The ultimate guide to email marketing for small businesses | Email essentials for a small business

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This adage applies to email marketing, which though appears old school in today’s fancy social media obsessed world, is one of the most important central pillars to a digital marketing strategy for any small business.

The humble e mail, when crafted in a thoughtful manner and sent just-in-time for a customer, can do wonders for your brand, credibility and trust. Think about it, a simple example of when you buy something online from a newly established business, getting the invoice for the purchase instantly over e mail builds a certain ‘confidence’ in the brand.

You as a customer are likely to trust this business since this instant email confirming your purchase and an invoice is a subtle signal that the business has its process figured out.

We seek the feeling of trust and credibility the most while interacting with a brand and very few channels of communication can establish that as well as well crafted email. Despite this, many small businesses struggle to set up email marketing in an effective fashion.

Why is email marketing an important pillar of any digital marketing strategy?

Email marketing strategy is the second most important for a small business in its digital marketing strategy right after content content marketing strategy. Like content marketing, email marketing is a channel that you have complete control over.

Lets look at some of the hard benefits that email marketing offers a small business, these benefits will drive home the point on why sending emails is so important.

You control the channel – Your business is in complete control over what gets sent out via email to customers, you can choose to automate emails, you decide the content, the tone, the frequency and the audience
Your business owns the email list – you are not dependent on any external platform to build your audience, the list of customers to send an email out is yours
No algorithm changes can affect your engagement – You are not at the mercy of any large company that controls algorithms on how users can share content. You are free to engage with your audience the way you deem fit via emails
You can customise customer journeys – You can decide at what point the purchase journey you want to send emails to your customers
Low cost – the costs of setting a good email marketing campaign, the tools needed etc are much lower that other digital marketing channels such as social media or paid advertisements

Lets look at how these important factors of email marketing actually deliver benefits to small business owners

Benefits of email marketing for small businesses

Email marketing has many benefits if a small business adopts the best practices as a part of the overall digital marketing strategy. Outlining a few specific benefits of sending an email for small businesses below

Sending an email is very cost-effective: Email marketing is the most cost-effective component of any digital marketing strategy. Since you as a small business will have content available, you do not have to do anything new to send out emails. Re-purpose the existing content from your blog, put them into an email and send that out. Each blog post is good to be split to send out 4 to 5 emails on sub topics within the blog

Emails Increase Website Traffic: By sending out 4 to 5 emails curated from a single bog post, you can essentially, amplify the visits to your website through emails. Link your website to every piece of content that is in an email and you will see direct traffic to your website increase over time

Emails help in targeted and personalised communication: Email marketing allows for targeted messaging. Small businesses can create customer personas and send them specific emails that are relevant to those customers. How customers interact with the small business can be captured with relevant tags and based on the tags, the relevant emails can be automated

Email campaigns have measurable results: When sending emails through email marketing tools as a part of a marketing campaign, small businesses can see the level of engagement with each email sent. You can see how many customers opened the email, how man clicked on the ‘call to action’ within the email and how many actually did the action you wanted them to. You can set up an email funnel tracking mechanism that will help you craft better emails with time.

Emails have direct access to customers: Emails are delivered straight to a customer’s inbox, providing direct communication. You are not dependent on any intermediary platform to reach out to your customers. Emails are the most trusted written form of communication, its also a valid record from a legal perspective. Customers would also prefer having an email communication while getting questions answered.

Email campaigns can boost sales and revenue: Unlike social media marketing, Email marketing has a much higher influence on sales and revenue. Small businesses can use emails to their advantage to in the form of drip campaigns while you are launching a new product or a new location. Email campaigns are also useful to give exclusive discounts to customers in specific cohorts. Promotional campaigns using emails have had a better success rate than advertisement based promotions

Email campaigns help in customer retention: Majority of software and internet based businesses do customer retention campaigns through emails. Emails are also effective in getting churned customers to re-join the subscription plan, through campaigns called as win-back email campaigns.

Emails offer flexibility and scalability: Email marketing campaigns can be scaled up or down based on the business’s needs and resources. Emails can be scheduled either based on a defined frequency or based on compliance requirements or based on customer’s activity. Emails also offer flexibility in terms of design, content, and timing, making them adaptable to different marketing strategies and objectives.

Emails offer easy integration with other marketing channels: Email can be integrated with other marketing strategies, including content marketing and SMSs creating a cohesive and multi-channel marketing approach. Emails can also complement other physical channels such as events or meet-ups to keep customer awareness and consideration high

Global Reach: Email marketing enables small businesses to reach a global audience without any increase in cost. Emils are often best used in business to business interactions opening up opportunities for growth and expansion.

Why do small businesses struggle with email marketing?

For many small business owners, the use of emails is restricted to sending transactional mails from their individual accounts to either vendors, or to customers in a business to business environment. Emails for marketing rarely comes up as a high priority when small business owners look to drive growth for their business.

Naturally, due to this, many small business owners struggle to visualise how email campaigns can help in marketing and growing their business. There are also other factors because of which small business owners struggle with email campaigns.

Business owners have limited resources and bandwidth to invest in email marketing tools and software
Many small business owners feel they lack expertise to craft marketing emails and manage the campaigns
Small business owners struggle in building a quality email list
Ensuring emails get delivered and not land up in spam need small business owners to have some technical knowledge
Creating engaging content for emails is another mental-block that small business owners have
Maintaining consistency in messaging of emails and frequency of sending emails out is another challenge

In order to solve for this, there is a standard set of emails that small business owners can develop one time and use these repeatedly via a email marketing tool to take care most of the repeated tasks and content design issues they may face.

Lets look at how to design the perfect email campaign for a small business owner.

What is the perfect email campaign for a small business owner

The prefect email campaign is the one where, your customers or potential customers receive just-in-time communication from you on what they are looking for. Emails when sent at ‘just the right time’ tend to convert the best in terms of click through rates and impact on your business.

Now how can we put this into practice?

As a small business owner, you need to be thoughtful about the situations when an existing customer or a potential customer may want to receive your email so that he or she takes the intended action. Here are some thumb rules that can be followed for existing customers and for potential customers.

The perfect email campaign for existing customers

The right frequency – if your business needs customers to interact wit you very frequently, only then send them mails every week or so. For regular business use cases, once a fortnight or once a month will be a good frequency to keep customers aware.
The right information – Give customers information in an email that they can use. For example, if you sell a product, send out monthly emails giving information about how the product can add more value to the customer’s life
The right promotion – If you have business that need customers to transact repeatedly, keep customers aware of the promotional offers in advance so that customers can get the best offer that you may have
The right ‘call to action’ – Don’t spam your customers and dont ask them to take a call to action on every email that you send. Customers are already starved for concentration and your email will just be a distraction. If you ask customers to take an action in every email, you may find that customers will tend to ignore most of your emails in future which defeats the purpose of all those emails.

Now that we have covered the basic elements that make a perfect email campaign, lets look at the kind of emails that should always be a part of any email marketing campaign.

Things that any small business email marketing campaign must have

A lot of business owners design email campaigns, but often miss out on some of the most basic types of emails that have to be a part of an email campaign.

I would define an email campaign, as a series of emails that are sent out in a specified time window with a definite objective in mind. An email campaign to me is not just one email that is sent out to many individuals. Many tools track email campaigns as one single email that is sent to multiple individuals.

The reason I say that an email campaign must have multiple emails sent out is because you are trying to build a story with multiple emails for your customers. The story should build out over multiple emails and get the customer to act in the desired way towards the end of the story.

Lets look at the basic components in detail

Basic components of any good email marketing campaign

There are many components that a small business should incorporate in an email campaign, lets take a look at the most important ones.

Clear Objective: Each email should have a clear purpose, whether it’s to inform, sell, get feedback, or drive traffic to your website. This objective guides the content and design of the email.
Compelling Subject Line: The subject line of the email is the first thing recipients see. It should be attention-grabbing, relevant and prompting the recipient to open the email.
Personalisation: Beyond using the recipient’s name in the email opening line, personalization can include content tailored to their interests, previous interactions, or purchasing behavior. This requires the business owner to set up advanced analytics.
Engaging Content: The content in the email should be interesting, valuable, and relevant to the audience. It can be informative, promotional, educational, or entertaining, depending on your email objective.
Strong Call-to-Action (CTA): A clear CTA towards the end of the email campaign guides the recipient on what to do next. The CTA should be easy to find and the “why” should be transparently called out
Your Contact Information and Unsubscribe Option: Include your contact information for credibility and trust. Also, ensure there’s an easy way to unsubscribe to comply with email marketing laws and respect recipient preferences.
Responsive Design across devices: Ensure that your emails render well on various devices, especially mobiles, as a significant portion of emails are read on smartphones.

The 4 types of email marketing that small business owners should know

There are broadly 4 types of email marketing campaigns, which small businesses should know about. The cover broadly 4 objectives (i) Educate and engage with recent updates, (ii) Promotes your products and services along with special offers if any, (iii) emails with clear objective of getting new customers and (iv) emails with the objective of retaining existing customers or getting back customers who have churned out.

Lets look at them in detail.

Email marketing with newsletters, known as the ‘Newsletter campaign’

Email newsletter campaigns are a powerful tool for businesses to maintain regular contact with their customers and subscribers. They serve as a platform for delivering a variety of content via emails directly to the inboxes of a targeted audience. The content of these newsletter emails can vary greatly, including company news, product updates, industry insights, helpful tips or a summary of recent blog posts. The key to successful newsletter campaigns lies in providing value to the recipients, ensuring that the content is not only relevant but also engaging and informative.

One of the primary benefits of email newsletters is the ability to build and nurture relationships with customers. By consistently delivering valuable content, businesses can establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry and create a sense of community around their brand. This regular engagement helps in keeping the brand at the forefront of customers’ minds, which is crucial for long-term customer retention and loyalty.

Basically, the effectiveness of an email newsletter campaign hinges on several factors. Personalization plays a crucial role; tailoring content to the interests and needs of the audience can significantly increase engagement rates. The design of the newsletter is also important; it should be visually appealing, brand-consistent, and easy to navigate, with a responsive layout for optimal viewing on various devices.

Email marketing to promote your business, ‘Promotional campaigns’

Promotional email campaigns are a vital component of a digital marketing strategy, designed to drive sales, increase brand awareness, and promote specific products or services. These email campaigns are typically more sales-oriented compared to other types of email marketing, such as newsletters.

The primary goal of these emails is to encourage the recipients to take action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a service, or attending an event. To achieve this, the emails are crafted with compelling content, attractive offers, and clear calls-to-action.

Email marketing’s success in promotional campaigns hinges on its ability to reach customers directly in their inboxes. This direct email communication allows businesses to present their offers in a personalized and targeted manner.

Well-executed promotional emails can lead to high engagement rates, increased traffic to websites, and significant boosts in sales. Basically, the effectiveness of these emails is often measured by their open rates, click-through rates, and the conversion rates they generate.

Creating a successful promotional email campaign involves several key steps. First, the email list must be segmented to target the right audience, ensuring that the emails are relevant to those receiving them. The emails should also be designed to be visually appealing and reflective of the brand’s identity. The subject lines of these emails are crucial; they need to be enticing enough to stand out in a crowded inbox.

Email marketing to get new customers also known as ‘Acquisition campaigns’

Acquisition email campaigns are a key component of email marketing, aimed at converting potential leads into active customers. These email marketing campaigns are specifically designed to engage individuals who have expressed an interest in a comapny’s offering but haven’t yet made a purchase.

The main goal of these email campaigns is to motivate these potential customers towards making their first transaction. To be effective, the emails in acquisition campaigns need to be meticulously crafted, focusing on the unique needs and preferences of the recipients.

The effectiveness of this email marketing strategy lies in delivering a tailored message at the right time. This involves sending out a series of emails that methodically guide the customer through the sales funnel. The initial email of an acquisition email marketing campaign might introduce the business, the product or service and the business’s core values.

The subsequent emails can delve deeper into product details, customer success stories, or exclusive first-time buyer offers.

Segmentation is a key element in these email marketing campaigns. By segmenting their email list, small businesses can send much more personalized and relevant emails, enhancing the likelihood of conversion.

These emails typically feature a very sales-y content and a distinct call-to-action, nudging the recipient towards a purchase or at least a registration, or other forms of meaningful interaction with the brand which can later be converted into a sale. Analyzing the impact of these emails is crucial in email marketing.

In summary, acquisition email campaigns are a strategic component of email marketing, utilizing a sequence of well-crafted emails to convert interested leads into committed customers. This approach of email marketing requires an in-depth understanding of your target audience, knowledge on making engaging email content and a well-planned email distribution strategy to effectively drive customer acquisition.

Email marketing to retain existing customers are ‘Retention campaigns’ or ‘Win back campaigns’

Retention email marketing campaigns are a crucial component of email marketing strategies, focusing on keeping current customers engaged and loyal. These email campaigns are designed to maintain a strong relationship with existing customers, using emails to provide continuous value and remind them of the brand’s offerings.

In retention email marketing, the emails are tailored to reflect the preferences and history of the customers, making each email feel personal and relevant.

The effectiveness of retention email marketing lies in its ability to deliver targeted and meaningful content through emails. By regularly sending emails that resonate with the audience’s interests and needs, businesses can foster a sense of connection and appreciation. These emails often include loyalty rewards, exclusive offers, or personalized product recommendations.

The frequency and content of these emails in retention email marketing are key factors. Overwhelming customers with too many emails can be counterproductive, while too few emails might lead to a loss of interest. Therefore, finding the right balance in email marketing is essential for retention. This can only happen by trial and error and with business owners constantly tracking key metrics for emails.

Email marketing analytics play a vital role in understanding the impact of retention emails. Metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and customer feedback provide valuable insights, helping businesses to refine their email marketing strategies for better retention.

In summary, retention email marketing campaigns are a strategic approach in email marketing, using a series of well-crafted emails to keep customers engaged, satisfied, and loyal to the brand. This kind of email marketing is fundamental for long-term business growth and maintaining customer relationships.

How to do email marketing for small businesses in a step by step process

As a business owner who is new to email marketing and wants to know how and where to start, the following step by step guide will be a good starting point for you. follow these steps, which will result in great learning for you. Once you do it the first time, you will automatically have the confidence to take this a level further.

Set Your Goals: Before starting, decide what you want to achieve with your email marketing. Do you want to sell more products, share news, or keep customers coming back? Your goals will shape your emails.
Build Your Email List: You need people to send your emails to. Start collecting email addresses from your customers. You can do this at your store, on your website, or at events. Always get permission to send them emails. You will need a “lead magnet” to build an email list. Its something that you offer for free to get the customer’s email ID in return.
Choose an Email Marketing Service: To send lots of emails, use an email marketing service or a software. These services help you manage your email lists, design emails, and track how well your emails are doing.
Create Your Email Campaign: Now, you start creating your emails. Think about what your customers like and what you want them to know. Your emails should be interesting and useful to them.
Design Your Emails: Your emails should look good and be easy to read. Email marketing services have tools to help you design your emails. Make sure your emails look good on phones, too, since many people read emails on their mobile devices.
Write Your Email Content: What you write in your emails is important. Keep your messages clear and to the point. Tell your customers what’s new, offer them deals, or give helpful tips. Always include a call-to-action, telling them what you want them to do next, like buy a product or visit your website.
Test Your Emails: Before sending your emails to everyone, test them. Send the emails to yourself or friends to check how they look and if all the links work.
Send Your Emails: After testing, it’s time to send your emails. Email marketing services let you schedule when your emails will be sent. Choose the best time when your customers are likely to read them.
Track and Measure Performance: Once your emails are sent, see how they’re doing. Check how many people opened your emails and clicked on links. This helps you understand what works and what doesn’t.
Improve Based on Feedback: Use what you learn from tracking to make your emails better. Try different designs, messages, or sending times. Email marketing is about learning and improving.
Follow Email Rules: Be aware of rules about email marketing. You must have permission to send people emails, and you should let them easily unsubscribe if they don’t want your emails anymore.
Keep Growing Your Email List: Always look for ways to add new people to your email list. The more people you can send your emails to, the better your email marketing will be.
Stay Consistent: Keep sending emails regularly, but not too often. Consistent emails keep your customers connected to your brand without overwhelming them.

WIth the above steps, you should get started with your email marketing campaigns. To get started, lets look at the kind of infrastructure you need to have so that you can start sending emails.

What infrastructure is needed for campaign in marketing using email?

Once you have an email list built, you are ready to start sending out campaigns. Before that, you need to have atleast 3-4 basic emails written out so that the first few signups are not left in the dark. Now, coming to the infrastructure you need to start sending emails, lets look at a list of all that you need.

Email Marketing Service: This is a special tool that helps you send out lots of emails at once. It also helps you design your emails, manage your email list, and track how your emails are doing. We will cover this in the email marketing tools section.
Email Templates: These are pre-designed layouts that make your emails look professional and appealing. Most email marketing services offer a range of templates you can use for your emails.
Content for Your Emails: This includes the text, images, and links you’ll put in your emails. Your content should be interesting and relevant to the people you’re sending the emails to.
Signup Forms: To grow your email list, you need signup forms on your website or social media pages. These forms let people sign up with their email ID to receive your emails.
Analytics Tools: Your email marketing service should provide tools to help you see how many people are opening your emails, clicking on links, and taking other actions. This information is important for improving your email marketing campaigns.
Strategy Plan: Have a clear plan for your email marketing. This should include who you’re targeting with your emails, what kind of emails you’ll send (like newsletters or promotional emails), and how often you’ll send them.

Designing an email campaign, how many emails should you send in a marketing campaign?

As a small business, taking a step back to look at the overall objective of your email marketing efforts is needed to ensure that you don’t miss the big picture. With the day to day execution challenges, it gets difficult to track the bigger picture and how email marketing is impacting your business.

Building a brand using email marketing

Though brand building takes some time and effort, email marketing can help in effectively raising awareness and building familiarity with your brand. There are some basic principles that every small business owner should follow in their email marketing campaigns to ensure that it has a positive impact on overall brand building.

Consistent Branding in Emails: Every email you send should look like it comes from your business. Use your business’s colors, logo, and style in your emails. This makes your brand easy to recognize. In email marketing, it’s important that people start to connect the look of your emails with your brand.
Share Your Story: Use emails to tell people about your business – how it started, what you stand for, and what makes you different. When people understand your story and values, they connect more with your brand. Email marketing is a great way to share this story directly with your customers.
Provide Value in Your Emails: Don’t just send emails to sell something. Send emails that are useful to your customers. This could be tips, news, or special offers. When your emails are helpful, people start to see your brand as something that adds value to their lives. Keep a ratio of 70:30 where 70% of the emails you send give value to your customers and only 30% of them ask customers to transact or do something.
Regular Communication: Send emails regularly but not too often (once a month is typical for many businesses). You want to stay in people’s minds, but you don’t want to annoy them. Consistent email marketing helps keep your brand visible without overwhelming your customers.
Engage with Your Audience: Ask for feedback in your emails, run surveys, or encourage replies. When people engage with your emails, they build a relationship with your brand. Email marketing isn’t just about talking to your customers; it’s also about listening to them.

Now with the above points, the only thing you need to do as a small business owner is to remain consistent and stick to your email marketing plan.. It takes time to make this work, but once it starts to work, you are on a virtuous cycle that builds its own momentum over time.

The right frequency of sending emails to not spam your customers

I am summarising a table for you, based on the kind of business you are and the type of emails you want to send. This is just a guidance based on my experience of working with many small businesses, working with marketing teams in large corporations and having hands on experience in doing my own thing.

Type of Business	Type of email campaign	Frequency of emails
Regular business with a physical store, an online presence and a website	Newsletters, Promotions	Once a month
Regular business with a physical store, an online presence and a website	Acquisition campaigns and retention campaigns	Once in two months for acquisition, once a month for retention
A company with Business to business type of transactions	All kinds of email marketing campaigns	Once in a month on average
A company with a digital product that needs frequent customer interaction	Newsletters or product information campaigns	Once a week at max
A company with a digital product which needs frequent customer interaction	Promotions, acquisition and retention campaigns	Once a month
A company which has a digital product, customers can engage at any frequency, not necessarily frequent interaction	All types of email marketing campaigns	Once in 3 weeks at max, or once in 5-6 weeks in a ideal scenario

The above mentioned frequency of sending email campaigns are based on verbal feedback I have received in the past and looking at some of my own un-subscribe rates. The frequency of email campaigns mentioned above tries to minimise un-subscribe rates while preventing engagement from dropping.

Any higher frequency will see an increased customer drop off and un-subscribe rate from customers.

Email marketing tools in digital marketing

To start out with email marketing today, any small business will need the following tools or features to manage the emails end to end.

Email Campaign Creation Tools: These tools help you design and create your emails. They often come with templates and easy-to-use editors, making it simple to create professional-looking emails. Good creation tools are crucial in email marketing because they determine how your emails look and feel.
Email List Management Tools: Managing your list of email addresses is key in email marketing. These tools help you organize your email list, segment it into different groups, and ensure that you’re sending the right emails to the right people. Properly managing your email list can greatly improve the effectiveness of your emails.
Email Automation Tools: Automation in email marketing is about sending emails automatically based on certain triggers or schedules. These tools can send welcome emails to new subscribers, follow-up emails after a purchase, or regular newsletters. Email automation saves time and makes your email marketing more efficient.
Email Analytics and Reporting Tools: To understand how well your emails are performing, you need analytics tools. These tools track things like how many people open your emails, click on links, or unsubscribe. By analyzing this data, you can make informed decisions to improve your email marketing campaigns.
Email Deliverability Tools: These tools help ensure that your emails actually reach people’s inboxes and don’t end up in the spam folder. Good deliverability is crucial in email marketing because your emails can’t be effective if they’re not being seen.

The good news is that most of the email marketing software that is available out there has all these tools bundled together and gives you all the features you need. Lets take a look at the software that may be best suited for your business.

Best email marketing software for small businesses

There are many email marketing software out there, but after having used many of them myself and after listening to feedback from existing small business owners, here are some of the popular tools that i would suggest any small business owner to start with.

These tools are identified based on parameters such as (i) Ease of use, (ii) Value for the small business owner and (iii) Support and integrations with other software.

The tools worth exploring are

Brevo (previously known as sendinblue) – This is my number one pick simply because they have a free plan, that allows small business owners to send up to 300 emails per day which is plenty to start off in my opinion.
Convertkit – many small businesses find the campaign management easy with this tool
Mailchimp – now owned by my ex employer Intuit, this tool has a great functionality and integration with many softwares including quickbooks. However, many business owners and I feel its expensive especially once your email list grows over time.

Are there free email marketing tools available in the market for small businesses?

There are some open source email campaign management tools available. However almost all of them need some sort of a developer experience with coding knowledge. I would still encourage small business owners to sign up with the free version of Brevo (previously sendinblue) since it helps you get started with very limited software knowledge.

However, that said “Listmonk” is a great open source email marketing tool that has been developed by Zerodha, the largest online stock broker in India for their internal customer email communications. Its extremely lightweight in terms of server requirements, its secure and its an open source email management tool. A quick search for listmonk will give you all the documentation you need to set this up for your business and use it for free.