How To Do Email Marketing For Small Businesses in 2024

Email marketing can help your small business achieve huge growth. But if you don’t have much experience, it’s hard to set up a campaign. We’ve created this in-depth guide to tell you everything you need to know before you get started. We’ll cover:

• The benefits of email marketing for small businesses
• How to set up a campaign
• Tips and best practices for an effective campaign
• How to measure your campaign’s success
• The top 5 email marketing platforms for small businesses

Let’s get started!

The Benefits of Email Marketing for Small Businesses

We cannot emphasize enough the importance of email marketing for small businesses. Here are just a selection of the benefits you’ll get from email marketing:

Email is a Reliable Marketing Channel

Email marketing is more stable and reliable than other marketing channels like social media. Here’s why:

• No reliance on algorithms: Unlike SEO and social media marketing, you don’t need to adapt to algorithm updates.
• Platform control: Email marketing doesn’t rely on third-party platforms or centralized networks. All you need is an email service provider (ESP) and a subscriber list. This gives you total control over your marketing platform.
• Audience control: You also don’t need to rely on third-party platforms to access your audience. Once you have your list, you own it and you can move it between platforms as you wish.

Low Cost Per Customer

The majority of businesses spend thousands of dollars each month on SEO and social media marketing. This can create a barrier to entry for small businesses with limited budgets, especially startups.

On the flip side, email marketing campaigns can be set up for very low costs. The costs vary based on factors like the number of contacts, the price of the email marketing software you use, and the volume of emails sent per month.

Yet, email marketing still costs far less per customer than SEO and social media. This makes it a great marketing option for small businesses.

Brand Awareness and Reach

It’s hard for small businesses to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs) and break through on social media. Email marketing is essential to building brand awareness.

There are around 4.48 billion email users globally, so you can potentially reach a huge audience via email. This is essential for keeping your brand top-of-mind among your audience and increasing engagement with your business.

Customer Retention

Retaining your existing customers is less expensive than attracting new customers. Email marketing is an ideal channel to improve customer retention. For example, you can send product recommendation emails based on purchase history and win-back emails to disengaged customers. This helps nurture and retain your existing customers.

Targeted Communication

Email marketing also allows for hyper-targeted communications with your audience. By using audience segmentation, you can target your subscribers based on behaviors, demographics, and preferences. This leads to improved user engagement and increased conversion rates. We’ll get into segmentation in much more detail later.

How to Set Up Email Marketing For Your Small Business

Where do you begin? Let’s take you through the steps you need to follow to set up a successful email marketing campaign.

(Alternatively, hire an expert agency for ecommerce email marketing like InboxArmy to do it all for you. Our team handles every aspect of your campaign from email design and coding to integrations and migrations.)

1. Choose The Right Email Marketing Platform

Yes, you can set up an email marketing campaign using a service provider like Outlook or Gmail. But don’t. Especially in today’s deliverability environment, it’s simply not a good idea.

It’s best to use an email marketing platform so that you can automate your campaigns, design emails with ease, and track performance. When choosing a platform, there are several things you need to consider, like:

• Drag-and-drop editor: If nobody on your team knows how to code, it’s essential that the platform has a drag-and-drop editor. This allows you to drag different elements and drop them into your email designs, which makes it very easy to design customized emails.
• Personalization features: Personalizing your emails is one of the best ways to increase engagement. Ensure the platform you choose has a personalization feature. This enables you to personalize your emails with customer names and other things like birthdays and specific interests.
• Form builder: If the platform has a built-in form builder, you can create a signup form for your mailing list and add it to your social media posts, blog posts, and website’s home page. Signup forms are vital for growing your subscriber list.
• Analytics tools: One of the greatest benefits of using a platform is tracking your campaign’s performance metrics. That’s why the platform you choose should have a robust analytics tool for tracking metrics like open rates, click-through rates (CTR), even conversions and revenue.

Here’s a glimpse at what Mailchimp’s analytics dashboard looks like:

2. Create a Signup Form

Once you’ve chosen the right platform, it’s time to create a signup form so you can start building your subscriber list. Due to data privacy laws like GDPR and the CAN-SPAM Act, you need to gain explicit consent from users before you start sending them marketing emails. That’s why you need a signup form where users can opt-in to receive your emails.

Your form should be simple and shouldn’t ask users for too much information. Typically, a name and an email address should suffice. Here’s an example:

It should also contain a clear call-to-action (CTA), encouraging users to sign up for your list. To prevent your domain from being marked as spam by email service providers, you may want to go for a double opt-in. This is where users have to confirm their email address once they’ve signed up for your list.

3. Start Building Your Mailing List

Now you’re ready to get your signup form out there so users can subscribe to your mailing list. You want to aim for maximum visibility by utilizing your other marketing channels. A great channel to use for this is social media.

To promote your signup form on social media, create posts relevant to your niche and your target audience. Creating relevant and valuable posts demonstrates your authority to your audience and makes them more likely to follow the link and sign up for your mailing list.

For example, if you run a SaaS company that sells project management tools, you could create a post about how to create an effective project timeline.

At the end of the post, you should include a CTA and a link to your signup form. Plus, you should add the link to your Instagram bio.

4. Decide What Types of Emails To Send

Once you’ve established a mailing list, it’s time to decide what types of emails you want to send to your subscribers. An effective email campaign should include many different types of emails, from discount code emails to newsletters.

It’s best to start with a small number of email types that are essential to get your campaign moving in the right direction. Here are some suggested email automations to get you started:

Welcome emails

Start off your email marketing campaign with a welcome email series. These emails are designed to welcome new subscribers (as the name suggests) and let them know what to expect moving forward.

Make the emails highly engaging to entice readers to learn more about your brand. These emails are meant to kickstart the process of nurturing leads toward conversion. They’re used to introduce your brand, give some info about your products/services, and should include a CTA encouraging users to convert, like this:

It’s also common for welcome emails to include discounts, offers, or free downloadable content. This creates a sense of exclusivity for your subscribers and is a good way to build user trust.

Abandoned cart recovery emails

Abandoned cart recovery emails are automatically sent when a user abandons their cart in your online store without making a purchase. You’ll need to use an email marketing automation tool to set up the triggers for them (which I’ll cover in more detail later). The aim of these emails is to encourage users to purchase whatever is in their abandoned cart. Abandoned cart recovery emails usually include:

• Compelling subject lines to grab the user’s attention.
• A personalized greeting addressed to the recipient.
• A clear summary of the abandoned item with product descriptions, images, and prices.
• An incentive to complete the purchase such as a discount.
• A clear CTA button encouraging the user to make the purchase.
• Social proof like customer reviews emphasizing the benefits of the product.

This is a good example of how to do it:

Cross-selling emails

Cross-selling emails recommend complementary products/services to customers based on the products/services they’ve previously bought or shown interest in. Businesses that use cross-selling have been shown to experience a 20% increase in sales. But how do they work?

Let’s say a customer buys a camera from your online store. This event will trigger a cross-selling series that recommends products like camera bags and tripods. The emails should contain:

• High-quality images of the products
• A list of benefits
• Suggestions for how these products can be used to complement the original product
• The price of the products
• Incentives such as discounts
• A clear CTA, encouraging the user to buy them

Cross-selling emails are an effective way to engage users with personalized recommendations. This improves trust and can lead to loyal customers who continue to convert.

Here’s an example of a cross-selling email that recommends complementary services:

5. Design Your Emails

Finally, you’re ready to start designing your emails. The type of design you use depends on the type of email you’re sending. For instance, a newsletter will look a lot different from an abandoned cart recovery email. However, there are some steps you should always take when designing emails, such as:

• Maintain brand consistency: The branding you use for your email campaigns needs to be consistent with the branding you use across every other marketing channel. This helps users easily identify and remember your brand.
• Include a header and a CTA: Use the header to tell recipients exactly what the email is about and use the CTA to tell them what you want them to do.
• Use visuals: Include eye-catching visuals in your email designs like infographics, GIFs, and high-resolution photos. This breaks up walls of text and makes your emails more engaging.
• Use responsive designs: Ensure your email designs are responsive so that they automatically adjust for mobile devices. This means they’ll be readable on smaller screens.

Here’s a good example of a survey request email with nice branding, good use of visuals, and a clear CTA:

How To Measure The Success Of Small Business Email Marketing

How do you evaluate the performance of your email campaigns once they’re up and running? The answer is to use the analytics feature of an email marketing platform to track metrics, such as:

• Open rate: This is the percentage of recipients who open your emails when they land in their inbox. The open rate indicates the effectiveness of your subject lines and gives you an idea of user engagement with your overall email marketing campaign.
• Unsubscribe rate: This measures the number of recipients of an email campaign who unsubscribed from your mailing list after receiving your emails. If your unsubscribe rate is high, it suggests issues with the relevance of your content, low audience satisfaction, and potential problems with your segmentation and targeting strategies.
• Click-through rate (CTR): CTR measures the percentage of users who clicked on the links in your emails after opening them. It tells you how well your CTAs are working and reflects the relevance of your email content.
• Conversion rate: This metric tracks the number of conversions you earn from delivered emails. It helps you determine the ROI of your email campaigns. As generating sales is the ultimate goal of most email campaigns, it’s the biggest marker of success in email marketing.
• Bounce rate: This measures how many of your emails are returned to the sender, which is known as bouncing. A soft bounce means the email wasn’t delivered due to a temporary issue and a hard bounce means there’s a permanent issue. Bounce rate helps you identify issues with your mailing list and tracking it allows you to clean it effectively.

All good email marketing software has a robust analytics feature where you can track these metrics. For example, Mailchimp makes it really easy to keep tabs on the performance of your email marketing campaigns:

Tips To Make Your Small Business Email Marketing Campaign Successful

We’ve shown you how to set up an email marketing campaign for your small business and how to measure its success. Next, we’re going to give you some tips and best practices to ensure it’s as effective as possible.

Segmentation

All email marketing campaigns should use some form of segmentation. Segmentation means dividing your mailing list into smaller groups based on user demographics and behaviors.

For example, a segment could consist of customers aged between 20 and 29 or simply users who have made a previous purchase from your business.

Segmenting your audience allows you to target users with highly tailored and personalized content. This ensures your emails are highly relevant to them and it should lead to better engagement and more conversions.

For small businesses in particular, it’s essential that your email service provider comes with pre-built segments so you don’t have to waste time creating them yourself. These are some of the pre-built segments you get with Mailchimp:

Email Marketing Automation

As a small business owner, you know how hard it is to keep on top of everything. So, imagine trying to manually send emails to all of your subscribers. Sounds impossible, right? That’s why you need to use email marketing automation.

By using the built-in automation feature within an email marketing platform, you can create email workflows that are triggered by certain events.

For example, when someone signs up for your mailing list, your welcome email series will be automatically triggered. This ensures the right emails are sent to the right users, at the right time.

Most of the email marketing platforms come up with pre-built workflows and triggers that make it really easy to automate your campaigns, like this:

Include social follow and share buttons

Your email marketing channel and your social media channels should go hand-in-hand. A great way to connect the two is to include buttons in your emails that allow users to share your email content on social media and start following you across multiple platforms.

This can massively increase the reach of your marketing messages while boosting engagement with your social media channel. Plus, when your loyal customers share your content on social media, it can really improve brand awareness.

Note: Only do this if you’re actually cultivating a useful and beneficial experience for the users across these social channels. Think about the value proposition of those communities and whether it’s a good place to land people.

We recommend including a concise CTA along with your social buttons to encourage users to follow you or share your content, like this:

A/B test your emails

A/B testing an email means creating two versions of an email that are identical apart from one key element. You’ll send the A version to a segment of your mailing list and the B version to another.

The aim is to see which version performs better in terms of specific metrics like open rate or CTR. This means you need to determine which metrics to measure before you send the emails.

Of course, you also need to decide which element you’re going to change for the B version. The element will usually be one of the following:

• The subject line
• The content
• The CTA
• The images
• The layout
• The name or sender name
• The message preview.

For instance, here we wanted to test three different subject lines:

A/B testing removes any guesswork from optimizing your email marketing efforts. It means you can gradually improve the performance of your email campaign based on the responses of your subscribers.

Use Email Templates

As a small business owner, you might not have much experience designing emails from scratch. We highly recommend using templates for your email campaigns. These are pre-built designs and layouts and all you need to do is customize them.

Again, all reputable email marketing platforms come with a library of pre-built templates for different email series and workflows. This typically includes templates for things like welcome emails, newsletters, and announcement emails, like this:

Using templates saves you a lot of time and resources. It also helps ensure your email formatting and visual elements are consistent.

5 Best Email Marketing Services For Small Businesses

We’ve given you all the advice you need to start creating your email campaign. However, as mentioned, you’ll need an email marketing platform to do this effectively. Here are some great picks for the best email marketing services for small businesses.

1. Mailchimp

• Pricing: Starts at $15 per month (500 contacts)
• G2 Rating: 4.4 stars

Mailchimp is a great option for small businesses as it’s affordable and easy to use. It has an intuitive interface, making the learning curve quite gentle, and includes all of the features you need to create a successful email marketing campaign.

It comes with pre-built email templates, segments, and automated workflows. So, you don’t need any coding or email marketing experience to get started.

Emails sent from Mailchimp also have more than a 99% deliverability rate and many users have seen a 25x increase in their ROI. This means you could get really good results for your small business for just $15 per month.

2. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

• Pricing: Free plan or starts at $9 per month
• G2 Rating: 4.5 stars

Brevo is another excellent choice for small businesses as it offers a fairly generous free plan. This allows you to set up an email campaign and learn the ropes before investing in the platform.

The free plan enables you to send 300 emails per day and gives you access to:

• The drag-and-drop editor
• Pre-built email templates
• WhatsApp and SMS campaigns
• Transactional emails

While the free plan is good for getting started, we recommend upgrading to the “Starter” plan once you get the hang of the platform. With this plan, you can use Brevo’s analytics tools to assess your campaign’s performance which is essential for success.

3. ActiveCampaign

• Pricing: Starts at $15 per month (1,000 contacts)
• G2 Rating: 4.5 stars

ActiveCampaign has the same starting price as Mailchimp but gives you twice the number of contacts for $15 per month. It can be integrated with over 900 third-party apps and has a robust A/B testing feature.

The reason it’s not higher on the list is that it does have a pretty steep learning curve. This is mostly due to the advanced nature of some of its features, like its detailed segmentation tool.

Yet, users can access helpful resources such as video tutorials and how-to guides. As a result, it’s still a good choice for small business owners who may not have much experience in email marketing.

4. Moosend

• Pricing: Starts at $9 per month (500 contacts)
• G2 Rating: 4.6 stars

Moosend has the same starting price as Brevo at just $9 per month and also offers a 30-day free trial. It includes all the features you’d expect from a high-quality platform, like a subscription form and landing page builder.

The learning curve is gentler than others. The interface is very user-friendly, it comes with plenty of pre-built templates, and the knowledge hub is packed with resources to help you get the most out of its features.

Its analytics tool provides detailed reports on the performance of your campaign, which makes it easy to fully optimize your emails. Plus, its smart segmentation feature allows you to create hyper-personalized campaigns that can even leverage real-time weather data.

5. Sender

• Pricing: Free plan or starts at $19 per month
• G2 Rating: 4.4 stars

Sender is a really comprehensive platform that’s fairly easy to use for beginners. The main reason it’s last on the list is that its paid plans have a higher starting price than the other four platforms.

Having said that, it does have a very generous free plan that allows for up to 2,500 contacts and lets you send up to 15,000 emails per month. This means the free version might actually be enough for some small businesses.

With the free plan, you also get access to:

• Google Analytics tracking
• Custom trigger automations
• The HTML editor
• The image library
• Custom timing
• Unlimited custom fields
• Automation reports

And much more!

Final Thoughts

Email marketing is essential for the growth of small businesses. It helps you build brand awareness, nurture leads, and greatly increase conversions. Yet, if you don’t have much email marketing experience, it can be tricky knowing where to start.

So, make sure you follow the steps laid out in this guide. This can serve as a roadmap to an effective email marketing campaign that’ll boost your revenue. The five platforms we recommended are all good options for small businesses, but there are plenty of others out there for you to choose from.

Remember to use the best practices we gave you, like segmenting your audience and automating your campaigns. If you do, you’ll be well on your way to creating engaging and valuable emails that your subscribers can’t wait to open!

FAQs

How often should small businesses send emails to their subscribers?

The optimal frequency for sending emails depends on several factors such as your industry, audience, and email marketing goals. Generally, we recommend having at least 1 email per week, and aiming for 2 to 3 emails per week if your product or service warrants it and your audience is responsive. You should test email frequencies and see what gets the best response from your audience. You don’t want to smother your audience, but you also don’t want to drop off the map.

How can I avoid my emails going to spam?

The best ways to avoid your emails going to spam include:

• Authenticating your emails with DMARC, DKIM, and SPF records.
• Using a reputable ESP.
• Avoiding spam trigger words in your subject lines.
• Regularly removing inactive subscribers and invalid addresses from your mailing list.

How do I create effective subject lines for my emails?

The easiest way to create effective subject lines is to personalize them by addressing them directly to the recipient. Plus, you should use catchy phrases to grab attention and use action-oriented phrases like “Join Us”.