Everything About Email Marketing for Small Businesses

How email marketing can help your small business

Let’s say, you start a small business these days. When it comes to marketing, the first thing you might think of is to sign up on a social media platform to promote your goods or services.  

Social media is indeed the most obvious option in 2024 and you should make use of those social media channels that are relevant to your brand. While it’s a valid strategy, don’t overlook the enduring power of email marketing. Fashion comes and goes, and classic email marketing is alive and well like a little black dress, and still takes up a huge portion of the marketing structure.

Email remains a powerhouse for small businesses. It’s not about choosing between email and social media – it’s about leveraging both strategically for maximum impact.

Small business email marketing is used to strengthen the relationships with the customers. Tools may differ, but the approach remains — to get closer to each customer and to give him exactly what they want. 

7 reasons why email marketing is a must for a small business

Mainstream ads often reach people who have little to no interest in the product. Whereas emails deliver personalized and highly anticipated messages to their subscribers that boost engagement and conversion.

1. Cost-effective promotion

Investments are a pain point for every small brand, especially when they are just making their first small steps in the big world of business.

Forget blowing your budget on pricey ads. Email marketing gives you a megaphone for your message at a fraction of the cost. 

2. Direct communication

Any business — big or small — values its clients, but for small businesses especially, every single prospect matters. Direct communication through email marketing improves sales by fostering personal connections and trust. 

Good email marketing is very direct and personal, getting your message straight into your subscriber’s inbox. The subscriber has already shown interest in your product or service by doing so much as opting in. 

3. Brand awareness

Email is becoming an even more powerful marketing tool, with people having separate messages for work, private communication, newsletters and deals, etc. No wonder, social media platforms ask for a valid email address to sign you up and send you notifications about likes and shares using this channel, which makes emails almost omnipresent, with no geographical or age distinction.

Starting with the very first welcome email and on, email marketing is about building strong relationships with a customer and nurturing continuous trust on their part. With email marketing, you can keep your brand top-of-mind with regular, valuable touchpoints to distinguish yourself among the ocean of other companies. 

4. Self-reliance

You collect your email list yourself, and you are not tied to the decisions of other businesses like social media platforms (like those who are trying to expand their businesses using only social media channels). It means, the platform’s sudden collapse won’t take your list down, if anything.

5. Customer retention

With well-segmented lists and personalized emails, your recipients are more closely engaged with your brand. It means that they are more open to providing honest feedback about the product or service, which is a key point for future growth.

6. Valuable analytics

It is crucial for assessing your company’s performance and planning future campaigns. Key metrics can help you keep up with your target audience and improve your business strategy.

7. Traffic and sales

When you create emails based on scenarios, your subscribers receive only what they are interested in. This is important for turning potential buyers into real ones. This direct approach encourages your audience to take action — click on links, subscribe, make a purchase directly from the email. This increases the conversion rate, and therefore the income.

How to do email marketing for small businesses step-by-step

Before launching your email marketing, it’s a good idea to think the strategy over in all detail. Here are some clues to what you should begin with.

1. Choose the best email marketing service

Pick an email marketing platform that aligns with your needs and budget. Look for user-friendly interfaces and robust features like automation and analytics (if you need those, that is).

2. Define your email marketing goals

Set clear, measurable objectives. Are you aiming for more sales, better engagement, or increased brand loyalty? Be specific and track your progress.

Decide what emails you need to send in the first place. Among all types of emails that are used in email marketing, there are three types that every small business should try. They are:

1. Welcome emails. The study by GetResponse shows that the welcome email open rate is 80% or higher, which makes them much more effective than standard newsletters. Your subscribers are just waiting to get your incentive or the content you promised in exchange for their email address, so make them feel valued. For every small business, welcome emails are a wonderful opportunity to stand out and feel personal, especially if you include great storytelling about how it all started. 
2. Promotional emails. According to MarketingSherpa, about 60% of consumers subscribe to a brand’s list to get promotional messages and deals compared to only 20% that just follow brands on social media. Think about giving these emails a try to boost your open and click-through rates and don’t forget to mention the incentive in your subject line. It’s an easy and free way to increase your sales.
3. Re-engagement emails. Your recipients may lose interest in your messages with time, and it’s ok. So, in re-engagement emails, you can ask the non-openers why they are no longer interested and offer them a discount or any other incentive to restart your relationships. If they respond, it’s a win-win. If not, it will still help you learn who is no longer interested in your messages. Delete inactive subscribers to maintain your list hygiene, and your email engagement rate will improve, as well as your reputation among internet service providers.

3. Identify your audience and build a quality email list

Get to know your people. What are their pain points? What solutions can you offer? Use surveys and data analysis to understand your audience’s preferences.

Quality trumps quantity. Grow your list organically with opt-in forms and lead magnets. Avoid the temptation to buy email lists — it’s not just ineffective, it’s often illegal.

Here are tips on how to build a high-quality list:

• Try out tools that suit your audience most (feel free to apply more than one option): signup forms on your website, landing pages, social media, cross-promotional deals, webinars, etc. For example, you can try to encourage your website/social media visitors to sign up in exchange for a freebie (e.g. a trial period, a checklist) that works as a lead magnet. Almost every email marketing service has ready-to-use sign-up form templates to help you grow your list. For example, with Selzy, this feature is free and can be done in a couple of easy steps.
• Make sure you use a double opt-in to have people willingly click the link in the confirmation email to get to your email list. These people will be your highest quality leads as they went an extra mile to become your subscriber. Also, their double-checked agreement means they are unlikely to mark you as spam, which could definitely spoil your reputation with your email service provider and influence the deliverability of your messages.

Again, never ever buy an email list! It’s like buying friends, which is no good. Bought contacts may be indifferent to what you have to offer or may consider your unexpected messages as spam cluttering their inboxes.

4. Segment your audience

One size doesn’t fit all. Take care of segmenting the new list before sending your first campaign. Group your subscribers based on interests, behavior, or demographics. 

Why is this important? Collecting customer data and preferences will allow you to offer them a personalized experience, and according to the latest HubSpot data, 96% of marketers note that such customers with a positive personalized feedback often become regular customers.

It will make your campaign relevant and unique to a particular group of recipients. As a result, it will boost opens and conversions, as the content of emails to segmented audiences is what they are really waiting for. Say, the male audience of an online underwear store won’t be bombarded by female bra offers. 

5. Design and craft your emails

To increase customer engagement, companies need to be customer-centric, building trust by making their emails targeted, relevant, and the benefits clear. Offer tips, insights, or exclusive content that your subscribers can’t resist.

This all begins with the content and the design you choose for your campaigns as marketing psychology still works wonders. The goal of an email design is to make reading your message a memorable experience so that your subscriber wants to stick with you.

Here are some things to consider from a psychological point of view:

• People prefer simple and clear information. Remember Hick’s Law stating that the more choices you present your users with, the longer it will take them to reach a decision? So, keep textual and visual hierarchy clear to help your recipient digest all you have to say and offer. And don’t forget about prominent (without overdoing it) CTA and unsubscribe buttons — they are all about your subscriber’s freedom of choice.
• Subscriber’s behavior can be influenced by visual and verbal cues. So, push them to a positive response by highlighting certain information. Integrate user-generated content, or social proofs and grab the attention of your consumers effectively to build trust for your small business. Another hint: try to use the same color for the wording of your offer and your CTA button, which will help the recipients’ brains tie them together. 

6. Provide valuable content

Many will report emails as spam if marketers don’t get the content and frequency right, even if your email isn’t actually spam. Consumers have the power to get rid of the irrelevant messages that are cluttering up their inboxes, so make their experience with your small business exceptional and memorable to escape the spam folder.

How many emails to send then? Well, it depends on the type of messages you are sending. A good tip here is to set expectations and to tell your recipients how often they will hear from you (and probably what day of the week/ time of day, if you write twice, for example), which you can do as early as in your welcome email.

Moreover, our experience shows that if you decrease the number of emails to inactive subscribers, the relative metrics for your campaigns will increase, and the deliverability of your emails (which is based on how your messages are read) will improve, as well. And psychologically, for a subscriber, it’s nice not to have their inboxed crammed with piles of emails. Besides, usually, if you send less, you will have to pay less to your ESP.

7. Optimize for mobile

If your emails are not mobile-first or at least mobile-optimized, you’re missing out on a lot of potential connections, customers, leads, and sales.

Make your email campaigns visually appealing and functional. Use responsive design to ensure your emails look great on any device. It’s very easy to do in Selzy’s email builder:

Most email service providers offer responsive email templates that are based on grids to help you keep design consistency on any screen.

8. Implement automation

Small businesses typically find themselves strapped for time to do marketing, as they have operational tasks to perform. To create a continual stream of business and to find new customers, businesses need to unceasingly market themselves.

And here is when automation is of great help. They spare your time for more important strategic tasks while taking care of the routine. Isn’t routine what we all want to get rid of?

Work smarter, not harder. Set up automated sequences for welcome emails, abandoned carts, and more. Litmus says that 87% of B2C marketers use automation as part of their email marketing strategy.

Consider sending an email series – flexible trigger-based (preferably dynamic – changing with the choices made by the subscriber) messages that adapt to subscriber’s behavior boosting their experience with your business. The first thing to do here is to analyze which triggers influence your subscribers’ behavior.

Ask subscribers for their preferences and take advantage of customer behavior and insights like geolocation, past purchases, customer status, and more to make their experience as personal as possible. 

9. Analyze and improve

Numbers don’t lie.

When your campaign is sent, it’s time to analyze the efficiency. With the right tools, email marketing is your most measurable channel. It includes basic metrics like deliverability, unsubscribes, open, click-to-open, and conversion rates — all created to track each subscriber’s behavior and preferences.

Here is why a small business needs to track the performance of its campaigns:

• To learn how many sent emails were opened. It simply shows the interest of the audience in your product, or whether the subject line worked.
• To learn what your subscribers like about your emails. What works for your audience, and what doesn’t. Click-through rate is a great tracking metric allowing you to predict what will work in the future for your recipients.
• To assess how your list grows and decays, how many people unsubscribe. It is useful for keeping your list clean and up-to-date. Sending emails to those ones who are not interested may end up with your campaigns getting to the spam folder.
• To learn how many emails were delivered and how many were considered spam by internet service providers or marked as spam by your audience. This info might be used to timely save your campaigns, if anything.
• To assess your email marketing ROI. You can as well check the number of transactions, the average amount spent after proceeding from the email, and the total amount your subscriber spent. 

Take your time and analyze your performance, as such a valuable lesson learned will help you improve your email marketing campaigns in the future.

Best practices to skyrocket your campaign

• Perfect your timing

According to our own findings, the best time to send a marketing email is in the morning, from 9 am to 12:00 pm, and the worst time is from 1 am to 3 pm. 

As for the days of the week, try sending on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Some new research also suggests Wednesdays and Mondays.

Test different send times to find your sweet spot. 

• Craft compelling subject lines

Every appealing email begins with a catchy and personal subject line. It’s like the image of a person that attracts your attention before you have exchanged a word. Make use of your subject line to entice your subscribers into opening the email and getting your message through. More converting subject lines are known to contain names, emojis, FOMOs, metaphors, etc.

• Personalize beyond names

Go deeper than “Hey [First Name].” Use behavior and preferences to make your content relevant to each of your subscribers. Personalized subject lines can increase open rates. 

• Focus on a clear call to action

Tell your subscribers what to do next. A clear call to action affects clickability rates. The click-through rate allows you to get an idea of how many of your total subscribers visit your website and ultimately make email conversions.

• Maintain brand consistency

Consistency is the key to recognition. And when people recognize you, it means stronger bonds with your brand. In practice, consistent design and content for all of your emails in a series or types of series means your recipients will understand it’s you before they have even started reading. And make sure that your email properly displays on different devices and has a recognizable layout if, for example, the subscriber opens it on their iPhone first, and later on a desktop.

• Leverage social proof

Show off a little. Use testimonials, reviews, and user-generated content to build trust. 

• Ensure deliverability

Your whole marketing campaign depends on the quality of delivery — on the number of open mailings, clicks and spam reports, so prioritization will have a huge impact on the success of your e-marketing. Avoid that your campaigns fall into the spam folder. Follow best practices to keep your emails landing in inboxes. 

• Respect privacy and compliance

Play by the rules. Stay up-to-date with email regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM. Non-compliance can result in hefty fines and damage to your reputation.

Email marketing for small businesses isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s a must-have in 2024. It’s your direct line to customers, a sales booster, and a relationship builder all rolled into one. Start small, stay consistent, and watch your business grow. Ready to hit send on your success?

5 best email marketing services for small businesses

Email marketing services are special services that are used to send email campaigns, track and analyze their efficiency. Here are 5 popular options:

1. Selzy

User-friendly interface with the most flexible email builder on the market. And it is also possible to get 24/7 support – via chat, email or by phone, even on the free plan. Perfect for small businesses looking to scale their email marketing efforts.

2. HubSpot

A more complex (and pricey) option, but might prove ideal for businesses seeking an all-in-one marketing solution. Its email marketing tool integrates seamlessly with CRM and other marketing features, providing a holistic approach to customer engagement.

3. Moosend

A budget-friendly option with an intuitive drag-and-drop editor. Great for small businesses that want professional-looking emails without breaking the bank.

4. GetResponse

A solid all-rounder with a built-in landing page builder. Offers a good balance of features and usability, making it suitable for businesses at various growth stages.

5. Brevo

Known for its robust transactional email features. Excellent choice for e-commerce businesses or those requiring advanced email automation capabilities.

You might wonder why there are so many of them, why people are just not sending commercial emails from their personal email accounts.

• They are not intended for bulk emails. So, if you still use a regular mailbox for your campaigns, they will likely get into spam folders or not reach inboxes at all!
• They can’t provide you with the stats to analyze your campaign’s performance. For example, unsubscribe rate management is impossible with them. And campaigns without such unsubscribe links are illegal.
• It’s difficult to create a beautifully designed email, as there are no templates in your regular mail.

Things to look for when choosing email marketing software:

• Deliverability. Does the service have a good reputation with email providers so your messages get to the inboxes? All responsible ESPs take care of their ratings with internet service providers, so deliverability mostly depends on the client themselves — on the quality of the list, the usage of dedicated IPs, the setting of authentification.
• Automation and segmentation. Does the service allow you to set up marketing automation, schedule your campaigns, and segment the list by tagging the audience?
• Integrations and other communication channels. Is it possible to integrate the service with other business tools you use? Is there a possibility to send SMS, or set up web pushes for your website? It’s an important point as it helps grow your business and conveniently keep all business activities in one place.
• Analytics. Does the service have strong analytic features so you can understand what to improve and optimize?
• Usability and ready-to-use templates. Is the service intuitive to use, both for standard tasks and advanced functions? Does it have a variety of templates for any campaign you would like to send? Usually, small businesses don’t have a designer for that, that’s why it’s convenient when you can easily create an email with a block editor. 
• Support. Is support service available 24/7 and how fast do they respond? It’s very important to get help fast, especially for a small business that usually has to deal with marketing themselves.

Challenges of small business email marketing

• Cutting through inbox clutter. With the average person receiving dozens of emails per day, standing out is crucial.
• Maintaining list quality. Regularly cleaning your list to remove inactive subscribers is essential for better engagement rates and deliverability.
• Consistent content creation. Producing valuable, relevant content regularly can be time-consuming for small teams.
• Avoiding subscriber fatigue. Finding the right email frequency to keep subscribers engaged without overwhelming them can be hard.
• Measuring ROI accurately. Tracking the impact of email marketing on overall business goals can be complex for small businesses with limited resources.

Conclusion

Email marketing isn’t just a nice-to-have for small businesses – it’s a must-have strategy in 2024. It’s your direct line to customers, a sales booster, and a relationship builder all rolled into one powerful tool. 

1. Email marketing is not dead, being one of the most cost-effective and conversive forms of digital marketing today. Besides, it is the main driver for customer retention and acquisition.
2. When used wisely, it drives not only a positive customer experience (which builds trust) but amazing ROI.
3. When designing a campaign, stay true to your brand identity, use personalization which is one of the most popular email marketing tactics, create lifetime value for your subscribers, and keep your email marketing customer-focused. It will help you build a strong connection to your subscribers and make your emails memorable, thus, increasing sales through customer loyalty.
4. Make mobile integration a key part of your email marketing strategy, as more and more people use mobile devices to check their inboxes.
5. Any email marketing platform can automate and personalize your campaigns for you (although in varying respects), sparing you the time for more important business activities.
6. Last but not least, stay consistent and analyze the performance of your campaigns. It will help you define your weak points and improve future results.

This article was originally published in August 2021 and was updated in October 2024 to make it more relevant and comprehensive.