Staying in front of the customer is a must for small business owners. And there’s no better way to improve awareness, conversion, and retention than with a solid email marketing strategy.

Here are 16 ways to ensure every email you send will resonate with your target audience as intended.

Bonus Content: Grab a copy of our Email Marketing Roadmap.

Get It Now

1. AVOID ALL CAPS.

Occasionally, caps work to put emphasis on a word or phrase. But more often than not, your audience feels like you’re YELLING AT THEM! Err on the side of good email etiquette and avoid the caps lock entirely.

2. Don’t overuse exclamation points!!!

Similar to all caps, exclamation points are easily misinterpreted. When used sparingly, the exclamation point can effectively communicate excitement. But go too far and you also risk coming across as overly enthusiastic or even insincere. A good rule is to limit yourself to one exclamation point per business email.

3. Don’t abuse the bold, italics and underline styling.

While these features can be used to emphasize a point, too much of a good thing goes bad quickly. An email full of bold, italicized and underlined text could come across as aggressive, or even rude. If nothing else, it’s distracting and confusing.

4. Watch your tone.

Your emails represent your brand, so it’s important to be both positive and professional. Avoid negative language, and when possible, try to frame negative messages in a more positive light.

For example, instead of saying, “you missed the deadline,” which sounds accusatory, take a more neutral approach and say, “the deadline passed.”

5. Keep the message clear, concise and easy to read.

Studies have shown that people misinterpret the tone and meaning of emails as much as 50 percent of the time. That’s a 50/50 shot your messaging can get lost. The best way to avoid this email etiquette faux pas is to eliminate unnecessary and ambiguous language.

6. Keep humor to a minimum.

Recent surveys have shown that many people find humor acceptable in an email. The problem with humor is that it’s entirely subjective. What you find funny, someone else may find offensive.

Plus, the absence of vocal and facial cues makes it difficult to know when someone is joking in an email. If you don’t know the recipient well, or if you’re not sure the joke reads in an obvious way, save the humor for another occasion.

7. Avoid the use of slang.

While email communications can be relaxed, friendly and informal, you still want to sound professional. Believe it or not, survey respondents were strongly against the use of slang in emails. In fact, over 40 percent of survey respondents ages 18-24 considered slang “totally unacceptable.” So save the BRBs and TTYLs for texting.

8. Keep salutations professional.

You don’t need to be over-the-top formal, just respectful. A simple “hello” or “good morning” will do. As you get to know recipients better, you can take a less formal approach if it’s appropriate. Using the recipient’s name adds a personal touch, but make sure to use the name they prefer.

Pro tip: Don’t shorten names on your own or create nicknames. As anyone who goes by Daniel or Katherine can tell you, getting an email addressed to “Danny” or “Katie” is both rude and disrepectful.

9. Close in a respectful manner.

Your sign-off can be as simple as “sincerely” or “thank you.” Always include your relevant contact information, so the recipient knows how to reach you. To make things easy, create a professional email signature that includes your name, job title, company, business address and phone number.

10. Keep your emails mobile-friendly.

After all, 91 percent of consumers check email on their smartphone at least once per day. Remember, special fonts and emojis don’t play well across all devices.

If you must include photos, add them as attachments. You don’t want to force recipients to wait for photos to load to get access to your message.

11. Always provide valuable content.

No one wants a constant sales pitch. If you can provide information or start an interesting conversation, your audience will respond.

Use list segmentation and create a targeted message for each segment group. The more you speak to the direct needs of the recipient, the better your results will be.

12. Don’t exhaust your audience with too many emails.

Determining the best email frequency for your business requires some experimentation, trial and error. But, in general, we recommend reaching out one to four times each month. This may sound like a lot or barely anything, depending on your business. However many emails you send, the goal is to stay top of mind without annoying your recipients.

13. Avoid lengthy email subject lines.

Email open rates are highest when subject lines are six to 10 words long, approximately 50 characters in length. So keep your subject lines short and to the point. Remember, you want the recipient to open the email. Make the subject enticing, but don’t give away so much information that there’s no reason to read more.

Here’s an example of a subject line that says too much: “Our research shows that emailing customers twice a month can lead to optimal open rates.”

A better subject line would be “How Often Should You Email Customers?” It poses an interesting question without giving away the answer, so the recipient is more likely to open the email to find out.

14. Always proofread before hitting send.

A sloppy, error-ridden email does nothing for your email etiquette reputation. Your readers shouldn’t have to proofread and edit your work to understand your message. Check and double-check everything from the subject line to the email signature, including grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling.

Pro tip: Also remember to check all links! Recipients who click a link that takes them nowhere will likely abandon your email altogether.

15. Respond to emails in a timely fashion.

Try to respond to everyone within 24 hours, if possible, including those who contact you by mistake. If a proper response is going to take additional time, shoot the sender a quick note to let them know you’ll be following up ASAP. This approach is not only a top-notch example of stellar email etiquette, but it also keeps your inbox clean and allows everyone to move forward with their business.

16. Don’t get tripped up by Reply All, CC and BCC features.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

• Use Reply All when the conversation is important to everyone in the thread.
• Use CC to include people on a need-to-know basis.
• Use BCC when mailing to a bulk list or when the privacy of the recipients is essential.

If your email doesn’t fit in these categories, stick with a single recipient. You can always add more people to an email thread later on.

We hope these best practices for email etiquette will help elevate your email marketing game. We know how busy professionals and business owners get, so if you’re short on time, we’re here to automate the process. Learn more about how OutboundEngine markets your business for you so you can focus on sales.

Are you a professional who finds the idea of a 40-hour workweek laughable? Test out these time management tips and “work” your way to a more productive week.

1. Make a Schedule Based on Your Personal Productivity Fluctuations

Your productivity and energy levels may swing like a pendulum throughout the day. The trick to tackling your most important tasks is to capitalize on the portions of the day when you have the most momentum.

Duke University psychology and behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely found that for much of the workforce, the most productive block of time occurs within the first two hours of their workday. He recommends using this time to tackle highly cognitive tasks, like strategically mapping out your day or completing creative projects.

If you know you struggle to concentrate in the late afternoon, save that time for tasks requiring less brainpower. Try responding to emails instead of scheduling end-of-day meetings or tackling important deadlines.

Compartmentalizing tasks based on the inherent ebbs and flows of your energy level can help you remain productive throughout your day.

2. Find Creative Ways to Limit Distractions

Once you find your flow, it’s important to stay on task. However, between the onslaught of push notifications and needy clients, most of us face large-and small-scale distractions every three minutes. That can be even more often if you’re working from home with kids in the house. While some of these interruptions can be quickly addressed, getting back to the original task at hand takes an average of 23 minutes.

There’s a clear takeaway: cut out two small distractions from your workday and you’ve potentially saved yourself an hour of billable time!

Try a combination of these techniques to help you stay focused:

• Find playlists you can work to. We love instrumental music and useful online options like SimplyNoise.
• Close browser windows you don’t need. This will save you from tempting distractions. If you’re worried about losing track of important tabs, use a tool like Session Buddy to save your tabs for later. If you’re using Chrome, you can also hide unused tabs away inside a tab group.
• Turn off notifications and set your phone to airplane mode. If you’re worried about time sensitive notifications, do this only for short sprints of time when you need to maintain intense focus.
• Keep a healthy snack at your desk. Hunger is distracting, and so is getting up to search for snacks.

3. Limit Your Priorities

When you’re running a small business, anything related to your company is ultimately your responsibility. But, as the adage says, “If everything is important, then nothing is.”

Not everything requires equal attention, and having an expansive to-do list can lead to task paralysis. By keeping your priority list short, you automatically hone your focus. For more than 72 percent of small business owners, this concentration hinges largely on developing high-level strategies that can help grow their businesses.

Which leads us directly to our next topic…

4. Learn the Art of Delegation by Automation

After you’ve culled the list of priorities down to the essentials, what’s next? The short answer: delegating them!

For some small business owners, this means hiring a part-time assistant to help manage the schedule or answer emails. Others turn to online assistants like Upwork or Zirtual for general task management and website maintenance.

And nearly 50 percent of companies use some form of marketing automation to get more out of their day. (Think customized email blasts and social media campaigns tailored to your customers.)

Bonus Tip: We can automate your marketing!

5. Stay Organized

Ever found yourself shuffling through business cards to find the one you want? Or logging in and out of multiple apps to get the information you need about a client? Or scrolling through an endless list of emails in search of the one you’re looking for? All of that takes time, and when you add it up over days and weeks, it can become a significant amount. Organization pays off not just in peace of mind but in actual minutes of your life.

Fortunately, there are apps to streamline nearly every repetitive, headache-inducing task you can think of. We compiled a list of our five favorite organization apps, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Wrap-Up

If you start following all these tips, you should see an immediate uptick in your daily free time. And don’t forget that we’re here to save you even more time by taking marketing off your plate.

Here are five LinkedIn features that small business owners should try out:

1. LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning is the place to go if you’re looking to get questions answered, are an avid learner, or want to develop a particular skill relevant to your career. You can search for skills, software and topics, and can save programs or presentations that are interesting to you. If you don’t know where to start, scroll through what appears on your LinkedIn Learning home page. LinkedIn has segmented much of content into categories like Editor’s Picks, learn within 30 minutes, and trends. They even offer a free trial so you can check out a few courses before you commit. Keep your skills and mind sharp – pick a course and start today!

How this LinkedIn feature can help your business: There is really no downside to continuing education. Whether it’s technical skills like HTML and SEO or soft skills like leadership, increasing your knowledge and strengthening existing skills is key to staying at the top of your field. By staying up-to-date on industry trends, popular topics, and what your competitors are doing, you’ll be more confident than ever in your ability to support your clients’ questions and needs.

2. LinkedIn Events

Did you realize LinkedIn offers an events feature similar to Facebook’s popular events system? Many users aren’t in the know, but on any given day you can find a wide range of virtual meetups, webinars and other events happening on LinkedIn. Just search via the top navigation bar and click on the “events” button to limit your query to events.

How this LinkedIn feature can help your business: LinkedIn Events serves as a handy networking and learning hub — there are events available for just about every industry for you to connect with peers and learn from them. You can also get a peek into the events your competitors are hosting for their clients and prospects, in case you want to try your hand at hosting one yourself.

Some examples:
Real estate events
Insurance events
Mortgage events
Small business events

3. Active Status

Facebook and Google have been using this little green dot for years to make it easy for users to chat with each other when they are online. You can now do the same on LinkedIn! When you go to a connection’s profile page, Active Status shows a green dot next to their photo if they are online.

There is a slightly different dot if they are not currently active but have mobile push notifications enabled.

How this LinkedIn feature can help your business: When you only have a few minutes to check in, knowing someone is online and available increases the chances of them seeing and responding to your note. Same goes for having your active status seen. On that note, be sure that your active status is on.

Follow these steps:

1. Under your photo in the upper right, click “Settings & Privacy.”
2. Under the “Visibility” section, click on “Visibility of your LinkedIn activity.”
3. Then click “Manage active status” to make sure your connections can see when you are online.

4. Advanced Search

Anyone who shops online knows the difference between a good search and a bad one. When you are digging through hundreds of search results, endlessly scrolling is ineffective and leads to most people giving up and moving on. The best searches have multiple filters you can apply quickly to sort through and narrow down your results. LinkedIn has made their Advanced Search easier to find exactly who and what you are looking for by including filters to appear once you submit a term in the search bar.

How this LinkedIn feature can help your business: They can’t contact you if they can’t find you, right? These filters make it easier for people to find you if you have a complete LinkedIn profile. Keep your account and information up-to-date and accurate and you’ll appear within various filters.

5. LinkedIn Publishing

After discussing some newer LinkedIn features to help your business we have discussed, we’re ending on a feature that has long existed but is more polished than before. Writing and sharing content has been available to users for some time, but LinkedIn has made it easier than ever for users to publish original content that can expand your reach beyond your existing connections.

There is one newer advancement in LinkedIn publishing worth noting. Users can now adjust their settings so posts shared to “Public” can be viewed by anyone even if they are not signed into LinkedIn. This means the content you publish can be read by others who aren’t logged into LinkedIn.

If you get stuck once you’re on that page, check out this post about LinkedIn ideas you can do now.

Use this LinkedIn feature to help your business: As a result of sharing your thoughts and expertise, you are starting and continuing conversations that may lead to new connections and opportunities. Being able to direct clients to an article you wrote adds another level of credibility to your business.

Wrap Up

Yes, you should be using LinkedIn as part of your marketing strategy. No, it’s not enough to just set up a profile. If you are only occasionally connecting with people you meet and doing nothing more, you are missing out on using many LinkedIn features to help your business.

Finally, know that LinkedIn will continue updating and improving its experience for users. Be sure you stay current on what’s new. This list of LinkedIn features to help your business is a good start, but by no means all-inclusive. If you need a hand in the world of social media marketing, we’re here to help take that off your to-do list.

To learn more on your own, check out our Social Media Field Guide below. It’s chock full of information on how to get started, marketing trends, where to focus your efforts, and so much more.