A Complete Guide to Email Marketing Campaigns for Small Businesses

For small businesses, running an email marketing campaign is one of the most cost-effective and impactful ways to promote offerings, share business updates, and strengthen customer relationships. A 2023 Litmus study found that nearly 40% of marketers consider email as “very critical” to their company’s overall success.

This guide will help you build and execute successful email campaigns, from the initial planning process and creating your content to choosing the right software and measuring campaign success.

What is email marketing?

As the name indicates, email marketing involves sending messages directly to customers’ email inboxes. You can deliver personalized content to achieve certain goals, such as promoting discounts or upcoming sales, sharing historical content about the business or owners, or increasing customer engagement. For example, emails featuring limited offers can encourage more purchases, and e-newsletters can drive traffic to your website and build awareness of your brand.

Businesses can also use email marketing to collect customer data, which can help refine future campaigns. It’s also a great way to distribute information to a large audience at once, enabling you to communicate with prospects and customers more quickly and effectively.

Why email marketing still works for small businesses

At its core, marketing is about communicating with customers and prospects in ways that motivate positive responses. Email marketing allows you to distribute content to your audience’s devices within minutes, and it can be done at scale even without a large budget or team.

For small businesses, email marketing offers several advantages, including:

• Keeping you at the forefront of customers’ minds, which can encourage continued purchasing and valuable referrals. “You own your list … and you can use it to build real relationships with your audience over time,” explained Nicole Pomije, Founder of The Cookie Cups and Co-Founder of Pitch Peach. “Whether it’s sharing behind-the-scenes content, new launches, or limited-time offers, email marketing keeps your brand top of mind.”
• Introducing prospects to your brand and guiding them to become loyal customers. “Email marketing is the bridge between visibility and loyalty, connecting initial awareness efforts with conversion and re-engagement,” said Rob Davis, President and CMO at Novus Media. “While paid media drives awareness, email nurtures ongoing relationships and should be seen as a retention engine.”
• Providing opportunities to collect and update customer data through online forms or surveys, which can improve the effectiveness of your messaging. That data can then be used to personalize emails within your campaign, making it more likely that customers will open and click through your message.
• Encouraging brand advocacy through sharing your emails or their contents with family, friends, or colleagues. This generates authentic referrals, driving your sales and growing your customer base.

How to create a successful email marketing campaign

Creating a successful email marketing campaign can feel daunting, especially for new business owners. These steps and best practices can help ensure your campaign truly resonates with your audience.

Define your campaign goals

One of the most important steps in your email marketing campaign is to define your campaign goals. The following six steps can guide you toward goals that are results-oriented and provide a measurable return on investment (ROI):

1. Define your email marketing campaign objectives (for example, brand awareness or increased conversions).
2. Set specific and measurable goals with relevant metrics and means of tracking them.
3. Align your goals with audience personalization and segmentation.
4. Establish realistic expectations and time frames.
5. Monitor and evaluate your progress.
6. Adjust strategies in light of performance.

Build and segment your email list

Every good email marketing campaign begins with a curated list of subscribers. Simply mass-emailing past customers and business contacts, or purchasing email lists, will not necessarily increase sales — and may, in fact, be against the law, depending on where you do business. If you have customers in Europe, for instance, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the General Data Protection Regulation, which mandates certain rules and policies about collecting and storing customer contact information for marketing purposes.

When launching your first campaign, you’ll want to obtain permission from customers before sending the emails. Your email marketing software should provide opt-in forms for prospects so you’re only investing in consumers who are interested in your brand.

Some ways to encourage organic email list registrations include:

• Offer an incentive (like a free white paper, e-book, or exclusive content) in exchange for contact information (Note: You’ll need to ensure visitors confirm their consent to receive marketing emails).
• Add subscription calls to action in your blog posts and articles.
• Include a sign-up link in your email signature.
• Create custom graphics to promote your newsletter or offers.
• Use powerful, polished language to make your sign-up prompts more compelling.
• Experiment with different sign-up offers to see what resonates best with your audience.

Once you have your list of contacts, segment your email list, breaking them up into smaller groups based on specific demographics like past relationships with your business, location, or interests. This will help you target your customer groups specifically rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach. Subject lines and messages can be customized based on the group and their email or buying habits to increase conversions.

Choose the right email marketing software

Email marketing software can make it significantly easier to run and measure the results of your email marketing campaigns. However, email marketing software varies in its features and impact. Look for these essential features when scouting for your top choice:

• Integration: You’ll want to ensure the platform integrates seamlessly with your other processes, like your customer relationship management software, to eliminate any unnecessary additional steps.
• Viewing options: Many consumers check their email on their mobile devices. If your email marketing template is not mobile-friendly, you’ll miss a major mark. “Mobile-friendly design and ‘scan ability’ [are crucial] since a majority of users check email on their phone. You want to limit the length of the content to avoid cropping and losing consumers in the body content if there's too much information,” explained Davis. “For e-commerce or lead-based campaigns, they still need to click through to take the next step, and the email should clearly guide them there.”
• Response handling: Email marketing is more than just sending out a newsletter or ad every few days. Whether your business is small or large, you’ll have to establish efficient email response handling. Consider software that allows automated responses or creates tickets for customer responses.
• Personalization: Consumers have come to expect spam email flooding their inboxes and will ignore or delete blast emails. To entice people to open your emails, make sure your marketing platform has intuitive personalization features.
• Automation: As your business grows, it will become virtually impossible to give individual attention to every customer. Make sure your email marketing platform has built-in automation features to send personalized emails to the right people at the right time.

Not sure where to begin your search? Read to the end, where we’ll highlight some of the top vendors for email marketing tools.

Write compelling email content

Creating compelling content is crucial to ensure your readers click on and read your message. Consider these tips when generating email content that captivates your audience:

• Prioritize sounding natural (i.e., human) when writing. You’re not generating a thesis statement or summarizing research. Use clear language that sounds like you’re talking to a friend.
• Write in the second person. Email marketing works best when you’re directly addressing the consumer, as it encourages a direct connection while reinforcing your brand’s humanity.
• Highlight the benefits to the reader. Your consumer wants something out of the email, so make it clear, specific, and meaningful to them.
• Personalize when possible. “If you can take clues in their browsing behavior or purchase data to suggest relevant items for their next purchase, it really improves CTR [the click-through rate] or open rates if you can layer that into the subject line or within the content of the email,” advised Davis.

Create a high-converting call to action

The most important component of any marketing email is the call to action (CTA), which is the part that encourages readers to engage and take the next step. Keep in mind that the exact language of your CTA will vary based on what your customer needs or wants from your business and, crucially, what you want them to do in exchange.

“Be direct about what you want them to do: ‘Schedule a call,’ ‘Click a link,’ ‘Hit reply.’ One action per email,” advised Mikey Lucas, Founder of American Energy Fund. “Confused people don’t act. Clarity drives conversions.”

Set up a landing page and track analytics

The links in your CTA should, once clicked on, take your customer to a carefully designed landing page.

“An effective landing page acts as an extension of the email that continues the flow of the conversation and drives them to a conversion,” said Ari Saposh, the former Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Bridge Corporation.

To optimize your landing page, make sure the message is clear and easy to understand. People will disengage if there are too many action points going on. Make your landing page easy to navigate too. If your goal is for them to fill out a form, have the landing page be the form itself, he said.

Additionally, your landing page should have tracking codes for analytics so conversions can be measured.

Pick the right time to send emails

Choosing the right time to send out your business’s email marketing campaigns is crucial, especially if you’re connecting with a global audience. Here are some best practices to keep in mind when scheduling your emails:

• Understand your target audience’s email behaviors. Analyze your email key performance metrics (KPIs), such as open rates, click-to-open rates (CTOR), CTRs, bounce rates, and unsubscribes to understand how your audience currently engages with your emails.
• Perform A/B tests. Based on your analysis, tailor your approach by experimenting with different versions of your message and sending them to subsets of your audience based on specific demographic details. Doing so will help you determine the best send time for maximal engagement and conversion.
• Schedule emails based on your target audience’s time zone. If your audience spans different time zones, consider segmenting them by the recipient’s local time rather than yours.

Track key metrics and measure campaign success.

As mentioned above, keeping detailed data on your email marketing efforts will help you to better understand what works (and what doesn’t) for your audience. Some key metrics to consider include:

• Delivery and bounce rates: Your delivery rate is the percentage of successfully delivered emails. Conversely, bounce rate is the percentage of total emails sent that could not be delivered. There are two types of bounces: “soft” and “hard.” A soft bounce typically occurs when someone’s inbox is full. A hard bounce occurs when an email address is closed, incorrect, or nonexistent. Tracking these delivery rates allows you to assess the overall health of your subscription list.
• Click-through rates (CTR): Your CTR is the percentage of the total number of people who clicked on at least one link in your email. It’s a great metric for providing a holistic view of how your audience responded to your campaign, as it accounts for several key factors, including content clicks and subject line optimization.
• Click-to-open rates (CTOR): Your CTOR is the percentage of unique recipients who clicked a link after opening your email. This metric is an excellent indicator of audience engagement and resonance because it only factors in those who opened and interacted with your email content.

Email marketing laws: Considerations and best practices

Each country has its own rules and regulations regarding email marketing. These laws serve to protect consumers and their data, providing options for those who wish to opt out of receiving marketing emails.

Luckily, regulations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and other countries are similar. However, if your brand is connecting with a global audience through email, you’ll need to be aware of the nuances and potential penalties and hefty fines for noncompliance.

Some overall best practices for email marketing law compliance include:

• Obtaining and maintaining all records of recipients’ explicit consent to opt in to receive your marketing emails.
• Ensuring all email campaigns include the necessary content requirements. Your business’s name and mailing address, an applicable and descriptive subject line, and clear unsubscribe links should be incorporated into each message.
• Honoring recipients’ unsubscribe requests quickly and maintaining records of their requests.
• Understanding your business’s legal responsibility to protect the personal and identifiable information (PII) people entrust to you when they opt into email marketing. Don’t solely rely on the email marketing company you’ve partnered with to protect the data you’ve collected.
• Conducting email marketing compliance audits frequently to ensure your marketing practices, data collection, and retention methods comply with all federal and international regulations.
• Instituting compliance checklists for creating new campaigns and sending test emails for a quality assurance review before scheduling them to go out.

If your business is accused of email marketing noncompliance, remain calm. Immediately stop all email campaign activity, gather all relevant documentation — including consent records, email logs, and your company’s privacy policy — and contact a lawyer who specializes in email marketing compliance for assistance.

Top vendors for email marketing tools

When it comes to growing your business through email campaigns, choosing the right platform is vital. To help you narrow down your search, here are some of the top email marketing tools to consider.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact empowers small businesses with practical email marketing tools designed to drive results. Its intuitive drag-and-drop editor and library of professional templates make it easy to create polished emails, while its automation and segmentation features help deliver timely and relevant messages based on customer behavior. Known for its 97% deliverability rate and flexible support options, Constant Contact ensures businesses have what they need to build, send, and optimize their email campaigns..

GetResponse

One of the top vendors in email marketing, GetResponse is built to help businesses of all sizes connect with their audience. From AI-powered campaign generators to advanced automation to real-time analytics, the platform makes it easy to reach the right people and improve results over time. With a legacy spanning 25+ years, GetResponse continues to innovate while staying true to its mission: making powerful, affordable marketing accessible to everyone.

Hubspot

HubSpot offers an all-in-one solution that combines powerful features with ease of use. Its drag-and-drop editor and customizable templates let you design professional emails quickly, while AI tools generate subject lines and copy to boost engagement. Integrated automation workflows personalize follow-ups based on subscriber behavior, helping marketers create effective campaigns without coding or extra support.

Kit

Formerly known as ConvertKit, Kit offers powerful email marketing tools designed to nurture lasting customer relationships and grow your business without being overly salesy. Its intuitive email editor lets you quickly customize beautiful, on-brand templates with advanced personalization options to boost engagement. Kit integrates seamlessly with your creative apps, creating a personalized workflow hub, and boasts a 99.8% delivery rate and a 40% average open rate.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the most widely used platforms for email marketing. It offers powerful features like AI-supported content generation, automation features, advanced segmentation, and pop-up forms that help boost opens, clicks, and sales. With integrated SMS capabilities, Mailchimp helps businesses engage customers across multiple channels seamlessly.

Omnisend

Omnisend offers a seamless blend of email and SMS marketing for e-commerce businesses seeking to boost engagement and drive sales. Its prebuilt automations (like welcome series, abandoned cart recovery, and post-purchase campaigns) help keep sales moving while you focus elsewhere. Additional features like real-time segmentation, unlimited contact groups, and intuitive personalization ensure the right message reaches the right customer at the right time.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

With its very own Marketing Cloud, Salesforce is a standout for email marketing tools. It empowers marketers to boost ROI through automation, real-time data analysis, and AI-driven personalization. The platform unifies customer data across channels, enabling personalized, connected experiences throughout the customer journey. With deep campaign insights and seamless integration, it helps brands deliver impactful, data-driven marketing at scale.

Kaylee Kolditz, Erik J. Martin, and Sean Peek contributed to this article. Some source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this piece.

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