How to use email marketing for small business

What Is Email Marketing and the Benefits for My Business?

8 min read

This relatively easy tool is one of the most cost effective ways to make sales and build a relationship with shoppers. Around 54% of small businesses send at least one email per week. Your competition is likely prepping their weekly newsletter as we speak, safe to say — you’ve got some catching up to do.

If you want direct access to potential and current shoppers, read on! We’ll cover key email marketing strategy, the different types of email marketing and how you can do it all with Ecwid E-commerce.

What Is Email Marketing and How Does It Work for E-Commerce?

Let’s start with the definition of email marketing — a form of direct marketing that allows you to promote your business’s products or service via email. Collecting customer email addresses and sending marketing emails is used to strengthen relationships with potential and existing customers, share updates about current offers, send discount coupons, increase loyalty, and more.

An example of a loyalty marketing email

In conjunction with your online store, the end goal is to drive traffic to your store and make sales. It’s not just enough to talk about your business or brand, you ultimately want to funnel customers to make a purchase.

All that to say, part of your email marketing strategy should also focus on building a relationship with customers. Any business can use email marketing but specifically for small businesses, this is an opportunity to directly get in touch with customers.

Why Is Email Marketing Important for Small Businesses?

With 79% of small businesses consider email marketing vital to their business strategy. You are able to diversify your strategy even more. As we mentioned, just about any business can use email marketing but it’s important to understand why you need it.

For example, a global pandemic has taught us the importance of building an audience on different platforms. With businesses forced online, that also meant access to their audience was strictly online. And if you didn’t have a strong email audience, making sales just got tougher.

For small businesses, you can’t afford to be out of touch with customers. And we’ll recommend a few different opportunities for you to try today.

What Are the Types of Email Marketing?

There are multiple ways for you to start building and implementing this tactic. Here are a few different types of email marketing:

Abandoned cart email

When a customer adds products to a cart, goes to checkout, specifies their email address, and then leaves the store without placing an order, an abandoned cart is saved in your store. You can track and recover those carts by sending customers abandoned cart recovery emails.

Each email contains a list of products the customer left in the cart and a button to complete an order. These can be sent either automatically or manually.

After an email is sent, the checkout will be considered recovered only if the customer clicks the recovery link and completes the checkout. If a customer completes an order by returning to the website, without using the checkout recovery link, then the abandoned cart won’t be marked as recovered.

Welcome email

These emails have the highest opening rate and are an opportunity to make a first impression! A few ways to incentivize users to open is by offering a discount or free shipping. Always make sure to include a link to your shop or social media accounts.

Take note of the free shipping and link to online store

Short, punchy email subjects get their attention, discounts or other shopping incentives them to spend money with you, and a casual, communicative vibe on your end helps ensure that they remain subscribed.

Part of welcome email from Bookmate

Learn how to write a welcome email

This type of email marketing contains updates and useful information that you send to your customers on a regular basis. Newsletters help to gain traffic, keep your customers in the know, and build brand loyalty. They offer interesting and helpful content, announce new products or events, promote your store, and more. To get such emails, customers subscribe to your newsletter list.
While the content may differ, the structure of an email newsletter is mostly the same. Here is a checklist of what you need:

A catchy subject line.
Uncluttered layout and appealing design.
An inviting greeting.
Insightful and engaging copy.
A strong call-to-action button.
A sender’s name.
Your contact and social accounts.
An unsubscribe button.

Don’t forget — customers often view emails on their mobile devices, make sure they are formatted correctly.

How Can I Get Started With Email Marketing?

We’ve just walked you through a few different types of emails, you’ll want to implement at least one to get started. And to help, we suggest using our recently released integration with Mailchimp.

Unleash the power of email with MailchimpHere are some of the coolest things you can do with Mailchimp:

Build your email lists with email signup forms in your store
Send manual and automated email campaigns
Create customized email templates to complement your brand
Segment your audiences to send targeted personal messages that resonate with your customers
Advertise on Facebook and Instagram to reach even more people like your customers
Schedule social posts
And more!

Now, in order to do email marketing you’ll need to be on a Business Plan or higher. It’s a relatively easy next step and small but impactful investment for your business. So let’s recap, with Ecwid E-commerce we have multiple ways for you to engage with customers via email marketing.

Mailchimp — accessible on our Business Plan, you can get started with their free plan!
Abandoned Cart Recovery, Welcome Emails and more — also available on an Ecwid Business Plan!

What email marketing strategies have you found successful for your online business?