What are top email marketing best practices for independent retailers?

Develop a Uniform Brand Message

As seen with any type of marketing or advertising, effective email marketing begins with a uniform brand message. Before you can start marketing your retail store in the field, it's essential to develop a brand strategy that includes your values, aesthetics, and offerings. 

According to Forbes, a brand message “reinforces your core values, mission objectives, and vision and serves as a vehicle to teleport your brand to the right audience.” Importantly, while most marketing content is consumer-facing, brand messaging is generally shared internally among stakeholders. Once your team understands your branding, they have the foundation needed to create winning email campaigns. 

Know Your Target Market

Knowing your target market is a critical email marketing best practice as it leads to tailored communication that resonates with recipients. By understanding customer demographics, interests, and purchasing habits, you can craft personalized content that increases engagement and conversion rates. 

While email marketing is extremely effective, it can also damage your brand if your emails are perceived as spam. Therefore, taking time to study your target market allows you to develop segmented lists and curated content. When you know your customer’s pain points, it’s much easier to create compelling content that brings real value to readers. 

Utilize an Email Marketing Platform & CRM Software

To get the most out of email marketing, you need to understand the different technologies used to create and manage campaigns and keep track of customer data. Mass email platforms like RareCircles will help you on the design and delivery side, while customer relationship management (CRM) software allows you to track customer lifecycles and create segmented lists.  

Since RareCircles is designed to streamline the digital presence of independent retailers, our system includes a mass email platform integrated with a CRM. With our CRM platform, you can keep tabs on all customer interactions and purchase histories to specify exactly where they are in your sales funnel. Next, you take this specific information to create segmented lists and personalized campaigns. 

Use Legitimate Addresses & Curate Your List

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in email marketing is purchasing a contact list from a 3rd party source. Rather, creating a legitimate list of subscribers ensures compliance with regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act and CASL, while also protecting your reputation. 

Once you have a solid working list of email subscribers, it's also beneficial to curate your list as you go. Regularly cleaning lists improves deliverability rates and ensures messages reach intended audiences. Since mass email sites like MailChimp penalize users for high bounce rates, curating your list is critical to the health of your digital marketing program. 

Keep Email Messaging Simple

When writing, your marketing emails should be short and to the point. Remember, people don’t have to read your emails, if they are too long and verbose there is a good chance your audience will lose interest. Similarly, you’re well advised to keep designs simple and digestible. As the Zapier website explains, “Stick to one or two colors and fonts, and keep complicated illustrations to a minimum.” 

A good piece of advice for crafting successful emails is to keep the content easily skimmable. Readers are often turned off by large blocks of text, so breaking up the page with titles, headers, and bullet points can go a long way toward keeping people’s attention. 

Personalize Emails

Personalization is another great way to increase conversion rates. Luckily, there are several technologies available like mail merge that allow you to embed fields in email templates that are taken directly from MS Excel or Google Sheets. As such, you have the luxury of adding personalized information like first names and company names, while still sending emails in bulk. 

By going the extra mile and adding a personal touch, you are much more likely to get the attention of recipients in your contact list. When combined with segmentation, you can develop highly targeted and personalized emails for maximum impact. 

Include an Eye-Catching Subject Line

Since the subject line is the first part of your email that a recipient will see, it's very important to write something enticing. As Zapier explains, “The most effective subject lines are personal, promotional, and engaging.” Ideally, you can touch on your customers' pain points, as well as your relevant offerings, in just a few short words. 

If you fail to grab a reader’s attention with your subject line, they will likely skip over your email, or disregard it altogether. 

Be Strategic on When You Send the Emails  

There is a science behind exactly when you should send your marketing emails. Not only must you send emails during business hours, but certain times and days of the week are known to provide better results than others. 

Generally speaking, sending marketing emails on Mondays and Fridays is not a great idea. Simply because people are focused on starting their work weeks or getting out for the weekend. In like fashion, it's a good idea to avoid sending marketing emails early in the morning or during lunch hours since people are often distracted at these times. 

Advertise Incentives & Specials

If your retail store has any sales or incentive programs, you should integrate these into your email messaging. In fact, putting something like “25% Off Sale Saturday Only” in the email subject line is not only a great way to get someone to open your email, but there is a good chance they will visit your store. 

Another thing to keep in mind is that incentives are a great way to get new subscribers for your marketing email list. Whether a customer is visiting your store or website, offering a discount in exchange for an email address will help you build a solid list of relevant customers.