How Can Small Businesses Effectively Use Email Marketing: A Complete Guide

Email marketing is a powerful digital marketing strategy that involves sending emails to generate leads and turn existing clients into loyal customers.

For an email marketing strategy to be effective, it must be personalized, targeted, and created with the goals and objections of the potential reader in mind.

On average, 60% of small businesses say that their email marketing strategy is either effective or very effective.

Do you want your small business to be part of that statistic?

Continue reading to learn why email marketing is the key to building a successful online business!

Almost 80% of small businesses say that an effective email marketing strategy is crucial for their business's success.

All successful email marketing strategies include a few key elements.

Let’s jump in and discuss the handful of these core elements in more detail.

A business’ email list is a collection of its customers’ email addresses who agreed to receive updates and promotions from your company via email.

The larger your mailing list, the more conversions you’ll get.

Small businesses with more than 500 subscribers are 42% more likely to have effective email marketing strategies.

Here are 3 common ways to grow your email list:

Giving rewards to your customers contributes to building a trustworthy and loyal customer-company relationship.

Many restaurants run giveaways in the form of rewards or a customer loyalty program.

When implementing your restaurant email marketing strategy, you need to ensure that you stay creative with your promotions to keep customers long-term.

Growing your email list is an effective marketing strategy that will allow you to reach more customers and promote your products.

An email marketing campaign is a series of specific emails delivered by a company to its customers.

Effective marketing campaigns will encourage the recipients to act, engage with your company, and assist you in generating more leads and sales.

Depending on what you want to communicate to your audience, different messages will be sent.

A few common types of emails you should be sending are:

One fitness email marketing strategy to re-engage with customers is by providing discounts to certain classes that are offered.

You’ll need to create a thorough brand strategy and email marketing campaign, with different types of emails sent at different periods, to nurture your leads.

This is where automated emails and the segmentation of addresses come in.

On average 56% of companies are currently using marketing automation.

An autoresponder is a series of emails that are sent to a subset of your email list in response to a specified occurrence.

There are 2 main reasons every small business needs an autoresponder:

These days, email users can access their inboxes from a variety of devices.

The ability to optimize an email design provides a user-friendly experience for all recipients on practically every device and platform imaginable, allowing them to access the content as intended.

To ensure that your website’s accessibility isn't jeopardized for any users — a responsive design email is typically the best solution.

Here are some ways you can optimize your email for all devices:

There are several ways to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy.

Here are some of the metrics you should be monitoring in your email marketing efforts:

When email marketing is used correctly, it will improve awareness and customer engagement.

If it is used incorrectly, it can harm your business’ reputation, erode customer loyalty, and even expose you to legal issues.

Here are 7 tips to keep your email marketing emails compliant:

The above fitness business made sure to include an opt-in form to obtain their potential clients’ consent to send marketing emails for their events.

Following the guidelines and partnering with a dependable and trustworthy marketing platform are two good ways to avoid infringing on laws.

With the components under wraps, let’s look at how email marketing can benefit your business.

Email marketing offers a direct method of communicating with your target audience.

For small businesses whose budgets aren’t necessarily big, an efficient email marketing strategy can bring impressive results.

Let’s have a look at 5 of the biggest benefits small businesses can gain with email marketing.

It’s extremely difficult to reach your customers telephonically or in person, however, email marketing makes this communication easier.

To make your life even easier you can set up a drip marketing campaign.

This will send out timed emails over days, weeks, or months.

Customer relationships can be strengthened through email marketing.

When you make a difference in your audience's lives, whether it's through your product or service, useful recommendations, or a gift coupon, they will learn to respect and trust you.

This email marketing example could apply to both the fitness industry and the hospitality industry.

It includes useful fitness tips and healthy breakfast options to live a better lifestyle.

It really does seem that Peloton’s goal is to build and strengthen the customer-company relationship while bettering the lives of their clients.

Your brand is your company’s personality and a promise to your customers.

A brand is a characteristic that distinguishes one business from another.

Creating a personal brand can seem like an impossible endeavor.

So, here are 10 golden rules for developing an interesting, distinct, and appealing personal brand:

Peloton did a remarkable job with their unique branding.

They introduce their fitness professionals whose goal is to connect the world through fitness, empowering people to be the best version of themselves anywhere, anytime.

Generally, there are time and money limits in any organization, but notably in small businesses.

The effective use of time and budget is one of the most significant advantages of email marketing.

It isn’t difficult or time-consuming to create a quality email marketing campaign.

It’s also cost-effective to send emails to a large number of people.

You can easily convince customers to make more purchases through effective email marketing.

Here are some ideas for increasing sales:

The restaurant email marketing strategy used here is by creating a unique offer based on National Drive-Thru Day.

The fitness industry can also use this strategy by creating an offer for National Fitness Day.

Emails from unknown senders or with suspicious subject lines can appear spammy.

You must personalize your material to the preferences of your targeted audience.

Knowing your readers’ interests and demands ensures that your email is delivered to their inbox rather than the spam folder.

When you’re new to email marketing, there’s a lot to learn.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if you had an email marketing fairy godmother who could whisper words of wisdom into your ear every now and then?

Although we aren’t Dama Fortuna, we have compiled a list of 5 email marketing tips that you won’t hear from just anyone in the marketing industry.

Systeme.io is an all-in-one online marketing tool that makes launching, growing, and scaling your business a breeze.

With a Capterra rating of 4.8/5, and being referred to as a swiss army knife for entrepreneurs, systeme.io comes out on top and smashes other platforms’ ratings.

The following are some of the email marketing features offered by systeme.io:

All of the major features are included in every plan, regardless of which one you choose.

Some useful systeme.io features are:

Constant Contact is an online marketing platform that is suitable for small businesses.

Its platform, amongst other things, allows business owners to run and track email marketing campaigns, create websites and ecommerce stores, and utilize social media.

The following are a few of the email marketing features available:

The Core plan includes:

Constant Contact’s Plus plan includes:

Even with a Capterra rating of 4.3/5, a lot of customers have complained about the lack of customization options, limited automation, and complex pricing.

Mailchimp is a popular marketing automation tool created for companies that use email to communicate with their target consumers.

It’s known for its distinctive and innovative branding, as well as its user-friendly and cutting-edge features.

The following are some of the functionalities offered by Mailchimp:

Mailchimp has a Capterra rating of 4.5/5.

However, this platform has received a lot of negative comments about its strange billing system and inconsistent customer service.