How to Start a Profitable Email Newsletter

An email newsletter can be one of the most lucrative forms of marketing for your retail company if you do some planning and strategy. Emails, unlike social media posts and videos, are not controlled by an algorithm. They can be optimized easily. 

Whether you’re just getting started with email marketing or have been at it for a while, these tips will help you build brand awareness, create engaging content and increase the conversion rates of your email newsletter. 

Start with your subject lines

The subject line of an email is the most important. 38% of consumersAccording to some, people open emails based on the subject line alone. To encourage as many open, create a catchy and enticing subject line.

These email subject line best practices can help you increase your open rate. 

• Limit subject lines to no more than 40 characters. You may lose your words if they are too long, especially for mobile inboxes. You can ask for some help in creating your subject line, Quick Lines can help you figure out the best subject lines for your email outreach.
• Emails that have 6-10 words in your subject line. They tend to get more opens.
• Emojis can increase the effectiveness of emails sent by email. Up to 70%. 
• Putting the recipient’s first name in the subject line can boost the open rate About 3%, on average. 
• Include the word “newsletter” in subject linesActually, people are less likely to open your email. 
• Avoid using words like “as seen on,” “buy,” and “clearance,” as these may trigger Spam filters.

Incorporate brand elements into the design

Design elements are a great way to establish consistency and affinity for your company. When designing your emails, consider incorporating your brand’s fonts, colors or other imagery that your customers will be familiar with. 

Small Biz Sense Loyalty’sEmail builder will allow you to save the email designs you have created as templates. This allows you to reuse them over and over again to keep your communications on brand. 

No matter how you design your email, ensure that it is optimized for mobile devices. According to most studies, at least 80% of emails are optimized for mobile devices. 50% of all emails are opened via mobile phonesInstead of desktops or laptops, Send a test email using your email builder software and then open it on your smartphone to see how your content stacks before you send it out. 

Keep it simple 

Emails are a great way to communicate with your customers. Research by The AtlanticEmails should not exceed 50 to 125 words. Email clients such as Gmail may trim off parts of your message if your email is too long.

Your audience may prefer emails that are less than 50 words and more than 125 words. You can experiment with different lengths of emails to determine what works best for you.   

You should clearly state your call to action

You should set a goal or objective for every email you send. Register for an email to ask your audience to purchase a product. Coming Events, or drive them to a specific blog article, the action is entirely up to you—but whatever it is, make it easy to find and do. 

Design-wise, your CTA should be a button with a bright color at the bottom of your email. The text on the button must be easily readable (choose an opposite color to the button) and should be attractive. These are some examples of CTA messaging that will inspire your next email: 

• Buy Now
• Get it now
• Save now
• Shipping Free of Charge 
• Continue reading
• Learn more
• Join us
• Sign up 
• Register now
• Take me there 
• Reserve your seat
• Book Now 

Take advantage of current events and holidays

It can be difficult to come up with new ideas for your newsletter. The major holidays and seasonal changes are a great place to start. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Presidents Day are the most popular annual shopping days. 

For each holiday or season, think about how many emails you’d like to send and go from there. For example, a major retail holiday like Cyber Monday or Black Friday might require several emails, while a seasonal announcement may only require one email. 

Another resource is the National Day CalendarThis calendar outlines the dates of National T-Shirt Day each year. This calendar can be used to inspire special promotions and email content. 

Segmentation and personalization to your advantage

Email marketing has two major benefits: segmentation and personalization. Personalization refers the inclusion of personal details about the customer in the subject or body of an email, such their first and last names. Segmentation is when email addresses can be grouped together based a shared characteristic. This could include customers who live in the same area or who were born in the same month. 

Personalization can increase conversion rates Six-foldSegmentation has been shown to increase revenue. Up to 760%.  

Many email builders allow you to personalize or segment your emails. With Small Biz Sense’s retail commerce platformIt is easy to store and include personal details such names and create segments based on location and sign up date. 

Regularly send out campaigns 

Regularly sending emails to your audience is a great way for them to become more familiar with you and your brand. Your message might not be heard or understood if you only send emails occasionally. 

The frequency at which you should send emails varies depending on your industry, audience, and goals. Research suggests that you should aim to send one per week. Bi-monthly emailsThis is the ideal. You might consider sending monthly emails instead if you feel that twice a week is too frequent. 

Be careful not to overdo it—sending emails too frequently over time may make your emails go to spam. 

Keep iterating and analyzing performance 

An important step in building a successful list is to evaluate your email performance. These are the main performance indicators (KPIs), you should be looking at: 

• The open rate refers to the percentage of people that opened your email. The average open-rate for email marketing across all industries is 21.33%. 
• Clickthrough rate: The percentage of people who click on a link in your email. 
• The conversion rate: the percentage of people who “converted” i.e. The conversion rate is the percentage of people who “converted”, i.e., took the desired action as the email intended. 
• The bounce rate: how many emails “bounced” back, meaning not delivered to the recipient’s inbox successfully. 
• The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of people who have decided to stop receiving email from you. 

Your open, clickthrough, conversion, and conversion rates should be as high and low as possible. You also want to minimize your bounce rate and unsubscribe rate. To improve performance, pay attention to the results of each send.  

Invest in marketing tools that will help your business grow

If done strategically, email marketing can be a strong revenue generator for your omnichannel retail company. A loyalty program that connects directly to your email marketing software can streamline your marketing efforts and help your business achieve long-term success.

Chat with us to learn more about what Small Biz Sense’s one-stop commerce platform can do for your business.