Email marketing for small businesses is one of the most effective outreach investments a technology company can make. It has a higher conversion rate than even organic search and social media.
Many businesses attempt to reach out to people by using email marketing, but they don’t see the positive results this investment promises.
Why do some tech companies excel with email marketing and others fail? The answer to that question might surprise you.
How Can Technology Companies Take Email Marketing to New Heights?
The primary reason email marketing efforts fail is that they never got started. When the speed of business is quick, it’s tempting to take shortcuts. Investing some cash to buy some email addresses seems to make sense.
There’s only one problem. You haven’t verified the interest levels of each person behind a purchased email list. Do you even know if those addresses are active?
Emailing information about your technology products or services and getting few responses indicates a lack of interest in what you offer. It can also be evidence that your communication structures aren’t suggesting an accurate message – or they’re getting filtered by spam and junk folders.
Shortcuts rarely work. It might take a little more time to develop your own email lists, but the work is worth it because you have more information about each address.
Here are some ways to improve your email marketing after establishing those lists so that your message gets heard by the right people.
1. Have a Plan Before Starting
When you want to know how to do email marketing yourself as a tech company, it makes sense to introduce yourself to the reader. Who are you? What are your values?
What is it about your business that makes you stand out from competitors?
When technology companies invest in email marketing, they often make the mistake of promoting themselves instead of what they do for clients.
It’s great that you’ve won awards, have global contacts, and generate tons of revenue. How can you help the email recipient today?
If you’ve won an award, talk about how your expertise in that area can help the reader find success or solve a problem. Your global contacts are great when they can help other small businesses grow with the experience those partnerships offer.
Your email marketing plans should show people the value you offer while delivering evidence that you can produce consistent results. If the content comes across as being a self-serving ego boost, that delete button gets hit more often.
Before sending your first emails, plan what you want to say. Get different opinions on what you’ve written to ensure you can evaluate a complete perspective.
2. Maintain Opt-in Lists
Someone might have downloaded marketing materials from your website in exchange for an email address, but that doesn’t mean they want to keep receiving messages. You could be doing more harm than good by sending information to someone who doesn’t really want it.
One way to manage this issue is to create suppression lists. If you’ve sent someone repetitive emails without anything being opened, they’re unlikely to be interested in the next one going out.
You can set a specific number that automatically removes an email address from your list due to inactivity. It can be anywhere from five to 15 unopened messages – whatever figure feels right to your tech company.
These additional ideas can help you streamline this idea to make your lists even more effective and responsive in the future.
- Send people who haven’t been responding an email that informs them they’ll be taken off the mailing list unless they opt-in again with a response.
- You can place them on a different email marketing list with reduced message frequency. Even once per quarter can be a practical resource for some businesses.
- Create email categories that let people choose the content and frequency of what they receive. Some recipients want daily communication, while others might be satisfied with a monthly newsletter.
When you make an effort to meet people where they are, your technology company will find more success with your B2B and B2C email lists.
3. Personalize the Signup Process
Everything seems to be automated these days. Businesses in almost every industry are looking for ways to simplify customer contacts, ranging from self-checkout registers to form-letter welcome emails.
You can create a custom opt-in form to join an email list, but does that experience communicate a personalized process to every visitor?
Here are some easy ways to add more personalization to the signup process to encourage more list development opportunities, even with today’s data privacy requirements.
- Get consent right away.
- Use lead magnets to express personalized offers.
- Comply with age verification.
- Limit explanation to avoid additional confusion.
- Provide choices whenever possible, especially if you maintain multiple lists.
Clients want tailored experiences with today’s best brands. When you can show people that your technology company offers it through email marketing investments, your investments will inspire more curiosity to follow up with everything else you offer.
4. Improve the Subject Line
The first thing an email recipient sees is the subject line of your message. It might be tempting to spice that information up with different emojis or an ALL CAPS note, but that approach doesn’t usually work.
The best subject lines tend to be boring and informative. Instead of trying to sell your tech company, create a description of the value a reader can expect by opening your message.
Spammy phrases and keywords can trigger spam filters. Even using an extra exclamation point in the subject line can screen out your email marketing efforts.
The best subject lines tend to include the following traits.
- Real Promises. If you can’t keep your word, don’t send an email that promises the world. Clickbait rarely produces long-term results.
- Be Precise. People scan their inboxes quickly. When you’re clear and concise with your subject line composition, it’ll make a better first impression. Think about how your content offers benefits, and then create a powerful statement that accurately describes what readers can expect.
- Use Action Language. When you treat a subject line like a call to action, it inspires more recipients to click. Use relatable verbs that translate to the message you’re conveying while avoiding passive grammatical structures.
- Test Your Outreach. Use A/B testing on different subject lines (or email formats!) to see what structures communicate authentically and accurately.
Your content might be incredible, but no one will want to see it with poor subject line structures. Improving this area of your email marketing campaign can deliver some amazing results!
5. Segment Your Audience
Every email marketing for small business investment creates readers who want to see specific messages.
Some subscribers are interested in different email types, including news, events, and coupons. Many might want one or two of those categories coming to their inboxes, but they might not want all three.
That’s why it is essential to understand who receives each email. You can achieve that outcome by creating audience segments.
You can create segments based on traditional demographics, client behaviors, or even where you believe someone is on their sales funnel journey.
Imagine that you offer a discount to retirees. Would it make sense to send an email with that promotion to young families?
When emails have more relevancy, the content encourages more engagement and fewer unsubscribes.
6. Use Your Data
Email marketing can produce results in most situations, but it can deliver something better when decisions come from the data your efforts generate. Although you can analyze multiple statistics and metrics, the open and click-through rates tend to be the most important.
Those statistics measure the percentage of list recipients who open emails and those who click on a link or call-to-action (or perform other specific behaviors).
Technology companies should monitor the results of every message sent. The information gathered from each investment refines the message to make it more effective.
Each business sets benchmarks to hit based on previous results. If you fall short of your goals, the first step should be to review your opt-in list and remove the non-engaged contacts.
You can also use data to evaluate your audience segments to streamline your messaging.
7. Make Your Message Mobile Friendly
Knowing how to create mobile-friendly emails can help technology companies reach out with more effective messages. When you take advantage of what tech can do for this marketing effort, you’re sending a subtle message to each recipient.
You’re proving that your company is on the cutting edge of today’s tech by creating an email that works well on the reader’s device.
About two-thirds of people read emails on a mobile device. When that information is easy to read, you’ll create a strong and positive experience for each recipient with clear structures to follow.
Here are the essential strategies that improve the mobile email marketing user experience.
- Use single-column templates when composing messages to avoid having the content appear condensed or difficult to read.
- Keep the email to a width of fewer than 600 pixels to take advantage of responsive designs.
- Use a font size of 13 or 14 to make the message easier to read on a small screen.
- Display small images to ensure recipients with slow or throttled data connections can still review the information they want to see.
- Include a distinctive call to action that prompts the reader to complete a specific task.
- Avoid using menu bars, and don’t stack links in the email.
Once you have the email structure where you want it to be for mobile devices, it helps to test it on multiple devices. You can accomplish this final step by using emulators, using paid services, or sending test emails to trusted recipients for feedback.
If you send an email to an older audience segment, you might even consider sending a text-only email to be mobile-friendly.
8. Avoid the No-Reply Problem
Most people open emails based on the person sending them. They don’t want to click on something that comes from a “no reply” or “do not reply” email address.
When your next campaign is ready to go live, have each email come from someone on your team. It could be a person in your marketing department, a customer service specialist, or someone in your C-suite.
Letting people know how they should respond ensures that replies don’t get ignored or rejected.
This step might be required to deliver email marketing content in some jurisdictions.
9. Send Messages at the Right Time
It’s easy to assume that most people in business respond to emails during regular working hours. The definition of a normal day for a technology company is quite different than it is for a blogger, a teacher, or an attorney.
When you want to know how to do email marketing yourself, try to align your messages with the times when someone is likely to be reviewing their inbox.
Some industries see significantly higher engagement levels in the hour before operations start. Others see more activity at lunch or near the end of the day.
It’s good to segment your email lists based on time zones to ensure each region gets your content at an optimal time. The United States has six standard time zones to consider alone, which is why paying attention to a specific hour is crucial.
A Final Thought to Consider About Email Marketing for Tech Companies
Email marketing for technology companies must place the reader’s experience above anything else. Even when information is interesting or informative, people don’t want to spend extra time deciphering what you meant to say.
The best emails provide concise messaging, responsive formats, and problem-solving benefits.
If readers cannot see or understand the action you want them to take, they are more likely to delete the email or unsubscribe from the list.
That means your goal as a tech company should be to build relationships with potential subscribers before the opt-in process starts. You can’t do that when you buy email addresses from lists that others have created.
