Your guide to small business email marketing

Key points

• Email marketing is a great tactic to strengthen customer relationships
• Four things you can do to get started with email marketing
• Email automation can elevate your marketing game

Behind every successful business is an even more successful marketing strategy. And email marketing is one of the best-performing strategies. Why? Well, we don’t stray too far from our screens these days. And with email access through our laptops, phones, and even smart watches, an email marketing strategy can put your business right in peoples’ back pockets.

We’re here to guide you through the ins and outs of email marketing and marketing automation so you can increase profit while reducing your workload. Let’s dive right in.

What is email marketing?

Simply put, email marketing is a marketing tactic that allows you to directly connect with your customers through an email address that they supply to you. Through this method of communication, you can do many things, such as:

• Share information about your business – “Save the date! We’re launching a new product soon.”
• Receive feedback on the customer experience – “How did we go today? We’d love to know what you think.”
• Convert leads – “Hi there, you’ve left some items in your cart.”
• Nurture your existing clientele – “Happy birthday! Celebrate your birthday with an exclusive discount code.”
• Confirm appointments and bookings – “Thanks for booking online. Your appointment is on Monday at 9am.”

How can email marketing benefit your business?

You can’t have a business without a strong customer base. And one way to strengthen your clientele is through a solid and well-executed email marketing strategy. Need more reasons to go down the email route? Then here’s a quick list of the benefits that often come with email marketing:

• Driving more customers to your business
• Providing a more personalised customer experience
• Improved repeat business
• Increased visibility and awareness of your products or services
• Improved brand recognition
• Better targeting on social platforms
• Low-cost marketing option compared to other strategies

4 steps to get the ball rolling with email marketing

1. Choose your provider

One of the first things any small business owner should do is choose their email marketing provider, like Mailchimp and Hubspot. These services will often allow you to create, send and track the emails you send to your customer base. There are different options available to suit all types of businesses and budgets – even free ones!

2. Build your receiver list

List building is the secret sauce of good email marketing. So how can you create this list of customers? Well, you can add a pop-up box on your website asking visitors to share their email. In exchange, offer a discount on their first order, or a free download sharing advice related to your business, which is often referred to as a lead magnet.

Another way to get a customer’s email is to run a competition on your socials. Encourage people to sign up to your mailing list so they can go in the draw to win a prize, like one of your products or services.

3. Make a calendar

Once you’ve got your list of subscribers, it’s time to make an email marketing calendar. Use your market research to work out when is the best time to engage with your audience and set up a regular email to be sent to your database for that day and time.

Take this opportunity to create regular value for your subscribers. If you have a food business, you may include recipes. Therapists might consider sharing mental or physical health care tips. You can also set up separate emailing lists for promotions, discounts and offers to make managing your customer communications easier

4. Monitor performance and improve

Most email marketing platforms come with reporting. It’s important that you monitor the performance of your email marketing through these reports and analytics, as you can use that data to improve your emails and get better results.

For example, if the data shows that not many people are opening your email, you can try a new approach to create engaging subject lines.

Here are some metrics to be aware of:

• Open rate – how many people open the email
• Click-through rate (CTR) – how many people clicked the links in your email
• Conversion rate – how many people clicked on a link and performed a specific action on your site
• Bounce rate – how many people didn’t receive your email

What is email marketing automation?

Marketing automation lets you manage your marketing without the need for human input. For example, marketing automation can help you send personalised email reminders to your customers about items left in their cart.

Email marketing automation is a great way to build strong and long-lasting relationships with your customers while on autopilot. You can use automation to set up customer journeys, which is a sequence of emails that’s triggered by certain actions or timings.

For example, a potential customer subscribes to your newsletter. They automatically receive an email from your business thanking them for signing up – you may even offer them a discount for their first purchase or free shipping. Then, a week later, they receive a follow up email explaining more about your business and the products or services you offer. Another week goes by, and they receive an email sharing a special offer and so on.

Another customer journey you can automate is collecting customer reviews. Using your email platform, set a date to reach out with an email that asks for feedback on the items purchased or services provided.

And, of course, email automation could remind customers if they left something in their shopping cart without checking out or alert them to upcoming appointments with your business.

Why use email automation?

Most email providers will allow you to automate your emails, such as setting up ‘trigger’ emails to be sent automatically when a customer does something.

There are many benefits to automating your emails, which include:

• Saving valuable time and money that you can funnel into other areas of your business
• Better customer conversion rates
• Improving customer retention and brand loyalty
• Better access to customer feedback
• A smoother and more personalised customer experience.

Next steps

If you’re ready to take your business to the next level through the power of email marketing, then check out our guide to growing your business. It covers many topics to support business owners with the growth and expansion of their business.