Whether you’re an online business or a brick-and-mortar store, email marketing has the power to bring in traffic to get your business kick-started in the right direction. Gaining traction in the small business world takes the combined efforts of networking and having a great product that benefits your target market. However, many businesses don’t utilize the cost-efficient, time-saving marketing tool that is email marketing.Keep reading to see what email campaigns, and specifically the ways to build these emails, can do for your business.It’s all about organic (no, not food). We’re talking about email marketing lists.

Make subscribing easy. By having a signup form easily accessible on your website, you are able to collect the information you need to build out your organic list. There are also ways to have the signup form on a tablet, making it easy for customers coming into your place of business to subscribe. One incentive you can provide customers when signing up for your email list is a discount on their next purchase. Finally, don’t forget your loyal customers. Target your existing client list to continuously improve customer retention and future business.Create a template to win them over. So you’ve got your contact list. Now it’s time to create the best formula to win your clients over. Templates can be created in third-party platforms like Constant Contact. You’ll want to have a template that is simple, mobile-friendly and does not contain too much text. Remember, your subscribers are busy and likely on the go, so don’t overwhelm them with filler text that is not beneficial to them.We find the best emails contain 3 elements: A good subject line, simple template, and is personalized to each subscriber. Subject lines should not contain phrases like: ATTENTION, ACT NOW, or BIG SAVINGS $$$. These are surely to be passed over and placed into the black hole that is the spam bucket.Good subject lines tend to describe the actual content of the email. One tactic is also including your company name in the subject line to assure users of where the email is coming from. Some examples are: “(Company Name)’s Monthly Deals” or “(Company Name) Invites You”. See more of our tips on email subject lines here.What to do with a Call-to-Action “CTA”. It’s all there - the content, the subject line and interested subscribers, but how do you get them to your site? Designing a button can help clearly delineate where and what your call to action is. If you want people to call, link a number to the button, if you want them to visit the site, link a URL. Be sure to check that buttons and hyperlinks link where they should before hitting send.The focus should be on placement of your button. Your button should be placed under or next to the relating message and have a simple line such as: “Get Started” or “Call Now”.

How to Decipher your Analytics. The first step in understanding your email campaign results is by knowing what areas are the most important. The key statistics that you should focus on is Click-Through Rate. This is how you’ll be able to measure the conversion rates of those CTAs you placed earlier. Any good email marketing platform should show you what links subscribers clicked on. By seeing which content performed the best, you are able to adjust future email marketing campaigns.The other statistic that you need to analyze is your open rate. An Open Rate is the percentage of how many people opened your email. There are two ways to utilize this data - to see how well your subject lines are performing and to compare it against your click-through rate. You may have been able to interest subscribers enough to open the email, but the CTA wasn’t strong enough to make them click. When you send out future email campaigns, make sure to see if those same people who didn’t open the last campaign are more engaged in the new one. It is a great way to see if you are succeeding in building engagement.