Email Marketing For Small Businesses [2025]

What Is Email Marketing?

Unless you're living in the dark ages, you've probably heard about email marketing for your small business. And most importantly, how it could benefit you. But you're not sure where to start. Great news – you've come to the right place. Read on and you'll find out everything you need to know.

Having started a business, you might already know how to entice customers to buy your products and services. And how to keep 'em coming back. But to achieve the kind of growth you want, you need to continuously attract new customers while keeping the ones you have happy. Tricky, right? Well, that's where email marketing comes in.

The Importance (and Benefits) of Email Marketing for Small Businesses

As a business owner, you're probably already super busy running your company, dealing with admin, and making sure your orders are fulfilled on time. We get it – your to-do list is longer than the queue at an iPhone launch. And who's got the time to worry about marketing? Well, luckily, we do. Partnering with the pros will save you time, effort, and it can skyrocket your ROI.

Taking action to reach your customers in a place they visit daily – their email inbox – is a step in the right direction. But there's (a lot) more to it than that. For the secret sauce to work, all the correct ingredients need to be added in the right amounts. This includes your email content and design, as well as your customer segmentation. Once these are in place, you've got yourself a pretty great recipe for success.

The truth is, there's nothing quite like email marketing. You can put up all the billboards you want, but nothing beats that direct, personal connection with your customers. Especially if you know how to organically grow your email list.

Sales & ROI

Email marketing can send your ROI through the roof and right into the stratosphere. Targeted holiday campaigns, automated workflows and promotions, list segmentation – all this means you'll be able to increase your revenue – and really optimize engagement.

Here’s a quick overview of how these can increase ROI:

1. Promos and holiday campaigns are still one of the best ways to boost revenue. By earmarking key dates on your calendar, you’ll have enough time to tease promos before they begin and, if need be, extend your sale as well.
2. By offering exclusive discounts to your email subscribers that can’t be found on your site, you increase your chances of repeat business and boost brand loyalty. You can also offer highly engaged subscribers and previous purchasers early access to any big sitewide sales.
3. Automated flows are a must-have for any business looking to grow. A flow is simply a series of emails that gets triggered at various points in the customer journey. The key benefit is that automated flows help increase revenue while educating customers about your business, and once they’re up and running, you don’t have to do much.
4. Segmentation is another major step in your email marketing journey and can reduce unsubscribe rates, increase engagement, and help you create personalized messaging. By dividing your list into various segments, you ensure that customers receive emails that are relevant to them, thereby making them more likely to buy your product or service.

Brand Awareness

With the right campaigns, your brand will stay top of mind all year round. Plus, you can constantly communicate with customers about their orders, items they’re interested in, new products, and more.

This is where segmentation pays dividends. By tailoring your messaging according to your subscriber’s profile and unique needs, you’re able to demonstrate your value and build a strong relationship with them.

Here’s an example: You own a car dealership. You segment your audience based on previous purchasers and potential purchasers. This way, those who recently purchased a car will receive campaigns about after-sales service, while those who haven’t yet purchased will receive info about all the new models on the showroom floor.

The old mindset of sell-sell-sell doesn’t work with modern, discerning customers. Instead, you need to synchronize your business’s value with their needs, wants, and lifestyle, and provide something that’s completely relevant to each of these.

Customer Relationships

Email marketing is also a powerful way to get to know your customers better. A/B testing can help you discover what they like and respond best to. That way, you can send your audience the right campaigns at the right time and get them clicking 'add to cart.'

A very effective way to maintain a positive customer relationship is through automated emails. As mentioned earlier, these are emails that get sent automatically at various points in the customer journey.

A major benefit here is that automated emails do the bulk of the work for you – as long as you keep a close eye on their performance, tweak as needed based on A/B test results, and ensure that all content is relevant and up to date.

Personalization

Personalized communication helps with relevance. Individual segmentation helps you tailor specific content for different audience segments based on variables like demographics, location, interests, and previous browsing or purchasing history.

This is why email marketing is your best tool for reaching customers – not only are they showing a clear interest in your business by signing up for your newsletter, but you’re afforded the opportunity to communicate with them directly. Where social media, broadcast advertising, and billboards speak to the general public, an email is sent to one person directly.

The onus is on you to ensure you maximize this opportunity by making every effort to understand their interest, needs, and lifestyle.

How to Set Up Email Marketing for Your Small Business

Create and Design Your Email Strategy

Before any of this, you need a solid plan of action to grow your list and boost your ROI. What’s working at the moment? What needs improvement? Where are the pain points? By establishing clear KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), you’re able to set goals and formulate the appropriate strategy.

Once you’ve established your goals, you can determine what kind of email campaigns to utilize. One article simply won’t cover all the possibilities, but there are many ways to improve your email marketing and grow your list. The key is to understand your customers’ needs and ensure that you’re three steps ahead.

Automate, Test, and Optimize

Regular A/B tests will help you decide which days and times you should send your emails, as well as which subject lines work best – and that's just the beginning. From design to content, there's not much you can't test (and you should really be testing everything).

The second part of A/B testing is constantly reviewing your test results after the fact, and applying these to future email calendars to ensure that you get the best possible engagement (and revenue) from your audience. Once you have a conclusive result, it’s time to move on to the next variable.

How to determine what variables to test? As we said, you should be testing pretty much everything, but your KPIs will also come in handy here. For example, if your goal is to increase open rates, you’ll want to perform plenty of open rate-related tests like send times and different subject lines.

And then there's the good ol' automated emails we mentioned above. Check out these automated email marketing tips to set these up yourself or (ahem), leave it to the email marketing experts for best results.

And the best part about automated emails? Exactly that – they're automated, so once they're created, you can just sit back and watch the orders roll in. Well, sort of. It’s important to note that for flows to really work takes a lot of effort and expertise upfront. They also need constant tweaking here and there, which your email marketing agency can take care of.

Common Challenges

Delivery Issues

For all of these email campaigns of yours to be effective, they actually need to reach your client's inbox. The last thing you want, after all that effort, is your campaign ending up in the recipient’s spam folder. Good email deliverability is key when it comes to email marketing for small businesses (or any business for that matter). You need to know how to circumvent the spam filters and warm up the IP when you start sending in order for your emails to get to the right place.

Are You Legal?

Another vital aspect of any good email marketing program is legal compliance. You'd be amazed at how many businesses don't use double opt-in methods or even send their customers any GDPR/CASL communication at all. Not complying with privacy laws can result in pretty hefty fines and high unsubscribe rates. These laws also vary between countries, so you need to know what kind of compliance is required for your specific target audience.

These days, it’s only about 30% of people who read emails on their desktop computer. Which means you’ll need to reach their audience where they hang out most – on their phones. Having a kickass email campaign that's optimized and coded for mobile is crucial to any email program's success.

Choosing the Right Email Service Provider

ESPs or Email Service Providers will help you manage campaigns, track data, and create automated email flows. There are so many options available, and most offer an initial free package as well as tiered package options with various benefits for each one.

Mailchimp, Klaviyo, GetResponse, Salesforce Marketing Cloud; these are but a few of the providers that are responsible for the millions of email campaigns flying across cyberspace every second. How to choose the right one? An important consideration here is the kind of capabilities you need for your specific email marketing program.

For example, if you plan to do a LOT of A/B testing, Klaviyo allows you to test pretty much anything and everything whereas on other platforms, variables can be limited.

If you’re new to email marketing and don’t have a huge budget, Mailchimp is easy to use and pretty affordable. Salesforce gives you the chance to customize many aspects of your email program, but it’s most suitable for advanced users. If you're not sure which ESP is right for your business, check out our super-helpful guide.

Final Word

Once all that's taken care of, you'll need a comprehensive, strategy-driven email marketing calendar. This will help you plan each campaign and flow to a T and keep track of what you're sending to who. This is where we come in. The world of email marketing can be complex to navigate at first, but there's no need to worry – we've got you covered. Chat to us today to find out how we take email marketing for small businesses to a new level and help you smash your goals.