Email Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Email marketing is incredibly valuable for businesses of any size. A strong email marketing strategy can have greater reach than social media, where many factors can impact how often your posts and ads are visible to your followers. Email marketing provides direct access to your most engaged customer base—the people who have raised their hands and said they want to hear more from you. It offers opportunities for small business owners to build customer relationships or attract potential customers and encourage brand loyalty. And while social media is a great channel for increasing awareness about your project or brand, email marketing is often a more effective digital marketing strategy for driving purchases.

One of the things that makes email marketing campaigns unique among other marketing channels is that it’s an opt-in channel. That means you should only send marketing emails to customers who have said they want to receive them. Doing so ensures that your emails are reaching an audience that is likely to convert—and may protect your business from violating legal restrictions in your region.

Read on for five easy-to-implement small business email marketing strategies, including email design tips, how to use automated emails, and how to optimize your email content based on your performance metrics.

1. Make it easy to sign up for your email list

Use a form embedded on your site to prompt your visitors to join your email list—and give them ample opportunity to do so by including that form on multiple pages of your website. Common places to add sign-up forms on a web page are in the footer or in the right sidebar. You can also use a pop-up form to collect emails on landing pages or prompt customers to sign up as part of your checkout experience.

You will need a place to collect and store those email addresses once your visitors opt in. With a Squarespace website, you can use Email Campaigns to collect addresses and keep your email subscribers organized. With email marketing tools, you can even explore segmentation options—a way of sending an email to only some of your subscribers. Email list segmentation can be helpful if you want to target just new customers, for example, and exclude return customers.

2. Email design matters

Email is an extension of your brand, so the layout and design of your email newsletter or marketing efforts should feel consistent with your website and social media presence. The layout can also influence how your audience interacts with the content of the email and whether they click through to your site to learn more or to make a purchase. 

Your emails should have compelling visuals and a clear call to action (CTA), whether it’s to make a purchase or read or watch content on your site. It’s also essential that the design of your marketing emails is responsive, meaning it can be viewed on any mobile device and is optimized for engagement on different screen sizes. 

Make sure it’s also easy to find the option to unsubscribe from your email list. While you hope your emails are useful and lead to strong subscriber retention, offering a way to easily opt out is legally required, in addition to being good customer support.

You don’t need to become a graphic designer or know any coding languages to build beautiful, responsive emails. Email marketing software makes it easy to build different types of emails quickly. Squarespace Email Campaigns has email templates for transactional emails, special offers, and other business needs that make it easy to keep your email design consistent with your website’s branding. You can also easily bring photos from your website into a template in the email builder.

3. Use automated email options

Set up email automation tools to send an email based on the action a customer takes on your page. For example, you can create one welcome email, then set up an email marketing automation that sends that message to anyone who makes a purchase from you. The automated email functionality helps you save time while keeping your customers informed and driving more engagement with your brand. For example, you can set up an automated email to prompt a customer to share their purchase on social media a week after they buy it, or send a coupon to a customer who left your shop before finishing checkout. 

You can also use automations to create a drip campaign, which is a series of emails sent over time. Drip campaigns are typically designed for lead generation—that is, to pique your audience’s interest in your brand and products. For example, a bike shop might send new subscribers an email series on step-by-step bike maintenance for beginners, or how to choose the right bike for you. If you’re already writing a blog for your brand, you can use blog content to create a successful email drip campaign—and drive traffic back to your site. 

4. Ask readers to add your email to their address book

The name and email address that subscribers see on your marketing emails are called sender details. You can customize these in all standard email marketing platforms. As an extension of your brand, your customized sender details help your subscribers identify your email in their inbox. They also improve your email marketing’s deliverability, or the measure of how often your emails make it to your subscriber’s inboxes. 

One way to improve your deliverability rate is to include a note in your emails asking subscribers to add your email address to their contact list. This way, your email sends will reach your target audience and avoid getting caught in a spam filter or secondary email filter. Better deliverability will also help you increase your email open rates, which is a useful metric in analyzing your email performance.

5. Review email performance and optimize

Open rate is just one metric for understanding the impact of a specific email campaign. The number of emails delivered is a good indicator for the quality of your mailing list. If many of your emails are going undelivered, that means your subscriber list contains incorrect email addresses and your messages aren’t being seen at all. 

Unsubscribe rates across your campaigns are also an important metric to watch to ensure that your emails are reaching the right audience. Email Campaigns provides views into these performance metrics in your Squarespace dashboard, along with other website traffic analytics. 

The number of emails opened reflects subscribers engaging with your brand (or perhaps simply intrigued by your compelling subject line). Clicks from the email to your site are known as click-through rates. These clicks could be through a call-to-action button, logo, or other link, and they’re key to helping you understand how effective your messaging is in prompting subscribers to take an action. You can run an A/B test to compare the performance of two slightly different emails and gain insight into the types of messages, subject lines, and images that resonate with your subscribers.

From there, you can use your website analytics to track conversion rate—the number of people who click-through to your site that also take an action, like reading a blog post or buying a product.

Watch our webinar to learn about growing your audience, and start building your first email campaign today.

This post was updated on December 19, 2022.