Wash Wisdom: 5 email marketing best practices

5 email marketing best practices

According to the article “5 Email Marketing Tips to Grow Your Small Business” by contributor Syed Balkhi on www.business.com, studies show that most customers prefer to receive marketing materials via email. As such, this marketing method is one that you should focus on when determining which marketing routes to take. However, there are some best practices to consider when implementing email marketing. Here are the five Balkhi recommends:

Make it easy to sign up. Don’t obscure your sign-up area in the bowels of your website. Include it on the homepage, as a widget in your sidebar, in your blog or anywhere else you gather attention. You could even consider using entry or exit pop-ups, which display a pop-up form when a person enters or intends to leave your site.
Incentivize subscriptions. After you make it easy for visitors to sign up, you have to make them want to sign up. Offer something of value to customers, such as a coupon, to anyone who subscribes. People prefer to give their email addresses as part of an exchange.
Vary your content. Subscribers won’t be pleased if every email you send them is promotional. Again, subscribers want an exchange of value. Some of the different emails you can send out include event invitations, new product or service information, newsletters and sales promotions.
Segment your email lists. Nowadays, you shouldn’t just be sending out the same blanket email to everyone on your subscriber list. Subscribers are demanding more personalization. Therefore, you can segment your email lists into such categories as new subscribers, people who haven’t opened an email in some time and those who made a recent purchase. Also, as mentioned before, don’t make all your emails promotional in nature — this defeats the purpose of segmenting the lists. For instance, send a welcome email to new subscribers. If you take the time to nurture relationships with your subscribers, it can pay back big dividends later.
Always include a call to action. In every single email you send, make sure there is a clear call to action, whether or not the main goal of the email is to instigate a purchase. Some ways you can make your call to action button more engaging are:
- Make it visually clear and exciting with appealing copy
- Stick to five words or fewer
- Use action-oriented copy (such as “click here”)
- Make the button easy to find within the body of the email, but don’t let it draw away from the content of the email.

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What to do when your team outgrows your business

According to the article “4 Things to Do When Your Team Outgrows Your Business” by contributor Abdul Ganiy Shehu on www.business2community.com, after you’ve managed to put together the right team for your business, the next problem that could arise is when your team grows faster than your business. If you don’t take a proactive stance in managing this issue, it could lead to incompetence, disorganization and conflict among your employees. As such, Shehu offers four tips for how to avoid this problem:

Pay wages at or above market level. As your team grows and thrives, there’s a chance that your competitors will want to headhunt your employees. To avoid having your employees taken, you need to be sure to pay them well, so that they’ll feel more loyal to you and invested in the business. Evaluate industry standards if you’re not sure what you should be paying your employees.

Implement checks and balances. As your company grows and you bring in more members from different companies with varying practices, it becomes more difficult to effectively assign responsibilities to employees. If these various practices aren’t checked, it could affect your productivity and return on investment (ROI). Therefore, implement a series of checks and balances to regulate your employees’ activities. This way, each employee will know his or her responsibilities. By implementing this strategy, you can prevent employee theft, inventory shrinkage and waste, bookkeeping mismanagement and more.
Motivate your employees. Keeping your employees motivated to work for you ensures business success. Unmotivated employees who do not work towards the vision of the company will stall your growth. As such, create an environment that makes employees want to work. You can do this through implementing rewards programs, investing in their training and education and setting examples for them.
Grow your business. Often, a business belongs to a single person, but the more team members you take on, the more risky this way of management is. To avoid problems in the future, it’s advisable to expand your business into one or two firms as your team grows. There are challenges to this path, such as structuring the businesses, getting the capital to start them and helping employees understand the new business proceedings. However, one way to go about this is to work with other business owners to become a company offering various services. Such collaborations help your business become more organized and gain more recognition.

Read the original article here.