By Henry Brown

Email marketing is a very effective tool for small businesses and solopreneurs for lead generation. Email is ideal for solopreneurs, as with some savvy planning, you can maximize the impact of your campaign even on a smaller budget. To get the most from your email campaigns, try these clever tricks.

Master your subject lines

We all get a lot of emails clogging up our inbox, most of which never actually get read. We delete a lot of email that looks like marketing without even opening it. Your challenge is to get people to view your subject line and find it interesting enough to open and read your email. Your subject line needs to be engaging.

Subject lines should not be between 60 and 70 characters. This has been shown to be a dead zone that doesn’t encourage much of an open rate. Instead, go longer or shorter. Use numbers, as this attracts interest. Try to trigger an emotional response in the reader. Short subject lines are snappy and more interesting. Single word headlines can work well too.

Give a digital gift

Everyone loves to get something for free. A digital giveaway can be a good tool to get potential customers to open instead of ignore your emails. Look at the content you’ve already created for your business. This could be templates, ebooks, whitepapers or other downloads. Offer these as freebies in your emails to encourage them to open your emails or respond to a call to action within it.

Use your email to re-engage subscribers

If you’ve done the work to drive up your subscriber list, you should have a good-sized contact list. You should be segmenting your list carefully as you gain subscribers, in order to be able to carefully target each of your clients or customers with content that is hyper relevant to them.

If you have proper segments, make sure you pay attention to inactive subscribers. These are the people who haven’t unsubscribed from your emails, but don’t open or engage with them.

You can use email to reach out to these people. Send out incentives, like a freebie, or ask them for their feedback to find out what the problem is. You may be able to generate to renewed interest and get some useful feedback. If not, you know you can clear those people to stop wasting your emails.

Personalize your emails

Email personalization has become very popular in the last few years. It’s important to get the balance right though. Addressing subscribers by their first names used to be popular, but it can actually feel pushy and a bit overly familiar. Avoid this for new customers, at least. Instead, just send a simple greeting before getting into the body of the email.

Instead, send content that is highly targeted and super relevant to the segment you’re contacting. Triggering automatic emails depending on subscriber behavior can be really helpful too. Send abandoned cart emails or trigger something like a Sendgrid welcome email to acknowledge new sign-ups.

Experiment with different send times Some marketing professionals suggest that the best time to send emails is after eight in the evening to get the highest open rate. Open rates also improve at the weekend. However, your email send times should be matched to the market segment. For example, if you’re sending information about a sale on your products to the general public, then a weekend send is likely to work. If you’re reaching out to business professionals with information about a service for their business, then a weekday morning for when people are reaching their desks and firing up their emails is likely to work better.

Read the guidance about send times, but use your common sense and adjust it to your audience. Try a few different times and see what works best for you for the highest open rate.

Optimize for mobile

A huge amount of web traffic comes from mobile devices now instead of from a desktop. This includes reading emails. It’s essential that your email templates are mobile friendly. Test them across a few different devices to make sure everything works and looks right.

Take email engagement up a notch by optimizing your emails for mobile. Use a single column template to keep things easy to read. Put an important CTA above the fold to keep it in prime view and make sure your email has been designed to work well on mobile.

Use a professional email address

As a solopreneur, you may find that you face a credibility problem. A larger business that is competing with you could be perceived as being more reliable and professional than you are. This can be hard to combat, but it can be done. Make sure you’re gaining plenty of customer or client recommendations and start establishing yourself as an expert in your field.

Your email marketing can have a big impact on how professional you appear to. If you’re sending your emails from an email address that ends in something like gmail.com, yahoo.com or live.com, this doesn’t send the best message. A freemail service doesn’t suggest that you are a legitimate business, and tells your customers that you haven’t bothered to set up a proper online presence.

When setting up your website, make sure you get an email inbox so you can have a professional looking email address. Ideally, you want your email address to be something like yourname@yourbusinessname.com, so you look legit.

Email is seen as an effective marketing tool for a reason. If you can get it right, it can be a great way to draw in new customers, keep existing ones engaged and draw back lapsed customers. Target your emails well, keep them professional and make sure they look good and enticing when they land in your subscriber’s inboxes. Do your research and run some tests to find the best email tricks for you to get the best open rates and click throughs.

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Henry Brown is an online marketing executive. When he isn’t talking shop, he’s roaming the streets of London, uncovering the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.