Constant Contact: Tips To Take Your SMB Email Marketing To The Next Level

Email marketing can take your business to greater heights. Not only does it offer stellar returns, but your customers like it as well. It’s true that most people prefer emails over paper mail and push messages etc. Emails are more credible and personal as well. 

The good news is that there is no lack of tips and suggestions for doing email marketing right.

From adding the right kind of content to your emails to sending them out at the right time, these best practices can provide you with the guidance needed to build effective email marketing strategies for your small business.

We’ve curated some of the best tips that can be the perfect foundation to build your business on. Use them as advice to figure out what works best for your business and target audience. In fact, use them in tandem with a robust email marketing platform such as Constant Contact to enhance your overall email marketing efforts.

Here are some techniques to help you become a more competent marketer and take your email marketing to the next level.

Connect With Your Subscribers

Implement a plan to get to know your subscribers more closely. Make sure you find out what they are interested in, who they are, and how you can keep them coming back to you for more.

Once you understand your subscribers, you’ll have to differentiate them into categories and develop unique content to communicate with each group individually. While some recipients on your email list may be the most valuable customers, others might be new to your company and may demand more lead nurturing.

So instead of “blasting” the entire contact list with similar emails, take some time to correctly figure out how you can deliver a more tailored experience to each of your recipients. With Constant Contact, you can personalize each subscriber’s experiences, providing them value while ensuring they relate to the content.

Consider building separate email lists to target different contact types more effectively. Here are some instances of how some marketers divide their list:

• A cosmetics boutique may email one coupon to clients who purchase makeup and a separate one to those who buy their skin-care products
• A nursery can email local homeowners, telling them about the new spring plantings, whereas their commercial customers get info on bulk mulch availability
• A financial services company can email tax prep clients an IRS filing reminder and their financial planning clients about rebalancing their portfolios

Set Up An Automated Welcome Series Email

This is one of the easiest yet most effective email marketing techniques you can implement with Constant Contact. It lets you connect with customers when they are most eager and motivated to engage with you.

We suggest initially setting up a two-part email welcome series.

The primary welcome email should go out as soon as someone signs up and welcome them to your team or as a customer or subscriber (whatever may be the case).

Make sure you follow through with the promises you made to get them to sign up for your subscriber’s list, e.g., give them the discount code or downloadable incentives they signed up for. Perhaps include a brief description of your business, such as an elevator speech. 

The second email in the series should request your new contacts to interact and get in touch with you in other ways. Tell them about the different social media platforms you use and ask them to follow you for regular updates.

Constant Contact is an all-inclusive email marketing tool that allows you to send email sequences to your new and existing customers with precision.

Focus On Personalization 

Today, the marketing landscape demands to deliver emails that increase brand awareness and drive conversions successfully. And the only way to do this right is to personalize your emails.

Address the email recipients by their first name and use insights from web analytics or behavior provided by Constant Contact to tailor the content in the email. It would be best to incorporate personalization features (such as first names) in the email subject line, as it helps boost open rates exponentially.

Here are some ways to leverage behaviors and web insights to cluster and customize your email communications to ensure that your customers feel heard and that you want to connect with them on a personal level.

• Demographics. One of the effective ways marketers can group their subscribers and send out relevant emails is by leveraging the demographic data — such as gender, age, company position, income level, etc. — to gauge a contact’s interests and needs. For instance, if you host an event and know a specific segment of your target market lives in the same city, you can send them a separate email. Then, collect the behavioral and demographic information through Constant Contact on your website and make the most of it
• Email Engagement. Another excellent way to segment your list is email engagement — and it can have a significant impact on the results of your email campaigns

With Constant Contact, you can develop a re-engagement email campaign that provides your inactive users with a discount or a coupon to re-engage them. Also, set up VIP access to your business’s products for customers who consistently interact with emails. 

And Constant Contact is a robust email marketing platform that helps you build lists based on the recipient’s email marketing activity such as click date, last email open date, etc.  

Automate Your Email Campaigns

Getting quality leads that convert to prospects should be the primary goal of email marketing programs. Automation enables you to move leads down the funnel and into several stages of the purchasing experience in a scalable manner. 

Automated emails allow you to deliver consistent brand messaging at the appropriate time for every individual. Effective automated email campaigns help you move leads from the awareness stage to the consideration stage to the decision stage.  

Some automated email workflows that work efficiently for B2C and B2B companies include: 

• Abandon Cart Workflows: Used in B2C marketing, these are good to remind clients they left items in their cart, providing an incentive to buy
• Welcome Workflow: You can leverage the top-of-funnel workflows to bring new leads into the funnel that might not be searching for particular services or products. These are often triggered by sign-up forms on the homepage or highly trafficked webpage
• Post-Purchase Workflows: Builds loyal customers and brand awareness through constant engagement once users have purchased

Amid these highly operational workflows, there are others such as product-specific, post-event, industry-specific workflows that allow for a solid email marketing program. 

Analyze Your Results For Better Insights

If you are not evaluating your email marketing results, how can you hope to enhance the performance of your marketing campaigns?

Constant Contact helps you send out emails and brings in data about the effectiveness of your campaign. The email marketing reports can provide insights into precisely how many subscribers are opening your emails, sharing your content, and clicking your links. 

They will also give you information into the different information types your target audience is most interested in and find relevant, providing a benchmark to refine upon the times you hit send.

Whether you are trying to get to know more about your email subscribers, increase sales, and provide valuable information —email reports can help considerably.

Wrapping Up

Although social media platforms connect with your followers and extend to a broader audience base, email marketing lets you get in touch with your customers in a more personalized and meaningful way. 

These personal connections can go a long way in getting your subscribers to sit up and take notice — and that’s the key to your success as a small business owner.

Using the techniques mentioned above can effectively help you take your email marketing to the next level. Additionally, Constant Contact can boost the open and click-through rates and enhance the overall efforts with precision.