Email Marketing Guide For Small Business

Of all the marketing tools out there, email marketing for small businesses is arguably the most valuable. Let’s face it, as a small business owner you need to stretch investment to gain impact, and there’s just no better way to do that than with email marketing. That’s because email marketing allows you to reach a highly interested and engaged audience at a very low price and with minimal effort.

While it may sound simple – just send emails! – there are many ways to maximize your email marketing efforts, from building your list to analyzing results, and more. So we’ve put together a comprehensive set of how-tos in order to make your small business’s email marketing as successful as possible.

What is email marketing?

But first, what actually is email marketing? It consists of sending targeted emails to customers who’ve actively opted in to hear more of what you have to say. These emails could include promotions, news, product launches, and incentives, among other content. The goal: to provide relevant information that your subscribers will find valuable, and to develop customer relationships in order to generate trust and loyalty.

What makes email marketing for small businesses particularly unique and important is that it’s direct and personalized, allowing you to cut through the noise, and focus on the message you want to get across. Whether the purpose is to promote, inform, retain (customers), or transact, emails give you the flexibility and precision to accomplish meaningful business objectives. 

Even better, email marketing can be leveraged by any type of business, regardless of its objective or size. Making it successful has little to do with actual monetary investment (great news for those on a budget!), and everything to do with strategy. That’s why we are getting down to the basics on how to make it especially fruitful for your small business.

How can email marketing help your small business?

Email marketing is one of the most valuable tools in your marketing toolbox. Indeed half of marketers say email marketing is their most impactful channel. That’s because, unlike other forms of marketing, it allows you to communicate with your most engaged customers, as well as with potential new customers. This allows you to develop a relationship with them, increasing credibility and loyalty, and ultimately generating more sales.

What also makes it particularly worthwhile for small businesses is that it builds on an already-existing point of differentiation in your business story: that you aren’t a massive corporation and, as such, your direct connection with the customer is even more genuine and meaningful.

Need more convincing? Here’s a list of key ways email marketing will be especially helpful for you and your small business:

• Low cost

It’s possible to start email marketing for next to nothing. With the smallest investment of time, you can start creating what will come to be one of your most precious marketing assets. All you need to start building your list is an easy-to-make online form.

• Higher ROI

Particularly of note for small businesses is that email marketing has a fantastically high return on investment – more than $36 earned for every dollar spent! So given a small business’s, well, small budget, the ability to invest a little and gain a lot is not to be underestimated. 

• Reach your audience directly

Few forms of marketing permit you to speak directly to your most targeted audience, and without any distractions. This allows you to send very relevant messages, and precisely measure and improve their success.

• Create loyal customers

Building an email list gives you direct access to your most interested audience, permitting your small businesses to develop credibility and connection with your clients. As such, existing customers are more likely to come back for more, and potential customers are more likely to turn into actual customers.

• Track and measure results (and direct sales)

The beauty of email marketing is that you can track and measure your results, and thus improve and fine-tune your efforts. By tracking data such as open rate, bounce rate, unsubscribes, conversions, and more, you can modify your list and message-sending in order to up your engagement and sales.

How to start using email marketing for your small business?

To start with email marketing, there are a few steps you must take. Follow these guidelines to run a successful email marketing campaign:

1. Choose an easy-to-use email marketing platform

If you’re managing your email campaigns manually, you probably don’t have the time for anything else. As a small business owner, you can’t afford to lose all your energy on just one aspect of your business when you have a whole business to run!

That’s why having an email marketing platform is crucial. What’s even more important is choosing the right email marketing tool to meet your business needs. Here are key features to look for when selecting your email marketing service:

• User-friendly editor

First and foremost, search for a tool that has a user-friendly editor. Whether you’re a tech person or not, an easy-to-use editor will save you loads of time and effort. Features could include the ability to drag and drop, or any other intuitive editor that allows you to create your emails in a few simple clicks.

• Professional-looking emails

Look for email marketing tool features that help you create professional-looking emails. Such features can include ready-to-use layouts or, even better, templates that you can customize depending on your business needs and goals.

• Customization options

Email customization options allow you to include your branding, such as your logo, brand colors, brand fonts, and other elements. It’s important that your customers recognize that the email is coming from your brand, based not only on the content but on its visual appearance as well.

• Responsive email design

Your emails should have a responsive design – that is, they need to look equally good both on desktop and mobile. That’s because users live in a dynamic world and open emails on various devices, depending on their current location. 

• Personalization options 

With so many emails sent out every day, it’s important to  personalize yours and stand out from the crowd. Personalization options can include, for example, the ability to automatically address your recipients by their first and/or last names within the emails you send to them.

• Healthy subscriber list

To keep a healthy subscriber list, the optimal email marketing platform will permit you to easily manage unsubscribed, hard bounced and other such contacts. This will, for example, help you to reduce bounce rate and maintain a good record as an email sender/marketer (and thus avoid your emails going to spam). Your email marketing platform should have these features, and they should be as automated and easy-to-manage as possible.

• Analytics tools

A detailed analytics tool is a vital feature of your email marketing platform in general, as you need to be able to track the performance of your email campaigns. By analyzing results, you can identify potential weaknesses and strengths, and then improve upcoming email campaigns accordingly.

• Deliverability

Not all email marketing platforms are created equally when it comes to your emails actually reaching recipients’ inboxes. To ensure high email marketing deliverability, choose a platform that has a good track record and reputation.

• Excellent customer support

You may come across doubts or concerns when using even the best email marketing platforms. So having the ability to ask questions and get quick answers and help from an excellent customer support team is absolutely critical and game changing. The ideal way to ensure the quality of a platform’s customer support is through personal experience (if you’re able), or to read reviews and ratings.

• Scalability

Successfully executed email marketing translates into business growth. As a result, if you’re on the right track, you will find your list growing, and may even need to import more new customers and/or leads into the platform. This calls for an email marketing platform that can scale along with your business needs, and all for a reasonable price and no extra effort on your side.

• Segmentation options

Last but not least you need to be able to segment your audience in order to send content that’s relevant to each group’s interests and needs. This further increases your opportunity to drive sales. Segmenting your audience (by labels, filters, etc) in an email marketing platform should be easy to do.

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2. Define your audience

Critical to any business is that of defining your target audience. This is just as important when getting started with email marketing for small business because you will want to be clear about who your recipients are, what they are looking for, and how you can offer them what they want. 

As a part of this effort, you may wish to break your audience out into different groups based on relevant criteria – for example, what they purchased, if they were added to your list via a specific campaign, if they are repeat customers, and so on. This will allow you to further target each individual segment with relevant email marketing messages, and – you guessed it – track those results!

3. Set the Right Goals

Setting the right goals for your email marketing campaign starts with asking yourself the right questions:

What are my business objectives? 

Identify the business goals of your email campaign. These could be:

• Brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Lead nurturing
• Driving conversions
• Customer retention

Who is my target audience?

To create relevant content, you need to first get to know your audience. You may consider:

• Demographics (age; gender; location; education, etc.)
• Psychographics (interests; hobbies; values; lifestyle, etc.)
• Professional life (occupation; industry; income, etc.)
• Behavioral patterns (purchasing and using products and services)

Based on these characteristics, you can segment your followers and start crafting relevant and engaging email marketing campaigns.

What type of content will help me achieve my goals?

Once you know your audience, you can think of the type(s) of content that will resonate with them. Here are some suggestions:

• Informative (blog posts; articles; white papers; case studies, etc.)
• Educational (how-to guides; tutorials; webinars; e-learning courses, etc.)
• Promotional (sales pages; promotional emails; social media ads, etc.)
• Entertaining (videos; podcasts; quizzes, etc.)
• Inspirational (interviews; success stories, etc.)
• News (press releases; newsletters, etc.)

What are my targets in regards to KPIs (what are my benchmarks for success)?

It’s important to measure the success of your email campaigns. Consider the following metrics:

• Open rate
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• Unsubscribe rate

Set goals for these metrics and monitor them closely after each email campaign.After analyzing the results, you can adapt and optimize your email strategy and future email campaigns.

Once you’ve set your goals, you’re one step closer to small-business success. Let’s explore what’s next.

4. Choose the type of emails to send

Identify the type of email you’ll send to a selected audience – this could include:

• welcome emails 
• announcement emails 
• monthly newsletters 
• promotional emails
• reminder emails 

From there, it will be easier to determine the optimal email design, and to be precise with your messaging.

5. Start Building Your Email List

Anytime is a good time to start creating your mailing list. Here are some smart ways to go about building and maintaining your subscriber audience:

Add a sign-up form on your website

Start by adding a sign-up form on your website. With the SiteGround Email Marketing platform, for example, growing and managing your subscribers has never been easier. Our lead generation plugin for WordPress helps you create and embed sign-up forms within your website’s theme, and with just a few clicks. 

Encourage visitors to sign up

• Use a lead magnet. For example, you can offer some discount, free trial, or samples in exchange for an email address.
• Create valuable content. This needs to be qualitative, relevant, engaging and compelling. Publish diverse types of content and do it regularly.
• Leverage social media channels. To generate more subscribers, share your valuable content via social media posts and run advertising campaigns on Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This way you’ll reach more people and send more traffic to your website.
• Organize online and offline events. These could be webinars, onsite conferences, giveaways, workshops, and many others. Use them to encourage your followers to become subscribers (and eventually loyal customers!).
• Work with partners. From influencers to guest bloggers and affiliates, collaboration is key. You’ll just want to make sure you partner with those that are relevant to your brand in order to ensure high-quality subscribers.
• Run a referral program. Offer your subscribers a meaningful incentive if they refer a friend to your email list successfully.

This is just a quick rundown on how to get your email list going, but you can take a deep dive into list creation by reading our how-to on building an email list.

6. Craft Effective Email Campaigns

By having clear goals and knowing your audience, you’ve already completed the first steps to a successful email campaign. Now it’s time to create meaningful content that encourages your subscribers to take action. 

• Compelling subject line

To craft a compelling email subject line, the first step is to make it short, concise and to the point. Use it to create a sense of urgency in your email and to leverage the curiosity of your readers. 

For this purpose, you can ask them a question, use numbers and/or emojis, and employ actionable language to spark action. That said, avoid spam triggers, such as “BUY NOW,”  in your subject line. You can also personalize your subject line for additional impact by including the receiver’s first name. 

The most crucial part, however, is to highlight the value of your email or offer. Here are a few examples of catchy subject lines:

1. Get 80% off our best-selling beauty product [your product name]
2. Celebrate love with a heart-melting offer – up to 75% off
3. Are you ready for an exclusive deal? Get your free trial with [your brand name]

• Valuable and relevant content

Then, of course, it’s important to write marketing emails that provide valuable and relevant content – after all that’s what your subscribers signed up for! And then be sure to include calls to action (which we’ll discuss in more detail in a moment) in the relevant places to stimulate your readers to convert to customers/subscribers. Don’t forget to use a readable and responsive email design, both on mobile and desktop!

• Strong a Call To Action (CTA)

To make your emails effective, you must include a call to action (CTA). These are a few of rules to follow:

First and foremost, make it visually compelling and appealing in order to grab your readers’ attention. Next, make sure to place it strategically within your email content. Experiment with different formats and email layouts to find out which one works best for your small business. Test with buttons, links with anchor texts, images, etc. Last but not least, optimize your CTA for both mobile and desktop alike.

• Compliant with Regulatory Standards

Last, but not least, comply with regulations. Make sure your email policy is GDPR-compliant such that all your emails include an unsubscribe option, your company’s physical address, etc.

7. Track & Analyze Results

Crafting your email campaign is just as important as analyzing the results afterward. But if the results aren’t as good as expected, don’t panic: this gives you room for improvement. Here are the main email marketing KPIs to monitor (+ a few quick tips on how to improve them):

• Open rate 

The open rate represents the percentage of recipients who’ve opened your email.

Tip: Improve your subject lines to achieve higher open rates.

• CTR (click-through rate)

CTR is the percentage of recipients who clicked on one or more links in your email.

Tip: Improve link positions and visibility to get a higher CTR.

• Conversion rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of subscribers who took a particular action (e.g. purchase, webinar subscription, etc.) after opening your email.

Tip: Improve the quality and readability of your content to increase conversion rates.

• Bounce rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of emails that were not delivered to your recipients (either a hard bounce or a soft bounce / permanent or temporary issue). Learn more about email bounces and how to reduce them here.

Tip: Keep a healthy recipient list for better deliverability results.

• Unsubscribe rate

The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of recipients who opted out of your email list after they received your email.

Tip: Try sending emails more infrequently, as certain subscribers might get turned off if they hear from you more than they would like. 

• Spam complaint rate

This stat measures the percentage of email recipients who mark your email as spam, which can very negatively impact your sender reputation. To help prevent this, read more about how to avoid your emails from going to spam.

Bonus Tip: A/B Testing

It is recommended to do A/B testing. It consists of sending two different versions of your email to the same segment. The goal is to measure which version performs better so that you can improve success rates of future emails. You can compare any number of factors, some of which include the subject line, type of sales offering, which incentives produce the most clicks, and so on.

Mistakes small businesses make with email marketing

Not having mobile-friendly design

Many email marketing recipients view emails on their mobile device as opposed to a desktop computer. As such, it’s exceedingly important to review the mobile version of your email. Thankfully, on most email platforms this can be done very easily during email creation by toggling between mobile and desktop view. 

Not checking the email message previews

Before hitting that final “send,” it is essential to send yourself, and potentially other team members, an email message preview. This allows you to view the email – including its subject line and preview text – in the exact same context as your subscribers. Oftentimes you’ll catch errors or needed optimizations that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Bad subject lines

Subject lines are your opportunity to grab a reader’s attention, or relegate your email to the trash bin. With that in mind, take advantage of AI to polish your subject lines. If you’re new to this, check out our how-to article on using AI for email writing, and download ready-to-use AI email prompts to get started. Meanwhile, SiteGround Email Marketing platform offers a built-in AI email writer that can help you optimize and improve your subject lines as you go.

Sudden & significant increase in the volume of sent emails

The more emails sent the better, right? Not so. If email volume suddenly increases by a large amount, it could be due to your list having been targeted with fake or irrelevant emails. This can result in an increased bounce rate or unsubscribe rate, can impact your sender reputation, and ultimately affect your ability to reach subscribers who truly want to hear from you.

Conclusion

Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing channels, especially for small businesses. It allows you to begin instant communication with your subscribers in order to drive new sales and increase customer retention. To make this happen, you need to focus on the quality of both your email’s content and design alike. If things are not working as desired, email marketing lets you measure and monitor your results in real-time, and undertake the necessary actions for improvement.

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The article was updated on July 30th, 2024.