Why should you invest in your small business email marketing? Well, businesses worldwide earned $10 billion in revenue from email marketing in 2023. But tapping into this goldmine would require expert email hacks for a small business. To stand out from the noise in crowded inboxes, your emails must captivate your recipients and speak to them personally.
But crafting captivating and engaging emails is not easy. Sending consistently engaging emails with high open and click rates is also quite difficult. That’s where email hacks can help. From personalization to A/B testing, here are five email hacks to help you get better results from your email marketing campaigns.
5 Effective Email Hacks for a Small Business
Here are 5 email hacks I’ve put together to help your small business thrive in its email marketing efforts.
1. Create Personalized Emails with Audience Segmentation
Effective audience segmentation is the foundation of successful email marketing campaigns. Making it an ideal pick for this list of email hacks for a small business to implement.
Use segmentation to divide your audience into groups based on distinctive attributes. This makes delivering personalized emails easier. Attributes like demographics, behavior, or preferences are quite distinctive. Such attributes allow you to tailor your messages to resonate with each segment. It ensures that your emails are relevant and more likely to catch the attention of specific people.
For effective segmentation, you need customer data, especially if you want to craft an email marketing strategy that converts. You use personalized data for precise segmentation, such as purchase history, geographic location, engagement patterns, etc. For example, an e-commerce store can segment customers based on past purchases. They use information on purchase history to craft emails with product recommendations or exclusive discount offers. This method increases the likelihood of sales conversion.
Here are examples of how your small business can use segmentation to craft personalized emails:
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Demographic Segmentation
Segmentation criterion: Age Groups
Example: Venmo sent emails targeting teenagers within the age group 13-17 years. The email promotes a specialized product named “Venmo Teen Debit Card”.
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Behavioral Segmentation
Segmentation criterion: Website Activity
Example: An e-commerce fashion brand, Backcountry, sends targeted emails to customers who frequently browse a specific category. They use limited-time discount offers to encourage conversions.
Here, Backcountry sends an email with a special deal on hoodies and fleece to customers who frequently browse that category.
Personalization goes beyond addressing recipients by their first names. Knowing your recipients’ interests and preferences is essential for a more personalized email outreach campaign.
By employing these segmentation strategies, you can deliver highly personalized content that resonates with the specific characteristics, preferences, and behaviors of distinct audience groups.
2. Automate Your Email Campaigns
Email automation is a game-changer for small businesses. It can make the email marketing process more efficient and precise. By automating repetitive tasks, you can make more time to create meaningful content and foster customer relationships. You can use free content templates such as Attrock to create engaging email content to send your audience.
Other benefits of email automation include consistent communication and the ability to send targeted emails based on customer behavior. With preset triggers, email marketing tools send automated emails to customers based on their interactions on your website. This drives engagement and conversions. But you’ll need a good email marketing and automation tool like Smaily to create high-converting automated email sequences.
Here is an example of how you may use email automation campaigns for your small business.
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Abandoned Cart Recovery for E-commerce
Automation: Triggers an email when a customer adds items to the cart but doesn’t complete the purchase.
Example: An online retailer sends automated emails reminding customers about their abandoned carts. They may include personalized product recommendations, limited-time discounts, or limited stock information to encourage a final purchase.
Look at how this email reminds a user of their abandoned cart and encourages them to complete the purchase.
Combine your email with AI chatbots to create a personalized communication strategy for your email campaigns. The time-saving benefits of this strategy make it one of the top email hacks for a small business owner.
3. Use A/B Testing to Fine-Tune Emails
A/B testing compares two versions of an element in an email to determine which performs better. You can do an A/B test on elements such as subject lines, calls-to-action (CTAs), image content, etc. You may also call these elements variables. This method allows you to make informed decisions based on actual subscriber responses to the different test scenarios. A/B testing is one of the top email hacks for a small business owner looking to make data-driven decisions.
You can use A/B testing to optimize your email marketing campaign when you use the right test variables. Test results will equip you with the insights needed to fine-tune your email content. Let’s look at some variables you can test.
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Subject Lines
A/B Test: Sending two variations of an email with different subject lines.
Example: Testing between a straightforward subject line and a more catchy one to determine which one gets you higher open rates.
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CTA
A/B Test: Experiment with different versions of a call to action.
Example: A sales email call-to-action must have very compelling words. If the wording isn’t compelling enough, you cannot convince the recipient to make a purchase.
You may test whether a CTA that emphasizes urgency performs better than one highlighting benefits. Take a look at an email with a CTA that emphasizes a cost-saving benefit with “Save Now”.
This “Last Chance” CTA in the example below evokes a sense of urgency:
4. Use Email Marketing Metrics to Measure and Improve Performance
Fourth on this list of effective email hacks for a small business is using email marketing metrics to track performance. These metrics are important for evaluating the success of your email marketing efforts.
As a small business owner with limited resources, you want to be smart with your money. You shouldn’t keep putting resources into email marketing campaigns that underperform or aren’t working. Email marketing metrics tell you how well your email marketing campaigns perform. You can then take necessary action to ensure your campaigns align with your goals.
Let’s discuss some of the key metrics you should track:
- Open Rate: It shows the percentage of recipients who opened your email. If your open rate is low, tweak your subject lines and content to spark curiosity.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): It measures the percentage of recipients who clicked on links within your email. For a low CTR, optimize your CTAs, content, and layout to boost interaction.
- Conversion Rate: It shows the percentage of recipients who completed the desired action, such as making a purchase. You can optimize CTAs and add incentives to drive more conversions.
- Bounce Rate: This indicates the percentage of emails that were not delivered successfully. If this is high, clean your email list to remove inactive or incorrect addresses to improve deliverability.
- Unsubscribe Rate: This shows the percentage of subscribers who opted out. Low unsubscribe rates are ideal, but if it’s high, you should reduce your email frequency to avoid spamming your subscribers’ inboxes.
These metrics provide insights into the effectiveness of your email marketing. Acting on the insights provided will help you refine your strategies and optimize your campaign performance.
5. Use Interactive Elements to Drive Engagement
Using interactive elements turns email communications from a one-way street to exciting conversations between two parties. You can effectively use interactive elements to increase user engagement. Interactive elements include polls in email marketing, surveys, quizzes, etc. Let’s look at a couple of examples of how you can use interactive elements in your emails.
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Quizzes
Example: An educational tourism platform, Road Scholar, sent an email featuring an American history quiz. Subscribers participate and test their knowledge with a series of fun questions.
Impact: This quiz entertains and educates the reader. It also helps Road Scholar gain valuable insights into subscribers’ interests.
These insights help with future content personalization and targeted recommendations. Interestingly, AI-powered quiz builder tools can help you create such quizzes quickly and efficiently.
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Surveys
Example: Airbnb sends this email with an embedded survey link to learn about customer experience:
Impact: This survey collects valuable data needed to improve customer experience. It also gets customers more involved and strengthens customer relationships with your business.
How does this work? By sending a survey, Airbnb shows a commitment to understanding and meeting the needs of its users. This approach enhances customer satisfaction and builds a sense of partnership between the company and its users. This strategy is an excellent approach to driving user engagement. Putting it in the fifth spot on this list of email hacks for a small business that values user feedback.
Small Business Email Marketing: Final Thoughts
Now the ball is in your court, it is time to grab this opportunity. Use these cutting-edge email hacks to drive conversions and engagement for your small business. Use interactive content to captivate your audience and email automation to save time and improve efficiency. Also, don’t forget to grab insights from email marketing metrics to help you improve your email marketing strategy.
About the Author
Reena Aggarwal is the Director of Operations and Sales at Attrock, a result-driven digital marketing company. With 10+ years of sales and operations experience in the field of e-commerce and digital marketing, she is quite an industry expert. She is a people person and considers human resources as the most valuable asset of a company. In her free time, you would find her spending quality time with her brilliant, almost teenage daughter and watching her grow in this digital, fast-paced era.
You can write to Reena’s here: reenaa@attrock.com, and check out her LinkedIn and X (Twitter) accounts.