Author: Kara McCartney

When you’re promoting a new product launch, advertising a spring sale, or gathering sign-ups for an upcoming webinar, a one-to-one marketing strategy won’t cut it. Instead, sending mass email campaigns allows you to reach more people, in far less time. 

And here’s the best part: You don’t need an expensive, convoluted email automation platform to get the job done. In fact, you can send email marketing campaigns from your existing Gmail account, allowing you to easily reach a wider audience.

If you run a small business, you often find yourself operating on a tight budget — particularly when it comes to marketing. As a rule of thumb, if your revenue is less than $5 million annually, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) recommends spending 7-8% of revenue on marketing and advertising.

It’s true what they say: You cannot grow what you cannot measure. And if you want to grow your email list, you need to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.

There’s a number of ways to measure subscriber engagement, including your email open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribe rate — just to name a few. Every business owner or marketer should understand what each of these email marketing metrics means so they can better serve their audience.

Business owners wear many hats, focusing on operations, accounting, sales, and people management throughout the week. With the hectic schedule required to run a business, it rarely leaves any time to actually promote that business. 

And yet, research shows that small business owners spend an average of 20 hours per week on marketing. If you don’t have 20 hours to spare, there’s plenty of marketing automation tools that can help decrease your workload — particularly when it comes to email campaigns. 

If you want to capture your customer’s attention, slide into their inbox.

If you’re a small-business owner, email is a must-have channel within your marketing strategy. One survey shows people spend three hours a day checking work email, and another two checking their personal inbox (a total of five hours!).

When it comes to email marketing, the “one size fits all” tactic rarely works. An effective email campaign needs to be personalized to the individual recipient.