Why consider email marketing?
Despite the many rumors of its demise, email marketing for small businesses is still going strong at 55. Email is the only marketing channel that allows you to own your audience. You aren’t relying on algorithms or battling sponsored content for attention. It is also the only channel that fits your audience wherever they are in the customer journey, from the first time they hear about you to long after they’ve made a purchase.
When is it time to start?
There is a common misconception amongst small business owners that you need a massive mailing list before you start email marketing. You don’t.
If you have a contact form on your website, collect leads through social media forms, offer products, downloadable content, or host events, you may already be ready. Even if you don’t have any of those things yet, you can still get started.
Case Study: Pastel Fire Business Consulting
When Denise Segler of Pastel Fire Business Consulting came to me, she was excited to host her first webinar. She knew she needed to email registrants, but had never sent a marketing email before and had no contacts.
She had a website, but her contact form wasn’t working and wasn’t GDPR-compliant. She had no way to email webinar registrants, and she wanted to offer the recording and a downloadable guide as a purchasable package.
We discussed her goals, needs, and budget to figure out the right approach. The first step was to update her Privacy Policy and her contact form. We referred her to Gia Consulting, a UK-based compliance expert, to help with her policies, and got her form working correctly so that she received an email notification every time someone submitted it.
From there, we set up Brevo and integrated it with her website. Brevo let her track leads, create segments and automations, and email webinar attendees about future events, all within her budget and without a lot of technical heavy lifting. For the webinar and guide package, we integrated her site with SureCart to handle payments and delivery, with the recorded webinar hosted on Bunny.net.
Her webinar was a huge success.
Andrea expertly handled the technical setup, enabling my website to process custom product sales. She put the necessary tech in place so I could capture email addresses from the webinar and follow up with attendees. This allowed me to send the webinar replay, promote the booklet’s availability, and create a system for eventual newsletters.
—Denise, Pastel Fire Business Consulting
Pastel Fire is a good example of how you don’t need an existing list to start thinking about email marketing. But there are things you need to have in place before you start.
What you need to start emailing.
A marketing strategy
Email marketing fits alongside your social media, paid media, blog content, and networking as part of your larger marketing strategy. Before you send anything, know why you are sending and what you expect the outcome to be. Denise’s goal was very clear: promote the webinar recording package to event attendees and position herself to send newsletters in the future.
A budget
Email marketing can include costs beyond platform fees, which can vary widely depending on how many contacts you have. If you have fewer than 250 contacts, you may be able to find an email service provider (ESP) or customer relationship management (CRM) tool for free or less than €50/month. Take a look at the platform’s costs at higher tiers, because many systems can become quite expensive once you have more than 1,000 contacts.
Depending on the systems you are using, you may need additional tools like Zapier to connect systems that don’t communicate with each other natively, or a payment processor like Mollie for online transactions. Those often carry additional costs.
If you are hiring someone to help you get set up, factor in those costs.
A Privacy Policy
Under GDPR, a Privacy Policy is required. It needs to cover what data you collect, how you collect it, why you collect it, and how it’s used. We highly recommend working with a compliance expert or attorney to ensure your privacy policy is correct for your business. The temptation to use generative AI to create this policy is strong, but AI will give you a document that is generalized and not specific to your business and industry.
As you are working on your privacy policy, ask your compliance expert or attorney about data retention policies. Customer data shouldn’t be stored indefinitely, and you should only be collecting data you actually need.
Building your contact list
Starting from scratch, you can collect email addresses from any form that contains a marketing opt-in. If you already have contacts in a spreadsheet, double-check that you have obtained marketing consent and that the addresses are valid. Your platform will have instructions for uploading them.
Are you ready?
Take our short quiz to find out.