Woman creating email marketing for a small business while following our 2024 Dos and Don'ts

Email marketing is one of the most consistent and stable forms of digital marketing of the last 30 years. It’s especially effective for small businesses to reach and communicate with their customers and community. There can be plenty to consider and strategize for effective email marketing. Therefore, to start your 2024 off right, we’ve created a list of some essential DOs and DON’Ts of email marketing for small businesses.

DOs

  • Set Up DMARC Authentication: The Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) is a protocol that authenticates those sending on a domain. This allows you to track and monitor everything sent on your domain, preventing the possibility of someone spoofing your domain and sending false emails on your business’s behalf. It’s best practice to set this up, but in 2024 it is also becoming a requirement from Google and Yahoo.
  • Verify Your Sending Domain: Effective email marketing requires using a third-party platform for creating campaigns, designing automations, managing audiences, and more. However, to send on your domain’s behalf, these services require you to authenticate your domain. Be sure to do this, so your emails come from your domain rather than the service’s proxy. Along with DMARC, this is also becoming a requirement of Google in 2024.
  • Link Everything: It might sound simple but don’t forget to link every image and button in your email. Along with opens, you want people to click on your email marketing to access your small business’ services and products. Users also now expect images and buttons to be linked and may become confused when a relevant image doesn’t go somewhere.
  • Keep Branding Consistent: Your email marketing, like any marketing, should be consistent with your brand. This ensures its messaging and appearance properly reflect your business. That consistency with your business, its other marketing, as well as keeping it consistent throughout all your email marketing will increase your audience’s trust in your emails.
  • Avoid Spam Complaints: A healthy sender reputation is critical for the success of your email marketing. It allows your emails to reach users’ inboxes where they will open and click them. This is why you need to avoid spam complaints, which will harm that sender reputation. Be sure you are only sending emails to subscribed recipients and follow Canadian regulations to avoid spam complaints.

DON’Ts

  • Forget About the Alt Text: Emails usually include at least a few images that are part of your messaging. It’s essential for your email marketing’s accessibility that you define the alt text for each of these images. This allows anyone who may have difficulty seeing these images can still comprehend your content.
  • Have Too Many Calls to Action: Don’t overburden your email with too many messages. Stay focused and limit the call to actions you want your recipients to perform, or else they may become overwhelmed. Research has shown that keeping an email down to at most two calls to action seriously improves click rates.
  • Write Wordy Subject Lines: Just like you shouldn’t overburden the contents of your email marketing, you also should keep your subject lines short and sweet. Remember, brevity is the soul of wit. The recommended maximum is 9 words, but an effective email marketing subject can be even shorter. Try to create something that is quickly captivating and piques a recipient’s interest. Let the email itself do the job of delivering the full message.
  • Forget the Unsubscribe Button: It’s legally required in Canada to include an option for your audience members to withdraw their consent to receive messages. The new requirements by Google in 2024 will also require this unsubscribe to be only one step and easy to see within your email itself. Plus, making this easy will reduce receiving spam complaints that will harm your small business’ sender reputation.
  • Send Without Testing Your Email: After you have diligently designed and written out that perfect email campaign, don’t just schedule and send it out to the world without first testing it yourself. Every email platform provides testing tools to send the email to a single account. This allows you to make sure everything is linked, is linked correctly and displays properly. Be sure to test it with a few different email service providers. Even certain versions of some providers are infamous for not displaying emails correctly. Also, make sure to test the device on desktop and mobile devices since assets may appear differently on each kind of device.

Mastering the Power of Email Marketing

Email marketing continues to be a powerful tool for any small business’ digital marketing. It’s a powerful channel for effectively and directly communicating with your audience. These email marketing dos and don’ts will help you start to master its techniques. If you’re looking for more advice to improve your email marketing for 2024, or are hoping to start email marketing, contact our marketing services team at Rosewood.

The Rosewood team sitting together to review a productive 2023

In some ways the holiday break went a little too fast, but at the same time the Rosewood team is excited to continue existing projects and start a ton of new ones this year! We have a lot of digital marketing to strategize and websites to design and launch. However, just like previous years, we’re kicking off 2024 with a review of the success and accomplishments we and our clients shared in 2023.

2023 Proved No Less Busy Than 2022

In fact, 2023 kept us even busier as we served over 120 clients from developing websites to creating comprehensive marketing plans, and everything in between. To address our growing scope and project lists, we had a few new members join Rosewood. We’re still a small and focused team across our Canada-wide offices, but that hasn’t prevented us from making big accomplishments this past year. That focus also allowed us to provide individual and local attention to many of our small business clients concentrated in Newmarket, Uxbridge, Aurora, and around the GTA.

The Launch of Rosewood Fundraising

Rosewood launched a new division in 2023 dedicated to nonprofits that benefit their local communities: Rosewood Fundraising. We have been supporting and providing our services to nonprofits since Rosewood’s beginning; however, this new division dedicates itself to marketing solutions and strategies along with fundraising technologies that are honed to each nonprofit’s needs. Along with our digital marketing expertise, our new division includes our successful Catch the Ace lottery system as well as the new Fundraising for Good platform.

New Services and Insights from Rosewood in 2024

Our review shows 2023 was already a big year, and before we show how by listing all the incredible wins our team had this year, we want to discuss what the year ahead has in store to make it just as exciting. Along with the many projects already underway and soon to start this year, we are thrilled to unveil that we will soon be expanding our consulting services. We’re excited to launch this new service that will only further help small businesses succeed.

These consulting services will provide businesses and organizations with our team’s technical and industry expertise to identify the unique needs and best strategies they should put into practice. These comprehensive services will include website audits, social media branding and strategizing, email and SMS setup and best practices. For ads, these will go beyond traditional campaigns to focus on customized strategies, utilizing a full range of digital tools and resources. These consultations will be precisely tailored to meet the unique needs of every small business we collaborate with.

Wins from 2023

Websites:

  • 31 websites launched!
  • 50 ongoing website maintenance clients with over 570 hours spent in 2023 on various maintenance tasks.
  • Countless websites optimized.

Ads:

  • Generated over 110,000 clicks, directing traffic to a variety of local businesses, and boosting their online presence and customer engagement.
  • Achieved over 16,000 conversions encompassing leads, purchases, phone calls, directions requests, and much more.
  • Conducted extensive A/B testing with over 2,000 headlines across multiple industries to capture the unique voice and appeal of each business and sector.

Digital Media:

  • Over 1100 social posts were uploaded across all major channels to help businesses and nonprofits grow their reach and foster their digital community.
  • 112 email newsletters and many more email automations developed and sent to keep business’ clients and customers up to date while fostering loyalty.
  • 103 blogs written with another 64 also posted to improve website SEO while educating and entertaining site visitors.
  • 42 hours dedicated to copywriting not including editing and implementation.

Fundraising:

  • Launch of Rosewood Fundraising as its own dedicated division.
  • Over $1 million in Catch the Ace transactions processed with proceeds directly supporting community programs across Ontario!

Misc.

  • Further integration of Monday.com for client-facing operations, allowing them to track and update projects.
  • Hundreds of Video Tutorials recorded for clients and team members.
  • Hundreds of eye-catching graphics created.
  • Thousands of perfect images licensed and sourced.
  • Thousands of hours spent on Zoom, Google Meet and Slack Huddles!

Starting 2024 Right

Reflecting on all we’ve accomplished in our review of 2023, we’re only more excited to get started with 2024. We have plenty more websites to design, social posts to create, and ads to review, let alone the exciting things brewing both in our consulting services and over at Rosewood fundraising. We have big goals ahead for ourselves and our many clients. The new year is always a perfect time to set your own business resolutions to accomplish by the year’s end. If you have some big goals whether it’s web design, ads, social media marketing, fundraising, email marketing, or more be sure to contact us to get the year off to the right start.

A rocket launching out of a laptop. A metaphor for speeding up website loading times.

One of the most common frustrations we experience today is watching a website slowly load in. Images pop in late, the page’s structure suddenly reorganizes itself and we’re back at the top, or we may never see the page at all. With the speed of modern data networks, usually a web page loads instantly. However, if a website hasn’t been properly optimized for speed and short loading times, it can suddenly become a snail. That’s not something you want for your business’ website. We discuss some of the best web design practices for ensuring faster load times for your website.

Why Website Speed Matters

Website load speed simply matters because it has a direct impact on your conversion rates. If your website is slower, you are less likely to get sales, orders, new clients, etc. This is the case for both B2C (business to customer) and B2B (business to business) businesses. Studies have shown that for B2B websites, a website that loads in 1 second has 3x the conversion of one that loads in 5 seconds and 5x one that loads in 10 seconds. The difference is similar for e-commerce B2C businesses, where a 1-second website has 2.5x the conversion rate of those loading in 5 seconds.

What is a Good Website Loading Speed?

In the simplest terms, the faster a website loads, the better. However, a website will always take some time to load, even if a fraction of a second. It might be easier to determine when the average becomes frustrated and gives up. Studies’ have found that its best to remain within 2.5 seconds, and the longest ideal time for a webpage to load is 4 seconds. After that, the conversion rate drops to half of what it was at 1 second.  

Determining Your Website’s Loading Time

To optimize your website’s loading time, you need to determine its speed. For a proper test, you need to consider different network speeds, device types, and that each page will have a different speed. Thankfully, Google has developed a free tool for the job: PageSpeed. Just by entering your business’ URL, PageSpeed will run a full a diagnostic on your website’s loading times. The test can also be run for a mobile device or computer, helping you determine if a certain version of your website has a speed issue.

Putting Your Website in High Gear

Once you determine your website could be faster, you will need to start optimizing. Here are some of the essential practices for speeding up your website’s load times:

Reducing Image Sizes

One of the main factors that affect a website’s load time is file sizes. A user’s device needs to download these files from a website to display them in their browser. Text is overall fast for a device to load. However, images, if not optimized, can be large and slow down your website considerably. Best practice is to keep the largest dimension of a website at 1200px or below. If you’ve used raw or stock photos, these tend to be 3 or 4 times bigger and just as hefty. File format is also important. JPEGs and PNGs can be relatively small in file size, but a WEBP is overall a more optimized format for website loading times.

Embedding Videos Rather than Hosting

Pictures can be large files; videos can be huge. That’s why a best practice for website speed is to upload a video to another service like YouTube or Vimeo. These allow you to embed a video on your site, making it part of the page’s display while keeping it hosted on these other services. Devices will retrieve the video from these faster sites while also keeping your site’s load size and time down.

Preventing Long Pages

An essential practice for website speed optimization is limiting the size of web pages. For example, if someone browses a store’s inventory, the page should not try to load all 250 products at once. That will slow the page down. Instead, make sure your website uses pagination or progressive loading for larger sections of your site. These smaller sections will take less load time and have less impact on a browser.

Look at Apps, Widgets, Plugins, etc.

Apps, widgets, and plugins often provide essential functionality to a business’ website. However, by adding that additional functionality, they can also increase a website’s load time. Monitor how these apps affect your site’s performance and weigh the importance of their functionality against their speed impact. Also, keep these add-ons updated with regular website maintenance. This will keep the tools optimized while also preventing any security vulnerabilities that could develop in older versions.

Some of Our Favourite Optimization Tools for Website Speed

Along with Google’s PageSpeed, our web team has two favourite tools for optimizing a website’s load time:

  • WP Rocket: This WordPress tool manages the website’s cache, cleans up the database, removes unused CSS, and defers JavaScript to prioritize a page’s content.
  • Shortpixel: This convenient tool will convert and deliver images on a website into WEBP format.

Don’t Wait on Improving Your Website’s Load Times

Now you know some of the essential best practices for improving and optimizing a website’s load times. We recommend optimizing your site right away. That swift website speed will provide your users with an optimal experience on all their devices. In turn, that improves your business’ conversion rate. If you want help optimizing or maintaining your website’s speed, contact our web design team.