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Email Marketing for Small Business: A No-Fluff Starter Guide
Email Marketing for Small Business: A No-Fluff Starter Guide
I ignored email marketing for two years because it felt old-school. Then I watched a competitor's tiny newsletter outperform my entire social media strategy. Here's the starter guide I wish I had.
Two years. I put off email marketing for two years and I am still annoyed at myself.
My excuse at the time was that email felt like something my dad does. He forwards chain emails to the whole family. He signs up for the newsletter at every single store he walks into. Bed Bath & Beyond, Lowe's, that shoe place at the mall. That's who does email marketing, right? Old people and big box stores. Meanwhile I was doing Instagram ads (zero trackable sales, I went back and checked), TikTok videos (averaging about 47 views, which I pretended didn't bother me but it absolutely did), and Facebook campaigns that a friend once described, accurately, as "setting cash on fire but with a Meta dashboard to watch it burn."
Sarah changed my mind over pho.
That place near her studio with the broken neon sign outside. Sarah makes pottery. Just her, a garage, one kiln. Somewhere between talking about glaze techniques and splitting the check, she mentioned her email list. Around 1,200 subscribers. I almost said something condescending. I had 4,000 Instagram followers! What's 1,200 emails?
Then she pulled up Shopify on her phone.
Every time she sends a newsletter, twice a month give or take, she sells somewhere between $2,000 and $3,000 of pottery within 48 hours. Not on a good month. Every send. She'd been doing this for eighteen months without a single miss. I sat there staring at her phone screen trying to think of something to say.
On the drive home I attempted to calculate my own Instagram ROI. Four thousand followers, two-ish years of posting, and maybe one sale that I can sort of connect to a post if I'm being extremely generous with the attribution. Sarah was pulling $4-6K a month from 1,200 email addresses and a Squarespace template. I don't think I've ever felt dumber.
You know those "$36 return per dollar" stats that email marketing people love to cite? Litmus's 2025 State of Email report actually found that 30% of marketers see $36-50 back per dollar spent, and 5% exceed $50. I used to write those off as consultant nonsense measured at enterprise scale that had nothing to do with a real small business. After seeing Sarah's Shopify dashboard I stopped being so dismissive. After building my own list and watching what happened, I stopped completely. Email marketing for small business is just... different. I don't have a clever way to put it. Social media feels like shouting into a room where someone keeps dimming the lights. Email feels like handing a note to someone who asked for it.
If you've been putting this off the way I did, here's the stuff I had to figure out the hard way. Tools, growing a list from nothing, what to write when you sit down to write, and a bunch of mistakes that cost me months.
Why I changed my mind about email
Look, I still post on Instagram. I'm not one of those "delete all social media" people. But a few things happened that I couldn't ignore.
Jess, a friend who runs a skincare brand, woke up one morning in October 2024 and her Instagram reach had dropped 70% overnight. Seventy percent. She hadn't changed anything. Same posting schedule, same content, same hashtags. Meta just... did that. Pushed some update and decided fewer people would see her posts. She called me kind of panicking and I didn't know what to tell her because there's nothing you can do. That's the deal with social platforms. Somebody else has the switch and they will flip it whenever they feel like it, usually right when your business depends on it.
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Your email list though? Those addresses sit in your account. Nobody at Meta or TikTok or anywhere else can decide tomorrow that 70% of your subscribers won't see your message. That distinction didn't feel important to me until Jess's phone call. Now it feels like the whole ballgame.
But honestly, what really got me was the math. I'd been telling myself my Instagram and email efforts were roughly equal. They are not. Not even close. My emails get around 38% open rates, which I thought was mediocre until I looked up what organic reach looks like on Facebook these days. Under 5%. Instagram is about the same. So out of 100 email subscribers, 38 open the email. Out of 100 Instagram followers, maybe 5 see the post. I spent years treating these as equivalent channels. Embarrassing in retrospect.
The other thing that surprised me was automation. Last June I sat down on a Saturday afternoon, wrote a five-email welcome sequence in Brevo, and set it to run. I have not opened or edited that sequence since June. Every new subscriber gets all five emails automatically. I've traced at least fourteen purchases directly back to those emails. Fourteen sales from one Saturday afternoon, and the number keeps going up.
One more thing and then I'll move on, I promise. Your competition at email marketing is hilariously bad. Out of curiosity I went on a research kick last year. Signed up for the email lists of maybe 20 businesses near me: restaurants, a yoga studio, two hair salons, a print shop, bunch of others. Twelve of them never emailed me. Not once. Still haven't. Of the eight that actually sent something, five were nothing but coupon blasts with zero personality. Just "20% OFF THIS WEEKEND" hitting my inbox every few days until I unsubscribed. If you can write an email that contains one actual interesting thought, you're already in the top 25% of small businesses in your city. That's how low the bar is. (I ranked marketing channels by actual ROI in our small business marketing strategies guide — email is near the top for a reason.)
Building a list when you have zero subscribers
This is where everyone gets stuck, including me. "I don't have any subscribers" feels like a reason not to start, which is exactly the backwards logic I used for way too long. My first email went to 23 people. Roughly eight of them were family members I'd guilt-tripped into subscribing. My cousin replied "looks great!" which was sweet but she replies that to literally everything I've ever sent her, including a photo of my car's check engine light. I don't count her as validation.
Why "subscribe to our newsletter" doesn't work
For two months I had a "Subscribe to our newsletter" box in my website footer and collected exactly two subscribers. Both were my mother. She used her personal email and then her work email. Love you, Mom. Your data was statistically useless.
Think about it from the other side. You're browsing some random website. You see a box that says "Subscribe to our newsletter." What goes through your head? Probably "no" and then you scroll past. There's no reason to say yes. What newsletter? About what? How often? Why should I hand over my email address so you can clog my inbox?
The fix is embarrassingly obvious once you see it: give people something specific in exchange. Sarah offers early access to new pottery before it goes on the website. That's it. Simple, clear, and her customers actually want it because her pieces sell out fast.
A plumber I had coffee with last year, his offer is a one-page PDF: "The 5-Minute Check That Prevents 90% of Emergency Plumbing Calls." He spent maybe an hour writing it. It's been his best list builder for over a year now. One hour of work, still paying off fourteen months later.
The bakery near my apartment does "Weekend specials hit your inbox every Thursday before we post them anywhere else." A marketing consultant I know swapped "Join our mailing list" for "Download our 10-page Website Audit Template" and went from 3 signups a month to over 40. Exact same form, exact same website traffic. The only thing that changed was giving people a reason to actually care.
Stop hiding the form (I hid mine for months)
OK this is embarrassing. My signup form lived in the footer for months. The footer! The place where you put your copyright notice and a link to your privacy policy. Nobody scrolls there on purpose. I looked it up later — footer forms convert at something like 0.3%. So basically I was hoping that somebody would read my entire website top to bottom, reach the very end, and think "yes, I must subscribe." Delusional is the only word.
When I finally moved it to the top of my homepage, signups picked up right away. Not dramatically, just... noticeably. Then I stuck a signup form inside a blog post, about four paragraphs down — right in the middle of the content where people are actually paying attention instead of bouncing. That inline form beat the homepage one for a solid three weeks.
About pages are weirdly good converters too. And your post-purchase confirmation page? If someone just gave you money and you're not asking for their email on that screen, come on. What are we doing here.
Pop-ups. God, pop-ups. I spent years ranting about how tacky they were. Swore I'd never use one. Then one night around 11pm I was looking at my signup numbers and feeling desperate, so I added a delayed pop-up. Twenty-second timer, shows the lead magnet. I told myself it was "temporary" and that I'd take it down after a week. That was seven months ago. Signups tripled. I am fully a hypocrite and I have made peace with it.
My friend Marcus owns a gym in Newtown. His signup form was a tiny text link buried in his footer, same mistake I made. He replaced it with a big banner across the top of his homepage: "Get Your Free 4-Week Beginner Workout Plan." That one change doubled his signups. He didn't redesign the site. He didn't change the copy anywhere else. Just moved the form and gave it a real offer.
Got a physical location? You have it easier than the rest of us
There's a cafe I go to most mornings. Little handwritten sign by the register: "Join our coffee club, free drink on your birthday." I asked the owner about it once, just being nosy, and she told me she collects 30 to 40 emails a month that way. Thirty to forty! From people already standing in her shop, already buying coffee, already happy. A QR code on business cards works too. A link printed at the bottom of receipts. An iPad propped up next to the tip jar. Any of it. The only requirement is telling people what they're getting and then actually following through on it.
Which email tool should you use?
I need to confess something. I once blew an entire Saturday building a comparison spreadsheet of email marketing tools for small business. Fourteen columns. Color-coded cells. VLOOKUP formulas calculating cost-per-subscriber at different list sizes. I was proud of it, in a deeply nerdy way. Texted a screenshot to my friend Anika and she responded: "dude just pick one."
Annoying. But correct. At this stage every platform does the same four things: signup forms, sending emails, basic automation, and showing you who opened what. Mailchimp, Brevo, Kit, MailerLite, they all do those things fine. You won't notice the differences for months.
That said, "just pick one" is useless when you're actually staring at five different pricing pages that seem designed by people who hate clarity. So here's what I learned the hard way after trying four platforms, paying actual money, and migrating between them twice (both times miserable):
Mailchimp is the one everyone defaults to because they've heard of it. Free up to 500 contacts, which sounds like a lot until you hit it in three months. The interface has gotten messy lately; they keep shoving AI features in that nobody asked for. I know three business owners personally who got hit with surprise billing jumps at tier boundaries. That said, if you learn from YouTube tutorials, Mailchimp has more walkthroughs than anyone else. That's worth something when you're starting out.
Brevo (it used to be called Sendinblue, which I misspelled every single time I typed it) is what I recommend to most small businesses now. Here's the thing that makes it different: you pay per email sent, not per subscriber. Their free tier is 300 sends a day to as many contacts as you want. With Mailchimp you're paying for 2,000 contacts whether those people open your emails or not. With Brevo you only pay when you actually hit send. The interface is cleaner. They have SMS built in. The templates are basic, but honestly I've come around to thinking that's a feature, not a bug. Plain-looking emails outperform pretty ones for small business. I've tested this more than I want to admit.
Kit (they rebranded from ConvertKit in 2024) is built for creators and course sellers and coaches. If that describes you, just go sign up right now, you don't need to read the rest of this section. The visual automation builder is so good I pulled a friend onto a Zoom call just to show her. Free up to 10,000 subscribers with some features gated.
MailerLite is the one nobody talks about that maybe they should. Free up to 1,000 subscribers with almost everything unlocked, including features Mailchimp puts behind a paywall. I keep running into former Mailchimp users who landed here after a billing surprise.
Beehiiv is for people whose entire strategy revolves around the newsletter itself. Best reading experience of any platform I've tried. Built-in referral programs. Free up to 2,500 subscribers. Not the right choice if you're selling physical products though.
OK so the short version, because you've been reading about email tools for too long already: Brevo if you sell products or run a local shop. Kit if you sell courses or coaching or knowledge. MailerLite if you want the most features without paying anything. I've switched platforms twice. Both times it ate a Saturday afternoon and I said some things I won't repeat here. But I survived and my list survived and it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. The point is: don't let this decision freeze you. Seriously. I've watched people spend a month comparing tools. A month! That's four emails they could've sent. Four chances to make a sale. Pick something and move.
OK, you have a tool. Now what?
So you picked a platform. You've got some subscribers, even if "some" means seven people and three of them are related to you. That counts. That's a list. Let's send them something.
Send a welcome email immediately
This is the thing nobody told me and I wish they had: when someone subscribes, you need to email them right away. Like within minutes. If you wait three weeks and then send your first campaign out of nowhere, they've already forgotten who you are. They'll mark you as spam without a second thought. I know because I did exactly this to somebody's list once, and I felt zero guilt about it. Couldn't remember signing up.
My welcome email is embarrassingly simple. Here's basically what it says:
Subject: Your [thing] + what to expect
Hey, here's the [template/download] you signed up for: [link]
I send an email most Tuesdays. Tips, stuff I've tried, occasional offers. If it's not useful, unsubscribe link is at the bottom. No weirdness.
— [name]
That's it. Seven sentences. Took me maybe fifteen minutes to write, and I haven't changed a word in eight months. Two people have actually replied just to say they liked how short it was. I keep wanting to make it fancier and then I remember: the boring version is working. Leave it alone.
Your first campaign should not be a sales pitch
I cannot stress this enough. Do not sell anything in email number one. Your readers don't trust you yet. Send them something useful. Something where they close the email and think "huh, that was actually worth reading."
A personal trainer I know, her first real email was called "The stretching mistake I see every single client make." She told me later it hit a 52% open rate. An accountant near me wrote about a tax deduction most small businesses overlook, and a landscaper sent before-and-after photos of a job that went sideways before he fixed it, with a paragraph about what went wrong.
None of that is fancy. It's just: be a real person, talk about something specific, and actually help. That's the whole thing. Not a listicle. Not a thinly disguised ad.
Drop the corporate voice
You know what kills small business email programs faster than anything? Sounding like a Fortune 500 press release. "We are pleased to announce our new seasonal offerings." Nobody. Nobody talks like that. And yet I see it constantly in small business emails because people think professionalism means sounding stiff.
Say "I" instead of "we" (unless there are genuinely multiple people writing). Keep paragraphs short because, let's be honest, your subscribers are reading on their phones while standing in line at Trader Joe's. Have actual opinions about things. Read your email out loud before you send it. Seriously, out loud. If it sounds weird coming out of your mouth, it'll sound weird in someone's inbox.
Subject lines used to paralyze me. I'd sit there for 20 minutes trying different options in my head, rewriting the same eight words. Now my entire strategy is: "Would I open this if it showed up between an Amazon shipping notification and a calendar reminder?" If yes, send it. If no, try again. That's it. I don't A/B test subject lines. I don't use formulas. I just think about my own inbox.
And then hit send. Your first email will be mediocre. Mine was. That's fine. Nobody is expecting literary genius from their local dry cleaner's Tuesday newsletter. They just want something useful from someone they recognize. That bar is low enough to trip over.
"But what do I even write about?"
This question has killed more email programs than spam filters ever will. The pattern I see constantly: someone starts strong, fires off three or four good emails, and then one Tuesday morning they sit down to write and just... nothing. They ghost their list. Weeks go by. Then months. Eventually it feels too awkward to come back and they quietly let the whole thing die.
I've been there. Sat staring at a blank Brevo draft for 45 minutes one morning before giving up and watching YouTube videos about email marketing instead. Real productive.
What saved me was realizing I only ever send four kinds of emails. About half are teaching emails, where I answer whatever question customers keep asking me. A trainer I know writes about the three-minute desk stretch that fixes bad posture. My accountant friend explains deductions people miss. This stuff is already in your head from doing your job every day. You just have to type it out instead of saying it to one customer at a time.
Maybe a quarter of my sends are stories. Something that happened with a client last week. A mistake I made when I was starting out. The moment I realized I'd been wrong about something. People remember stories way better than tips. I have emails with a 45% open rate that are literally just "here's a dumb thing I did and what I learned."
Then there's promotions, maybe one out of every five emails. This is where you actually sell. New product, seasonal deal, subscriber-only discount. It works because you've spent the rest of the month being helpful instead of pitchy. But if every email you send is "SALE! BUY NOW! LIMITED TIME!" your list will shrink faster than you can grow it. I watched a florist do this. She had 800 subscribers in January and 200 by April. All coupons, no value.
And occasionally I send something personal. My take on some industry news. A rant about something that bugs me. A reflection on a business milestone. These are the emails I'm most nervous to hit send on and, without fail, the ones that get the most replies. Turns out people actually want to hear from a person, not a brand.
How often? Once a week works for me. I send on Tuesdays, usually in the morning. Twice a month is fine if you're genuinely swamped. Less than that and people forget you exist. I unsubscribed from a "monthly" newsletter recently because each time an issue arrived, I had to Google the company name to remember who they were. That's not a relationship. That's junk mail.
You only need three automations (ignore the rest)
Someone on YouTube told me I needed a seventeen-step funnel with branching logic and lead scoring. I spent a weekend trying to build it in Kit. It was horrible. Deleted the whole thing and started over with three simple automations that have made me more money than any campaign I've ever sent manually.
The welcome sequence is the big one. Three to five emails spread over about two weeks. You already wrote email one (the instant welcome). After that I send my origin story a couple days in, then my single best piece of advice around day five, a customer testimonial or quick case study around day eight or nine, and a gentle pitch around day twelve. I wrote the whole sequence in one afternoon. Haven't touched it in months. These five automated emails have generated more revenue than any single campaign I've manually sent. I'm not exaggerating. More revenue than any one.
The post-purchase check-in is the one I'm proudest of, weirdly. Three to five days after someone buys, they get an email that just says: "How's everything going? Need help with anything?" Nothing else. People are genuinely surprised when a business follows up like that. I get replies like "wow, nobody ever asks." Around two weeks later I ask for a review. Around a month in I suggest something related they might like. The whole sequence takes maybe 30 minutes to set up and then it runs forever.
Then there's re-engagement, which sounds boring but saved my deliverability. Every few months I email everyone who hasn't opened in 90+ days. The subject line is just: "Should I stop emailing you?" Counterintuitive, right? But Gmail is watching. If a huge chunk of your list ignores every email you send, Gmail starts assuming you're spam, and then even the people who want your emails stop seeing them. I'd rather have 400 subscribers who actually read my stuff than 2,000 email addresses attached to people who deleted my emails without opening them six months ago.
The only numbers I actually look at
I used to check my email stats compulsively. Like, multiple times a day after a send. It was not healthy and it taught me nothing because individual emails are noisy. One email gets 42% opens, the next gets 31%, and you have no idea why. It made me anxious without being useful.
Now I mostly track four things. Open rate: 30-40% is normal for small business. If you're consistently under 20%, your subject lines might be bland or you're emailing too often (or not often enough, weirdly). Click rate: 2-5% is typical, anything above 3% is solid. If nobody's clicking, your emails are interesting but you're not giving people anywhere to go — check our conversion rate guide for what to fix on the landing page side. Unsubscribes: under 0.5% per send, you're fine. If you're regularly hitting 1%+ you're probably sending too many promos or the content doesn't match what people signed up for. And revenue, which is the one that actually matters. How much money did this specific email make? If you're not tracking that, everything else is vanity. (If you haven't set up proper analytics yet, our GA4 beginner guide walks through the setup.)
I send ten or fifteen emails, then I look at the trends. One bad open rate doesn't mean anything. Five bad open rates in a row means something.
Every mistake I made (so you don't have to)
The dumbest thing I did was waiting. For a full year I told myself "I'll start email marketing once I have 500 subscribers." Think about that for a second. You can't get subscribers without doing email marketing. It's circular. I wasted twelve months on this logic. When I finally sent my first email it went to 23 people and several of them bought something. Twenty-three people! I could have been doing this the entire time.
I also wasted weeks — actual weeks — designing fancy HTML templates. Custom header graphic. Brand colors. Nice fonts. The works. Want to know what happened when I A/B tested my beautiful template against plain text? Plain text won. My highest-converting email to this day is four paragraphs with a link at the bottom. No images. No header. No design whatsoever. I was annoyed about it for days.
There was also the month I got greedy and made every single email a pitch. Buy this. Try this. Sale ending soon. My unsubscribe rate hit 1.8% and I panicked. Backed off to roughly four or five useful emails for every promotional one. Sometimes six to one. People need to trust that opening your email won't always mean being sold to.
Inconsistency almost killed the whole thing. January I sent four emails because New Year's energy. February, zero. March, one. By April I'd been so inconsistent that people had forgotten who I was. I had to basically rebuild trust with my own list. Now I treat my Tuesday send like a client meeting. It happens. Every week. No excuses.
One more: a subscriber emailed me to say my emails looked "like a wall of text" on her iPhone. I pulled it up on my phone and... yeah. She was right. I'd been previewing exclusively on desktop. Rookie mistake that took me embarrassingly long to catch.
How email changed everything else I was doing
Here's something I didn't expect. Before I had a list, my blog was basically a revolving door. People showed up from Google, read a post, and left forever. I was generating thousands of pageviews a month and capturing exactly none of those visitors. Now when someone reads a blog post and subscribes, I can reach them again next week. My content marketing actually accumulates value instead of evaporating. (I wrote a longer version of this in our small business SEO guide if you want the full picture.)
My relationship with social media changed completely too. Instagram used to be where I tried to sell things. Now it exists to feed the email list. I tease Tuesday's email on stories. Post a snippet from last week's newsletter. The whole goal is just: get people off Instagram and onto my list, because Instagram can take away my reach any time it wants and my email list can't go anywhere.
There's also this weird feedback loop with SEO that I discovered by accident last year. When I email a new blog post to the list, a bunch of subscribers click through, spend time on the page, and some of them share it. Google sees all that engagement and ranks the post higher. Higher rankings bring in more Google traffic, more of that traffic subscribes, the list gets bigger, and the next time I email a blog post it gets even more engagement. I don't totally understand why this works as well as it does but my organic traffic is up about 40% since I started doing it consistently.
If you're working on domain authority through backlinks from places like Wikipedia and Reddit, which is what Revised does, email makes that investment compound faster. Stronger domain authority means better rankings across your whole site, which drives more traffic, which grows the list, which amplifies the next post. It all feeds into itself.
What your first month looks like (it's not pretty, and that's fine)
I'm going to lay this out week by week because I wish someone had done that for me instead of handing me a 47-step "ultimate guide" that made me want to close my laptop.
Week one is just setup. Pick Brevo or Kit or MailerLite — I don't care which, just pick one tonight. Verify your domain so emails don't land in spam. Make one signup form with a specific offer (not "subscribe to our newsletter"). Stick it on your homepage. Stick it on one other page. Done.
Week two, write three welcome emails. Set up the automation so they send themselves. Subscribe with your own email address and read the whole sequence on your phone. Does it look like a wall of text? Fix that. Then tell your existing customers the list exists — text them, email them from your regular email, mention it at the register, whatever.
Week three, you send your first real campaign. Something useful. Not a sales pitch. I don't care if your list is 12 people. Send it. Check your open rate the next morning. Try not to refresh the stats page more than twice. (I refreshed mine about forty times. Don't be me.)
Week four, send another one. Compare the two. Add the form to one more page on your site. If you've got a physical location, put up a sign or a QR code by the counter.
That's it. Four weeks. Nothing polished. Nothing optimized. But you're running. And honestly? A sloppy email program that actually exists will outperform the beautiful one you keep planning to start "next quarter" and never do.
The boring secret nobody wants to hear
I keep waiting for someone to reveal the advanced email marketing strategy. The sophisticated hack. The thing the pros know that I don't. I've been waiting for over a year now and I'm starting to accept that it doesn't exist.
Every email marketing tip in this entire post is really just scaffolding around one spectacularly boring habit: write something worth reading, put it in people's inboxes, do it on the same day every week. That is literally the whole thing.
The business owners I know who make real money from email? They're not doing anything fancy. They sound like themselves. They send on Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever day they picked. They help people more than they sell to them. Not some perfect ratio, just... more helpful emails than salesy ones. And they keep showing up. That's the whole thing. I kept expecting to find some secret layer underneath and there isn't one. It's almost annoying how simple it is.
Alright. Close this tab and go sign up for Brevo or Kit or MailerLite. I mean it. Right now, tonight, before you get distracted by something else and this becomes another thing you meant to do. Write the welcome email tomorrow while you're drinking coffee. Send your first real email next Tuesday. Your list might be twelve people. One of them might be your mom. Several of them might have subscribed because you guilted them into it at Thanksgiving. Doesn't matter. You'll learn segmentation and A/B testing eventually. What you can't do eventually is go back in time and start six months earlier.
