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The Small Business Guide to Email Marketing 32 ShopKeep Masters Series
Contents
5 Reasons Small Business Owners Need to Start Email Marketing 5
Find the Right Email Marketing Tool For Your Business 13
Creating Your Emails 19
Measuring the Results and Adapting Your Plans 29
If Nothing Else, Do This... (The Cheater's Guide to Email Marketing) 33
About the Author:Hadley Deming, Email Marketing Specialist
Hadley Deming is a designated email marketing expert responsible for all email marketing initiatives including strategy, development, analysis, and execution. Hadley works hard to increase email engagement while contributing to acquisition and retention through email marketing. Her experience in growing email programs was the inspiration forthis guide.
The Small Business Guide to Email Marketing 54 ShopKeep Masters Series
5 Reasons Small Business Owners
Need to Start Email Marketing
S o you’re probably wondering why email marketing is so important, right?
Well, a really great email marketing program can help establish your brand, increase repeat business, drive revenue, and foster customer loyalty. Sound good? Here’s how it works:
At its core, a brand is a promise. It’s a pledge to your customers that your store is in some way unique and that you will deliver this distinctive offering consistently. Email marketing can play a huge role in conveying this distinctive ‘brand promise’ to your customers. If you sell the freshest fish in the neighborhood, send out an email letting people know how you source your produce. If you have the latest Parisian fashions, tell your customers about your special French ‘buying’ trip where you found the supplier.
1 It Builds Your Brand
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Small business owners often tell me that they don’t worry too much about any kind of marketing because they rely on having good ‘word of mouth’. If you have this, and it is driving consistent referrals, you are onto a winner. Word of mouth is really the ‘holy grail’ of marketing – a friend recommends a friend who recommends another friend and your customer base just grows and grows, at no cost to you.
The simple truth, however, is that email marketing makes this kind of growth more likely. It puts you at the top of people’s minds more regularly and thereby increases word of mouth. Customers are more likely to tell their friends about your business if it is fresh in their memory. As the expression goes: ‘top of mind is tip of tongue’. And in addition to directly spreading the word, customers are more likely to review you online if they are prompted while online. Of great email campaigns, are awesome Yelp profiles made.
2 It Grows Word of Mouth
It’s amazing how something as simple as a weekly email can drive repeat business. If you put yourself in front of people, they will think about you. And if they are thinking about you, they will be more likely to drop in the next time they are out and about. Product-specific emails are often best in this regard as you can give people a real, concrete reason to come on by (or order something online). Information about new products or special offers on your products (e.g. free shipping on all orders) work especially well for this purpose.
3 It Drives Repeat Business
One of the things I love about email marketing is the ability to push a specific product or product range and measure the impact that this has had on sales. In every retail business, there is a core product range of top selling, high-margin items that really drive the revenue of the store. Email provides a fantastic opportunity to throw a spotlight on these items and thereby drive sales. Best of all, the impact is measurable as you can easily track month over month sales of these items.
For example, you may be a grocery store overstocked on the snack aisle. You could consider sending out a ‘Movie Night Promotion’ offering 20% off on popcorn and ice cream and then track the results. In fact, if you collect emails at the point of sale you could even track the specific customers who bought the product.
4 It's Measurable
If you aren’t building out your email list and engaging your customers regularly, you are missing out on an enormous opportunity to create a relationship with your customers that extends beyond the walls of your store.
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Compared to its pre-digital equivalent, the direct mail campaign, emails are incredibly cost effective for small businesses. In fact, for small businesses who are starting out with small email lists (~2,000 subscribers), there are even online services that will provide sophisticated email management tools completely for free.
These services like MailChimp and Constant Contact make it very quick and easy to put together emails without requiring any ‘specialist’ skills. In fact, their intuitive, drag and drop interfaces are probably much easier to use than most software that small business owners use regularly.
5 It is Surprisingly Affordable& Easy to Use
In every retail business, there is a core product range of top selling, high-margin items that really drive the revenue of the store. Email provides a fantastic opportunity to throw a spotlight on these items and thereby drive sales.
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Picture the scene. Business is good and customers are really starting to love what you have to offer. You are building out a steady stream of regulars and you are making money. Then one day your landlord comes in and tells you he can’t renew the lease on your coffee shop; Starbucks is offering to pay double the rent.
Note: This isn’t a hypothetical. It actually happened to a ShopKeep merchant in NYC.
How can you effectively communicate what’s happening to your customers? How can you keep them informed about when you’ll be moving and where you’ll be moving to?
Or imagine a scenario when negative press about your store starts to spread. Maybe an unfounded rumor starts that you have an unclean kitchen, or an unfair hiring policy. Having a line of communication that reaches beyond your store is crucially important when things go wrong!
If you’d like to learn more about the value of collecting emails from your customers, check out our case study on the subject.
BONUS REASON:It’s The Ultimate Insurance Policy
12 ShopKeep Masters Series
Find the Right Email Marketing
Tool For Your Business
Before you begin sending emails, let’s cover the basics. It is important to think about the bigger picture in order to
find the right service for you and your business. What do you want to get out of your email marketing? Who do you want send emails to? How often do you want to communicate? Only once you’ve answered these questions can we begin to pick the ideal service provider that can get you to your goals.
Keeping your recipients and overall message in mind, look into the variety of email marketing providers that are made for small businesses like yours. As with most small business services, email marketing tools are available at different price points, but no matter which one you choose, an effective email marketing strategy will make sure that you get a healthy return on your investment.
Email marketing works best if you commit to a certain level of consistency, so take the time to find the solution you can see yourself actually using, week-in, week-out.
The Small Business Guide to Email Marketing 13
The Small Business Guide to Email Marketing 1514 ShopKeep Masters Series
The Basic Requirements of an Email Marketing Tool
Builds Relationships Quick & Easy
Measurable Results Affordable
Expands Your Reach
Finding an email marketing service that works well for your business and your experience level is essential. The tool you choose should be easy to use but not lacking in reporting or features. Maybe the crucial thing to look for is how quickly and easily you can create good-looking, image-rich emails. Ideally, you’ll want a provider that gives you a wide range of templates to work from - as designing HTML emails from scratch can be time-consuming and hard to achieve if you don’t have the relevant technical skills.
All this being said, every email service provider will offer slightly different functionality, but at a minimum, whichever one you choose should offer the following features: customer tracking and segmentation, pre-designed email templates, image hosting, A/B testing, mobile optimization, social sharing, web signup forms, and customer support.
The major email marketing providers that we will be looking at in this guide all offer this functionality and more. They are: Benchmark, Constant Contact, Emma, GetResponse, iContact, and MailChimp.
Composition Tools
- Pre-made templates
- Customization capability
- WYSIWYG editor
- Drafts
Scheduled Sending
- Set your completed message to send at a specified time for maximum impact
List Management
- Integration with your website and/or social media page
- Customer opt-in/out capability
- Import/export
- Customer profile
- Separate lists
Advanced Analytics
- Bounces will help you trim your list of invalid emails
- See who opens which message and when
- See where they’re clicking
- Get insights on best send times
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MailchimpVaries from Free to$425+ per month
Constant ContactVaries from $20 to $395 per month
BenchmarkVaries from $9.95 to $399 per month
iContactVaries from $10 to $109 per month
GetResponseVaries from $15 to $450 per month
EmmaStarts at $45per month
3dcart
Bigcom
merc
e
Cart66
CoreCom
merc
e
Open Cart
Presta
shop
Shopify
ShopSite
Whirl
wind
X-Cart
Zen Cart
The essential differences between these major providers are e-commerce integrations and pricing. If your business does a lot of e-commerce, or you expect it to in the near future, you should consider choosing an email service provider that integrates with your e-commerce provider. Establish your projected database growth for the next few years. Email service providers tend to charge based on the number of contacts you have in the system, and some additionally monitor the number of emails you can send in any given time period. Take a look at that to get a better sense of what your monthly cost will be. To the right is a chart that outlines the top email marketing providers, their pricing and the e-commerce integrations they offer.
It’s important to test out the different email marketing services. Many offer a free trial so you can get a senseof the back-end of the system. This might seem like a waste of time but sometimes you have to operate with morespeed and less haste. Email marketing works best if you commit to a certain level of consistency, so take the time to find the solution you can see yourself actually using, week-in, week-out.
E-Commerce Integration withMajor Email Providers
All prices based on number of contacts.
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A great way to introduce your business to new customers is to create an experience that aligns with your brand.
If you are a restaurant you can use a slow night or night that you are closed to create a cooking experience with your guests. You can create a few stations in your kitchen and allow people to make one of your signature meals. If you do these events correctly you can reward your top customers, creating awesome viral buzz that will lead to a lot of raving fans. If you are a coffee shop and your slow time is during the evening maybe you can host an open mic night or bring in a local musical act with unique desserts and coffee.
Or you could have your top barista teach people how to make your special latte.
Creating Your Emails
Once you’ve chosen your provider, your next tasks are to understand the framework for a good marketing email,
define what you’re trying to achieve, and establish what content you’re going to need.
Your first job is to build a mini-plan for each email, detailing who you’re sending to, what you want to say, and what your overall objective is. Each email should have a specific objective and you should be able to measure the success of each email in a numeric manner. For example, you might create an email targeted at bringing back old customers and getting them to buy more red wine. In that case, your specific measurable goal could be selling 50 extra bottles of red wine the week of the email.
Once you have considered the relevant information, you can create a chart like the one on the next page and fill in the corresponding columns for your own email campaign.
1 Make a Plan
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The Recipient
First, think of who will be receiving your emails and what they want to see from you. Perhaps the recipients in this case is a ‘custom’ mailing list of your top 100 customers and you plan on sending them something special. This special email could contain a discount, or a simple, ‘Thanks for being the best’. Keeping the recipient of the email in mind will help you tailor the body text you use to communicate to your target audience.
The Goal
Your email should have a goal, something you are hoping to get out of it. Write down a short description. What are you trying to accomplish? This may be anything from making them aware of a new brand your store carries, to getting the recipient to come in and purchase an item at a discount. While your overall goal for all emails is to increase sales, make sure your goal is attainable and measurable.
The Call to Action
Next, establish your call to action. What will be the short, simple, driving force that will get people to your goal. If you want your customers to visit your new website, that should be clearly stated, and there should be an easy path for them to get there. The simpler, the better.
The Message
Finally, outline the message you will lead with to get the recipient to take action. Be sure to address why it is important for your customer to want to take action. Put yourself in their shoes, how will it benefit them?
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The chart you made outlining your recipient, goal, call to action, and message will help you develop your email. Now you can put it all together, backwards. Establish your call to action, the body text, and last, the subject line. While this approach may seem strange, it will help you stay in the readers mindset and give them exactly what they need to see, and then take action. You have already established your goal, now let’s figureout how the recipient will get there.
What is the call to action that will get them to your goal?
What is the body text that will convince them to respond to that call to action?
What subject line and preview textwill get them to open the email in thefirst place?
2 Write Your Email
There are many studies on open rates and it has been found that 6-10 words in the subject line gets the best open rate.
24 ShopKeep Masters Series24 ShopKeep Masters Series
A The Call to Action (CTA)Think slogan, not sentence. Your CTA should be concise, yet attention
grabbing. It should use action-oriented works, such as ‘take’, ‘get’, ‘ join’, ‘sign up’, etc. Design is as important as copy, so place the CTA where it clearly stands out - without the recipient needing to scroll down the page.
B The BodyThe first sentence of your body copy should continue the work of
the subject line - hook the reader in and get them excited to read more. You can use statistics, questions, factoids, promotions, and more to pique the reader’s interest. The rest of the copy is your chance to convey the bulk of your message, but again concision is paramount. Your core message should be quick, clear, and lead intuitively to your CTA.
C ImagesA great image in an email will pique the recipient’s attention, illustrate
the core message, but remain subtle enough not to distract from the CTA. Your email marketing service should make it easy to add images to your emails. Be sure to add some ‘alt’ text to your images - this is the text that will display in case your images do not load (which happens more than you might think). This is also why you should never put your CTA within an image. It might look pretty, but if it doesn’t load for 10% of your recipients, that’s a big lost opportunity.
B
C
A
E Your Subject LineA great subject line grabs the attention, alludes to the content to follow,
and, according to research, is between 6-10 words. Avoid words like ‘free’, as this will see you re-routed to the junk folder. Also, according to a MailChimp study you should avoid ‘reminder’, ‘percent off’, and ‘help’.
F
Win $10K to Make Your Big Idea a Reality ED
D Preview TextIn a standard email inbox the preview text that is displayed is simply
the first sentence that can fit, depending on the window size in which it is being displayed. With a marketing automation tool, you have the power to use this area to your advantage. Your preview text should serve as an extension of your subject line, and transition nicely to the body text.
F The Opt Out OptionIt is good etiquette to allow your recipients to ‘unsubscribe’. Most
email providers have this functionality built in as a standard requirement - and for a reason. If you send emails without this option, your recipients may flag your emails as spam. This will lessen the chances of your emails making it into your new subscribers’ inboxes. If you’re losing a lot of people to ‘unsubscribe’ you might want to revisit the content and frequency of your emails.
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Your email is almost ready to go. All that’s left to do it to test your email in different clients. You can use a service that can test your email for all types of inboxes or you can create an email address with different clients and test in each inbox manually.
If you are using a template provided by your email provider, it should already be optimized for deliverability, but it is always good to test.
3 Inbox Testing
There is no exact science to determine what day or time sending your email will give you the best results but there is definitely a wrong time of day to send. So it’s worth testing.
As you scale your efforts, you’ll want to send on a variety of days and times, measure the results, and go from there. A lot of this is of course common sense, so before sending, take a moment and put yourself in the recipients’ shoes. If you were the recipient, when would you want to be receiving the email? And when would you have enough time to take action?
Choose some times you think will work and get sending. Email marketing is a continual process of trial and error, so just keep on testing and you’ll find the times that work for you.
4 Sending at the Right Time
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A great way to introduce your business to new customers is to create an experience that aligns with your brand.
If you are a restaurant you can use a slow night or night that you are closed to create a cooking experience with your guests. You can create a few stations in your kitchen and allow people to make one of your signature meals. If you do these events correctly you can reward your top customers, creating awesome viral buzz that will lead to a lot of raving fans. If you are a coffee shop and your slow time is during the evening maybe you can host an open mic night or bring in a local musical act with unique desserts and coffee.
Or you could have your top barista teach people how to make your special latte.
Measuring the Results and
Adapting your Plans
There are standard analytics that your email marketing provider will report to you, but it may be helpful for
you to pull these numbers into a spreadsheet so you get a better sense of comparison moving forward. For most small business owners, the built-in analytics should really satisfy all your analytics needs, so make sure to choose a provider that makes it easy to identify your successes and failures.
As you begin to scale your efforts though, you may want to take the analytics into your own hands. The following is a quick guide to the numbers you should be tracking and how to build a spreadsheet to track this information.
With every email sent, it is very important to track these basic metrics so you can measure and learn from them. Before constructing your next email, look at the results and identify an opportunity for betterment. You know it’s in there, you just have to find it.
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Number of Emails Sent
Number of Emails Delivered
Number of Emails Opened
Number of Emails Clicked
The remaining numbers you can pull from your email marketing service provider. It’s best to look at these numbers about 24 hours after the email is sent.
I Number of Clicks on the Call to Action – Some people may click on other links, but not the call to action. To get an accurate understanding of your % engagement with your CTA, take a look at it separately.
J Delivery Rate – The number of emails sent divided by the number of emails delivered. This number should be 90+%. If it's not, you may be sending to bad email addresses, or your emails are being rejected from the email client.
K Open Rate – The number of opens divided by the number of emails delivered. This will give you a good idea of the success of your subject line. Always keep an eye on this and take note of the words you choose for your subject line. There may be some trigger words that work well with your audience. You don’t want to abuse them, but know what they are.
L Click Rate – Often called the "Click-to-Open Rate, this is the number of clicks divided by the number of emails opened. Of the audience that was intrigued enough to open your email, this is the percentage of people who identified with your message, and became engaged.
M CTA Click Rate – The number of CTA clicks divided by the number of emails opened. While this is similar to the click rate, this will give you a better reading of the audience that was identified with your message and became engaged with your call to action.
N Click Through Rate (CTR) – The number of clicks divided by the number of emails delivered. This takes a look at the percentage of people that you emailed, and how many of them became engaged.
Build a chart with the following header columns:
A Email – A short title for the email so you will know what it was and who it was for.
B Send Date – Just to keep it in the books so you avoid overcommunication with your customers.
C Send Day of the Week – As you begin to send more emails you will want to take note of what day of the week gives you the best open rates and click rates.
D Subject Line – You’ll begin to notice a trend with the language you use that serves you best.
L M NKJIHGFEDCBA
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1 Welcome Emails Rule!
If Nothing Else, Do This…
(The Cheaters Guide to Email
Marketing)
You only get one first impression. E-commerce sites have long had the chance to follow up on a new customer’s first purchase with a personalized welcome email, thanking them for their business. Why do they do this? Because it is statistically proven to increase the likelihood that the customer will come back and shop again. If you collect customer emails at the point of sale or even using a clipboard and pen, you can take advantage of this strategy too. This is a fantastic new opportunity to introduce yourself, your store and your brand to your customers very early on.
Note: Make sure to send out a welcome email within 48hrs [ideally 24hrs] of the customers’ engagement with your store. You will be fresh in their minds and they’ll be more open to your message.
2 Plan Ahead and Automate
One of the great things about cloud-based email platforms is that you can plan ahead. While you shouldn’t feel compelled to email your customers all the time, it is important that you keep a consistent and reliable stream of content so you are always fresh in the mind of your customers. In order to keep this process from becoming overwhelming you should set aside a chunk of time initially to set up your preferred email program, build a template, decide on a content schedule, and figure out to whom each email should be sent.
The Small Business Guide to Email Marketing 35
3 Make it Feel Exclusive
Small, independent business owners are in a unique position to make their emails ultra-personal and completely avoid any sense of ‘spamminess’. To make your emails as personal and exclusive as possible, you should:
Directly address your customer by first name, i.e. ‘Dear John’, or whatever the first name is. Services like MailChimp make it possible to bulk upload emails with their associated names and deliver ‘personal’ emails en masse. Don’t worry if you don’t have names for all emails, you can easily setup a default if this is the case, i.e. Dear Valued Customer!
A
B
C
Write from you as an individual, not from the company. This is especially true for smaller, single location stores. Make the reply email something personal i.e. [email protected]. There is nothing less inviting to warm customer relations than an email from [email protected].
Use a personal, friendly, non-corporate tone when writing and include images of your wares, your customers, and even yourself.
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5 MEASURE, MEASURE, MEASURE!
While this automation can free up a lot of time, it is absolutely vital that you make sure to track the results and adjust accordingly. Success should be defined according to how many of your customers carried out your desired action. Again, most email marketing services will allow you to quickly and easily see how each email performed. The metrics you should be looking at include: open rates, i.e. what percentage of your email list opened your email; click-through rates, i.e. how many took the action you desired; and unsubscribe rates, i.e. how many people decided they didn’t want to get emails from you anymore.
These metrics will give you a good idea of whether your email was a success or not. If you want to improve your rates you can play with adjusting things like the subject line, imagery, the length and tone of the copy, the layout and more. The process should be one of continuous innovation, trial and refinement, hopefully yielding better results over time.
Note: Don’t underestimate the importance of the subject line. People make very quick decisions about whether your email is worth opening, so your subject line must be appealing, interesting and, if possible, intriguing. Simple often works better than you think it will!
4 Be Action Oriented
This is perhaps the most important thing to know about Email Marketing. Each and every email you write should seek to drive a customer action.
If you are sending a ‘brand-building’ email, provide a link to your Facebook page and try and encourage your customers to like you and/or comment/share on your profile.If you are sending a sales email, make it clear and easy to download/print your coupon, or navigate directly to the purchasing location on your site.
Note: Each email should have multiple links/opportunities for the customer to carry out your desired action (known in the industry as Calls to Action). Also, it is notoriously difficult to encourage ‘offline’ behavior (i.e. a visit to your store) through online communication, so one way to combat this is to create a sense of urgency through time-sensitive promotions/offers.
It is important that you keep a consistent and reliable stream of content so you are always fresh in the mind of your customers.
Have feedback on this guide? We’d love to hear it! Simply email us at [email protected].
Want to know more about point of sale and how it could improve your business? Make sure to download our Guide to Choosing a POS System on the opposite page.
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