Revamping Email Marketing Strategies to Allow Small Businesses to Stand Out In a World Filled with Emails

In a world that essentially turned completely virtual in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a larger number of consumers found the desire to engage more with businesses that they were subscribed to. By March 25th, almost every industry saw an increase in engagement during the early stages of the pandemic compared to the year prior. The demand for email marketing continues to grow, so it is just as important for small businesses to find different strategies to implement into their emails in order to catch the eyes of their consumers.

Why Email Marketing?

Many people believe that email marketing is a platform of the past and that social media has completely taken over the marketing industry. Even though external threats like social media appear, email marketing has been able to resist and continue to be a key channel for communication. 

There are more online users that use email than social media. 92% of adults who are online use email while only 79% of internet users have a social media profile. In terms of whether or not email marketing is still an effective strategy, 81% of retail professionals say email marketing is successful in acquiring new consumers, while only 51% think social media is a successful strategy in doing the same. Especially for smaller businesses, the increase in engagement in email marketing saw the most dramatic change. 

Email marketing is not going anywhere, so it is important that businesses continue to focus on ensuring their email marketing efforts are at a comfortable level.

While it is widely understood that email marketing is mainly used for products or services, email marketing can be used for much more than just that. Email marketing can be utilized to develop and strengthen the relationships with current consumers while also strategically reaching out to new consumers.

For small businesses in particular, email marketing provides many benefits.These benefits include garnering a large ROI, improving customer retention, learning likes and dislikes of customers, staying prevalent in the minds of the customers, and many more. Email marketing will continue to be an essential platform of communication for all businesses large and small.

Know When to Use Email Marketing

Knowing when to use email marketing is just as important as applying email marketing in general. It is key that businesses use email marketing to its full potential and use it in the most effective way. Some of these uses include:

• Build relationships with new and existing customers using a personalized engagement strategy

• Promote content by sharing short blogs or other purposeful assets that potential consumers would be interested in

• Market products by continuing to promote services and products and displaying the best features of them

• Boost brand awareness through consistent interaction in order to ensure your brand stays at the top of the consumer’s minds

How to Stand Out

Since the use of emails is continuing to grow every year, it will inevitably become harder for small businesses to make their emails stand out. Here are some strategies to use in order to attempt to stand out from the large surge of emails that consumers receive on a daily basis.

Using an engaging subject line is essential since this is the first item that people will read in an email. It is also the main feature that appears in the customer’s inbox, so it is very important that the subject line stands out. Keep subject lines short, but clear enough that it previews what the email is about. Adding questions that provoke the customer to think and become more interested is another way of making the subject line more intriguing. Emojis could also be a useful feature to add since they add more expression and are easy to pick out amongst words.

Keep the length of the email short and concise. If emails are too long, most readers will lose interest in the email and move on to the next one. Emails with 75 to 100 words have the highest response rate of 51%. That is why it is important to keep your email short and easy to read. Make headers, paragraphs, and bullet points in order to allow for the reader to pick out the most important parts of the email quickly. In addition, put the most important information of the email in the beginning portions of the email.

Make emails easily accessible on a mobile device since 41.9% of emails were opened by mobile users in the first quarter of 2019. In order to ensure that emails are mobile-friendly, make sure to draft your email in a one column manner. Test the emails by sending a draft to a personal device to ensure that everything looks perfect. 

Adding interactive content can make your email more intriguing to the reader and keep them interested. Using GIFS, animations, surveys, quizzes, polls, and more will keep the reader on the email longer than a normal email since they will be interacting with the content. 88% of marketers say that implementing interactive content into emails allows them to differentiate themselves from competition.

To go further with interactive content, consider adding short and appealing videos. Emails with videos bring in a 280% higher return than emails without videos. Keep the videos short, and switch up the videos in different emails so that each video brings in something new and fresh.

Key Takeaways

• Even with the rise of social media, the use of emails will never go away. Therefore, it is important that businesses maintain their email marketing to keep old customers while garnering new customers 

• In order to get the most out of emails, businesses must utilize email marketing for as much as they can and stay consistent. Consistent emails will lead to consistent customers.

• With the number of emails being sent and received increasing by the year, it is crucial that businesses are able to stand out from the flood of emails in every customer’s inbox.

As a social impact initiative, Rem and Company also offers free consulting services and resources to small businesses and nonprofits impacted by COVID-19. Our pro-bono consulting teams provide small businesses with the opportunity to identify and prioritize issues facing their business, propose innovative strategies, and facilitate execution. If you are a small business or nonprofit in need of assistance, learn more about how we can help.