Running a Small Retail Business: Here's How to Make Email Marketing Work for You

As a small retail business owner, you understand how challenging it can be to keep in touch with your current customers and reach out to new potential customers with special offers for growing your business. For many successful retail operations, email marketing is becoming the sure-shot solution for this problem.

According to a recent industry-wide research, 89% of the top marketers consider email marketing as their primary source for more business and leads.

Read on to learn how retail outlets are making email marketing work for their business.

Collect Customer Information and Increase Sales

Collecting email addresses is certainly a good strategy and is certainly required if you are serious about email marketing. If someone shares an email address with you, she's much more likely to become a regular customer than someone who hasn't shared any contact information with you.

Find New Customers

Getting new customers to visit your store can be tough if you don't know where to look. Email marketing is becoming a potent weapon for this, and nowadays you can easily buy or rent single email lists of people living in a particular area or locality nearby your retail outlet's location.

In fact, email is working 40x better for acquiring customers as compared to social media sites, according to a study by McKinsey & Co.

Focus on Delivering Customer Loyalty

Make it effortless for customers to sign up for a loyalty program. Mix online with offline. Flyers often go well with online marketing, and email marketing is no different.

Print out some high-quality flyers with a sign up link (or QR code) for your prospective subscribers in exchange for a discount or gift and put them in outdoor literature holders near your retail outlet's entrance so people can take one even when you are closed.

This allows you to reach out to them on a regular basis via email with a list of good discount offers and also boosts sales at the same time.

Engage Better with Your Customers by Building Trust

Your customers might be getting tons of email every day, which makes it harder to build trust. Here are some points worth noting in this regard:

• Make it easy for people to subscribe and unsubscribe.
• Explain the benefits (in clear language) for anyone to sign up for receiving emails.
• Ask what kind of products in your store they are more interested to receive the emails about.
• Avoid emailing your customers too often.

Track Closely and Optimize Continuously

After setting up email marketing campaigns, it becomes quite important to track every single email using analytics tools and software. This will help you understand what's working for you and what's not.

The most critical metrics to track include:

• number of emails sent out
• percentage delivered
• percentage opened
• percentage of emails bounced
• number of clicks generated
• click-through rate (CTR)
• number of unsubscribes

Final Thoughts

It goes without saying that there's a thin line between engaging with your email subscribers and annoying them, so it always helps to follow the best practices when it comes to marketing your business.

Offering more relevant information, building trust and analyzing the shortcomings is the key to improving at email marketing and increasing sales.