open it”, “what did I do wrong?”.

Without answers to these questions, it’s difficult to know how to proceed. If you’re on this boat, worrying isn’t going to help.

Our email marketing tips and tricks are here.

At some stage, you’ve probably received an email and deleted it without so much or a thought.

You may have even confined some to the spam folder, too. If your customers are doing this to your emails, it’s important you understand why.

You may need something more catchy and with a great subject line. Something that makes them want to open and read.

You don’t have to go around spamming your subscriber lists in the name of email marketing. Truly, this marketing channel is an incredibly powerful tool to help you deliver messages directly to your clients and prospects.

The stats should also convince you because about 3.8 billion people are email users worldwide, and that figure is estimated to reach 4.4 billion users by 2023. Furthermore, based on the broadcast they receive, 44% of people make at least one buy.

Nonetheless, spamming or buying email lists will not yield an amazing response. To improve your marketing efforts, you can try out the following tips and tricks for the best results.

Top Email Marketing Tips

1) Make it easy to Opt-in

Many people think email marketing takes entire care of itself. Sure, you get a lot to achieve but this is one trick you don’t want to miss.

Consider creating an email list that has a process of registration that’s as easy and simple as possible.

For example, the name and email address of each subscriber is suitable enough for the cause. To that end, you don’t need some unnecessary information including the date of birth and place of origin.

When you have a long and arduous registration form, it’ll likely discourage your viewers or potential customers from completing the registration form.

Besides that, the whole registration process can be beaten down to one click of the “Register” button.

If you can, also consider making the registration easy for prospective customers by enabling a feature that lets them register via their social media accounts.

It will make more sense if they can connect to you through platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

With an easy opt-in process, it would be easy to connect with them and chat them up on the platforms they choose.

2) Get the Position of your Registration box Right

Don’t overlook this tip because it often determines the percentage of people that are willing to register to your email list. You’ll see many things on the internet.

But the best ways of placing your registration are outlined below:

At the top of the page. This way, visitors can easily view without scrolling down the page.
At the top right sidebar. This position is ideal for visitors to make registration when you have a sidebar placed at the top right corner.
At the end of your articles. By placing the registration box at the bottom of your articles, viewers who are highly pleased with your write-ups and other content will probably also register to your email list.
At the footer. Not a bad location especially for people who own online stores and websites that have no blog posts but still need people to register to their email list. As one of the best places to place your registration box, it would get you a high rate of email sign-ups.
At the top of the homepage. Many brands use this space. Also, many common websites and pushers who want to get more email subscribers position theirs here. Placing the sign-up option at the top of the homepage will lead to more sign-ups at a fast rate.

3) Use a Lead Magnet

The use of Lead magnets is another way to go. They are bonus content you get behind an email opt-in form to encourage more signup for your business.

First, you must make sure that you give reasons why your readers or visitors should provide their email addresses.

This will clearly show the profits in the registration process.

Not many people are comfortable sharing their email addresses with you. To get them to do so, you might want to offer them some incentives.

For example, you can try out stuff like free coupons, gift items, or discounts on their next purchase from your store to gain their trust. These work well as lead magnets.

4) Let your Messages have a Personal

There’s nothing quite like adding a personal ring to your messages.

Try to make your messages personal by taking the time and effort to customize each message that goes out of your mail.

To start, inform users who are going through the registration process about the activities happening at each stage. Go ahead to interact with each of them via email.

If possible, make sure you use their first names to further establish a strong bond and relationship with them.

You could always start with informing users undergoing the registration process about what is happening at each phase.

Use Real Names in the Sender Field

We know that getting an email from an actual person feels more friendly than one from a business brand.

As such, we’d advise you to use an employee’s name in the sender field, rather than your brand name.

Many bloggers and solo consultants often have their names double up as their brand name. However, large retail and B2B brands can use this strategy. While you’re not quite there yet, it’s important you adopt it, too.

There are some email service providers that make it easy to edit the sender’s field.

You can always use the service that suits your customer’s preferences.

5) Take Advantage of Social Media

Social media is a whole bee world on its own. Yet, it’s also part of the internet. As such, there are numerous ways of expanding your email list other than through your website.

One of such ways is through optimizing your use of social media for email marketing.

From a host of platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and more, you can make a choice of what works for you, and gets more out of your email list.

It’s not wise to hesitate when you want to ask your visitors to join your email list via the above-mentioned platforms.

You can also go ahead to mention valid reasons why they should join your email list. That way, things are a lot easier.

For example, you can let them know they’ll be the first to hear about your new products and services.

6) Send Helpful tips and Information

The main reason why businesses engage in email marketing is to get new customers to their business and not to gain more visitors to their site.

It’s best you also have this thought always at the back of your mind when starting an email marketing campaign to boost sales.

Let your emails be tailored around what you offer.

For example, if you sell different types of clothing and accessories, it doesn’t make sense to run campaigns based on kitchenware. In such an industry, your marketing operation should be centered on fashion-related content.

Information about the current trends in fashion and general clothing design should form the basis of your content.

You’ll also point out that your visitors can visit your online store or website to make purchases.

7) Monitor Results and take Counteractive Measures where Necessary

No matter the type of small business you run, popular or not, it is important to keep in mind that you should continually monitor the results of your email marketing at various intervals.

What are the errors you’re making? What is your team taking for granted? Always keep an eye on errors that you have made along the marketing campaign.

Also, check if such mistakes cost you the loss of customers or subscribers.

Here are some of the results you should closely monitor:

Number of subscribers
Email open rates
The unsubscribe rate
Customer conversion rate

The results here will help you figure out what you’re doing wrong, and how to address the issues.

8) Create a Stunning Subject line

Even a small business has the wherewithal to create stunning and catchy subject lines. This is the most important part of the email.

It happens in many circumstances that the subject line of your email has an impact its open rate.

It takes some work

To build an interesting and engaging subject line is not a walk in the park.

Sometimes, you’d be wise to go for the A/B Testing method after developing a good number of ideas on subject line texts.

In line with that, try to generate your subject lines in a unique way that makes the recipient think about their own loss by not opening an email.

9) Segment the Email list

You’ve probably heard about it. Segmenting your email list when it starts growing is a given.

What you have is a different purpose and unique reasons for having some people you’ve chosen to send emails to.

As such, it makes no sense to have everything grouped together.

For example, if you have customers that are on different age groups, you can’t have the same messages sent to them.

The email you send to an 80-year-old man can’t be the same for an 18-year-old teen.

As a result, it becomes necessary to segment the list by age and what’s relative to their generations.

10) Be Consistent with your Editorial Calendar

Time is always of the essence. In order to maintain a great email marketing campaign, schedule your calendar for sending the newsletters or event deals at the appropriate time to the subscriber’s mail list.

Include the time of creating and designing the email template used in advance for all the events.

If you don’t, you are likely to forget, and your subscribers are even more likely to forget about your brand when they don’t get your emails from time to time

11) Design new Email Templates

You have the world at your feet with email marketing. That means you can create appealing email templates by adding your business logo to them.

Make a great look and feel of these templates and spread your brand name on every part of your customer list.

While you can create new stuff, you can still stay consistent in sending these email templates so that your readers become more familiar with your methods and site from the beginning.

Furthermore, about 41% of the email open rate occurs on a mobile device.

That means you should test and tweak your mail template design for newsletters, promotional, or festive invitations to fit mobile.

If you run a campaign, check the mobile-friendliness quality of these templates. Otherwise, you may get a fall in your email campaigns right from the get-go.

12) Make sure your Emails look Clean and Crisp

While this may sound obvious, you’d be surprised how many people send emails that look like amateur websites from another decade

If someone goes out of the way to open your mail because of an engaging heading, you want to keep their interest.

To get a clean and crisp email, check for the following:

Use short paragraphs with keywords and phrases that are relevant to your readers. In particular, make sure the keywords and phrases stand out.
Insert bullet points at various intervals. Bullet points help people to understand your content at a glance while taking the essential points.
Use pictures sparingly. Sure, images are good, but they should be used to illustrate your message rather than replace your content. Moreover, some email providers block images or have them sent to the spam folder.

13) Make it easy to Unsubscribe

Hey! Hold on! Did you just read right? Sure you did. You want more subscribers and not the other way around.

Yet, you’re not cutting off the “conversation” by giving clients the chance to opt out.

What you’re doing is making it easy for them to remove their names from your list. If they can’t perform that action with ease, they’ll go ahead to flag your emails as spam.

That’s more problems you would have avoided in the first place.

14) Test, test, test

NEVER send anything without making double sure it’s working properly.

Double-check if you have to, that your messages look the way you want them to by sending them to employee accounts.

Make use of tools that help you stay within the good graces of your customers. You can view them On Outlook.com, Gmail, and Yahoo.

There also exists a variety of mobile devices that can be trialed before finalizing your drafts.

More Testing

Sure, you’ve done some normal tests including those related to your content. However, it goes beyond that.

You should experiment with different subject lines, calls to action, and the body of the text so that you know what’s more engaging to your audience.

Some tools also come with built-in A/B testing modules that allow you to compare how different versions of your emails perform.

But having access to these doesn’t mean you can’t run tests of your own.

What you can do is try sending your emails on different days and times of the week to see when you achieve the best response rate.

15) Overall, Provide Value

If you must have a great email marketing campaign, it ultimately comes down to giving your audience something that sticks with them for an extended period or at best, for life

It has to be something that keeps your business on their mind.

Whether that’s educational information about your industry, operational messages about your service, or marketing messages about the products and services you offer, make it count.

If what you send doesn’t count or at least, grab their attention, that email will always end up in the trash.

Email Marketing Tricks

16) Learn from your Competitors

There’s a saying that “no man is an island.” It rings ever true in the business world.

In line with that, learning from your competitors should never be an issue.

In fact, it would be a fun step to take, and at the same time, tactical to register on your competitor’s email list.

With you get registered to your their email list, you will able to see the following:

Their marketing strategy
the type of emails they send out to their subscribers,
the kind of products they promote,
how frequent their communication is with subscribers and many more.

Your main purpose in joining their list is not to copy your competitors’ marketing strategies but rather, to find better ones that would counteract that of your competitors.

That way, you’re always putting yourself a step ahead.

17) Have a Content Marketing Strategy in Place

Content marketing is all about strategies focused on making, publishing, and allotting content for a target audience.

You should never confuse content marketing with email marketing, and for that matter, social media marketing.

While they all feature as digital marketing, they’re not the same in any way. But the fact is that to succeed at email marketing campaigns, you need to have a good content marketing strategy. After all, you’ll be borrowing a leaf from how they work.

The content marketing strategy in question must be appealing and able to convince your recipients to do business with you.

18) Make use of an Email Marketing Service

By now you know that email marketing service further boosts your chances of getting the best results.

In fact, not sending out your emails via email vendors is a big mistake you should do your best to avoid.

Still, you should avoid services like Gmail or Outlook when you want to send bulk messages to your email list.

There are many risks involved in a simple process like sending emails.

As a result, it is recommended that you hire the services of a professional email marketing company that would guide you from making mistakes.

Benefits of using a vendor or email marketing service

It is free (mostly)
Many of them sport simple and customizable interfaces
The analytics are very detailed
Create an Announcement email
Send emails to targeted audiences
You can re-engage subscribers
You have the option to create an information email series
Make use of the best and well-designed templates

19) Make text and Images easy to read and view

As a small business, you should not expect your subscribers to spend an awful amount of time reading your emails or reading them regularly.

What to do? Set out to grab their attention within the first few lines of the email.

Sure, that means you’ll have to do some work on the titles and ads. Other than that, make the headline catchy at all times.

20) Don’t Forget Visuals

Email marketing does contain content and content contains words. However, your emails shouldn’t just be a bunch of words. Take the liberty to add graphics, pictures, and even embed a video!

Videos may be unnecessary, though, especially when you get other visuals right.

Whether you like it or not, your audience love aesthetics. As such, make the emails more worth reading especially on mobile devices.

21) Use your list to Boost Sales

You could also learn the various marketing strategies from the best and most successful online stores out there.

Online stores like Amazon leave everyone else feeling left behind. What you can do is study them to discover how and why they are so successful.

For example, when you view one or more products, some similar suggestions often pop up on their website and via emails.

Also, when you buy a product from Amazon, you’ll get an email describing ideas of similar products that could be beneficial to you.

You can do it too.

You may not have the resources to pull this off. However, the best thing you can do is have more knowledge of your subscribers and customers. You can do that when you learn to study your email list.

22) Be clear about what your Subscribers Should Expect

What can they possibly get from you? You should inform your subscribers beforehand what type of information or content they can constantly expect from you.

It could be informational articles, infographics, coupons, sales pitches, offers, new releases, and more.

In the process of encouraging subscribers to opt-in your list, do your best not to make promises. Also, be careful with set expectations you can not resolve.

23) Avoid Generic Templates

When it comes to email marketing, there’s nothing wrong with using a template as a starting point. But, everyone has probably come across the same plain text email templates, repeatedly.

It’s then obvious that if you’ve seen something similar sent before, it’s best to go back to the drawing board, and come up with something unique and fresh.

It can also be a hybrid of the generic template. But it should never be the same generic template your customers have also seen before.

24) Make copy Skimmable

If there an open secret about email marketing, it’s that dense paragraphs of text typically perform poorly.

As such, you should keep sentences brief, and cut down paragraphs to a sentence or two (three at the max).

That way, people find it skimmable without feeling bored to death, or moving it quickly to the spam or trash folder.

25) Experiment with Emojis

Emojis do more than just provide fun and illustrations. They can actually help small businesses improve opens on emails.

In fact, according to Kim Courvoisier (formerly from Campaign Monitor), “brands that make use of emojis have seen a 56% increase in their unique open rates.”

That’s impressive and the best part is that you too can experiment with emojis. They’re not difficult to include in your content.

26) Use Power Words

Subject lines should spur leaders into taking action. So, include power words that motivate audiences to open, click, read, and purchase. Words like “click to share” are power words.

27) Experiment With Numbers and Stats

According to a study, including a number like an interesting stat or percentage can play a huge role in influencing a modest increase in clicks and replies.

Numbers are concrete and a subject line that makes vague promises are less compelling than those that state specific claims or benefits readers can identify with.

For example, “Save 25%” is more useful than “Save Money” money in many contexts.

If you have facts or interesting numbers to share, consider using them in your email marketing campaign.

28) Never use All-caps for Emails

What’s that about anyway? Learn to use capital letters sparingly.

If you want to highlight an important word or phrase, this would be the time to utilize caps.

The only other way capital letters are acceptable is when you want to e-shout at somebody for a sentence or two.

Other than that, it’s not polite to use them.

Conclusion

Every email you construct should have a definitive purpose that can attract your customers to your website, or make them patronize your business.

Design your email templates in a way that increases a host of functions including website traffic, sales rate, and more social engagement.

These email marketing tips represent the best ways to keep your customers informed and engaged on your happenings about your business.