Email Marketing Growth Hacking | 5 Email Growth Hacks for Emerging Startups & Small Businesses

Email growth hacking is a tried and true way of connecting with your customers.

When you uncover any successful brand story, you will find numerous forces at work. And there is a high probability that you will find a solid email marketing strategy somewhere in that framework. And it makes sense. Email marketing brings great ROI; as per this study, email has an average of $38 for every $1 spent.

Video marketing is a fantastic way to make your email campaigns stand out. Videos can be an excellent way to engage your audience and make them feel valued. They’re also great at showcasing the company in a fun, memorable light! It also allows you the ability for interactivity and engagement with customers by asking questions or getting feedback on what they think about your products in real-time!

Including a video in your emails is one of those email marketing hacks that is still underused. Video in email can boost click-through rate by almost 200-300%.

As a startup, you can greatly benefit from an explainer video. If you have a decent budget set aside for video marketing, get an explainer video from a video production company. Don’t restrict your video to the landing page. Send it out in your emails.

These videos can also increase email sharing by 43%. So if you have included a video in your email, there is a higher chance of that email getting forwarded. This trick helps in creating the ‘mouth of word marketing’ effect; people are 88% more likely to purchase a product/service when the recommendation is made by a peer.

Videos can be incorporated in the email either by embedding or by including a link. Emails without videos were just background noise. Once Growth Hackers introduced video content, clicks, forwards, and conversions all shot through the roof.

Here’s a tip: use a static image from your video frame in the body of the email and take the user to the website by providing a link.

Including a CTA in your email is surely the top email marketing hack out there but… for some reason, I still see so many email marketers, entrepreneurs, startup founders, business owners and growth hackers forgetting it. Having a call to action to entice your subscribers to click a button or answer a question is a must for email marketing for startups or small businesses.

It’s your call-to-action (CTA) that delivers the actual result in your email strategy as it takes the user beyond the email and leads to a purchase or a reservation or simply further reading. A call-to-action can either be a button or a link. CTAs, when used effectively, will help you increase your sales.

The position of CTA placement along with the CTA text, both play a role in the click through. These are the qualities of a good CTA:

• A good CTA has a compelling text
  If you are saying what everyone else is saying, your CTA text won’t really impact the buyer’s decision. So there is a necessity to create unique and enticing text to call users to take the action that you want them to take.
• An optimized CTA stands out
  I have come across many great emails with great content, but barely visible CTA. Sometimes, the CTA would be placed after a really long piece of text or sometimes it would just be written in a smaller font than the remaining text. Such CTA doesn’t stand out and sometimes makes it difficult for the user to even locate it.

Make your CTA stand out. Use bold formats, different colors or create a CTA button.

• It creates a sense of urgency
  Are you sending out an email for a sale that is due and only lasts two days? Then use your email subject lines as well as your CTA to create urgency in your user. Time-critical emails need to tap into the power of ‘time limits’ and drive the user to take the action.

When Growth Hackers tested a two-line, brightly colored CTA for a client, click-throughs jumped 68% overnight, proving that visibility and urgency drive results. In fact, this technique can also create urgency for things that are not time-critical but deliver something to the user that can improve their life drastically. For instance, an e-book that helps a blogger to learn quick hacks to visibility, even though not time-critical, can make him/her download it quickly so it is not lost to the email purgatory.

Email marketing is a tried and true way to get feedback from your audience and keep improving your buyer personas. By sending targeted surveys, Growth Hackers helped a SaaS client uncover hidden user needs, resulting in a 42% boost in feature adoption and higher engagement. Why? Because you can ask specific questions to your email subscribers such as:

• What can your company improve?
• Which feature(s) are you using most?
• Which feature(s) are missing?
• How can we improve as a brand?
• How is our customer service?
• Or personal questions like “Where are you from?”, “What’s your job?”, etc.

As you can see, email marketing can be greatly beneficial in creating buyer personas and gathering feedback. For startups and small businesses, email can be a great way to understand users and then target them accordingly.

For instance, you may create surveys to gather your user’s information. This is one of the 15 bright ways to make your emails interactive and engaging and grab attention. Since these responses are received through the email itself, these details are more likely to be email specific.

In short, since you are using email to collect information to re-target users through the same channel again, those strategies will be me much more email optimized because of the same exit and entry channel. This will show your subscribers that you care about them and improve your customer retention.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Humor is a great way to make the tone of your email more lighthearted. Adding humor to your emails is vital for nurturing growing customer relationships. Humor is a great way to humanize your brand and make it more engaging. Humorous content helps break up monotony and boredom.

There are many techniques to use growth hacking with emails and incorporating humor is definitely one of them. It is common for startups to restrict their email to a formal, business tone because the risk is less. But that’s where a lot of companies fail to understand the role of humor in building better first impressions.

Humor helps you catch your reader off guard and dissolves the ‘marketing’ intent. Humor can help you build a good email list and leave your readers looking for more. Your email subscribers will love it! Introducing humor in your content can be a bit tricky but the rewards are many.

Growth Hackers has repeatedly seen emails that make readers laugh outperform stiff, formal campaigns… humor isn’t just fun, it drives clicks and builds loyalty.

Incorporate visuals to infuse humor. Rely on memes, GIFs, etc… to uplift your email strategy. Humor can be a great ice-breaker and improve your email interactions to help you achieve your marketing objective.

– Email Subject Lines

How do you get people to click on your email? The answer might be as simple and foolproof as sending them the perfect message. This starts by crafting a great email subject line.

The email open rate is largely dependent on the subject line of your email. After all, this is the first email element that the user sees. About 36% of email recipients open the email based on that subject line. And a large chunk of emails are discarded as spam simply based on the subject line used. Another growth hack you can try to increase your email open rate is by including emojis in your subject lines.

For Growth Hackers, a subject line is like a neon sign for your email: grab attention, draw people in, and leave a lasting impression. Keep your subject line crisp and enticing. Also, personalized subject lines work much better than generic ones.

– Opening line

If the subject line is the bait, the opening text is your hook. The faster you engage your reader, the easier it is to keep them going towards taking the intended action. As HubSpot suggests, move beyond “Hi, My name is” to something like “I noticed you” or “Saw that we both”.

– Body

Emails can be powerful if they are specific. Generic body content often results in disengagement. Especially for startups, there is a greater need to stand out in their email content. When creating sales emails, ask yourself:

● What new unique pain points is my startup solving?

● How your product/service has changed the landscape of that particular industry?

The answer to these questions can be really useful as email text.

– Closing line and Email Signatures

While the CTA does the main task of making the user perform an action, the closing line impacts the reader’s decision. A closing line which is abrupt or devoid of an actionable step, may leave the reader confused and/or unwilling to complete the action.

Use closing lines to initiate a response from the user or to take them to the destination where they can complete the transaction.

By following these email marketing best practices, I can ensure you that you will boost your email marketing ROI.

In addition to a great closing line, I recommend you add links on your email signatures, especially everyone in your company engaging with prospects, leads and clients. For instance, asking your customer support team or your account managers to add a link directed to one of your popular blog posts or landing pages in their signature can help you generate free traffic.

Bonus tips:

1. Always double check your emails before clicking the “send” button. Check for any grammatical and spelling errors because those kinds of mistakes will make you lose trust.
2. Send a test email to yourself or one of your employees, colleagues or team members before sending it to a client or a lead. Why? Because a badly formatted email or an email that cannot be read on a mobile device will make your company lose credibility.
3. Make sure you have a high deliverability rate. You want your emails to land on the inbox, not the spam folder.
4. Add other elements in your emails such as: incorporate social proof, testimonials or anything that shows your value proposition to your email subscribers.