Almost every small business already has hundreds of customer email addresses sitting somewhere, and never uses them. Email marketing for small businesses does not start by buying a tool: it starts by realising that that list is the one channel nobody can take away from you.
What happens when the channel is not yours
A social network changes its algorithm and suddenly your posts reach a quarter of the people they used to. A search engine changes how it shows results and your traffic drops without you touching anything. It happens every few months and there is no appeal.
Email is different. If you hold an address somebody gave you, you write and it arrives. Nobody in the middle decides how many people get to see you.
The list you already have and never built
Before you think about collecting anything, count what is there. Most businesses are surprised.
Where those addresses are right now
- On the invoices and quotes from the last few years, one by one.
- In the messages from your website form, including the ones that never became a sale.
- In bookings and appointments, if you work by diary.
- On warranties and job sheets the customer signs.
- In the notebook by the counter, which counts too.
A workshop with six years of invoices comfortably holds eight hundred addresses. These are not strangers: they are people who have already paid you.
Want to know what it would cost you?
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
Asking properly, with no hidden checkboxes
This is where people get nervous, and they are half right to. The rule that applies is the General Data Protection Regulation, and what it asks of consent is easy enough to meet: it has to be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous. In plain terms: an unticked box, a clear line about what you will send, and the option to withdraw at any time.
What a small company actually has to do with customer data is well summarised by the European Commission on its data protection page for businesses. The legal pages your site needs for all this are in the legal pages your website needs.
What you can send to someone who has already bought from you
There is a nuance hardly anybody knows: you can write to an existing customer about products or services similar to the ones they bought, as long as you offer an easy opt-out in every message and at the moment you collect the address. It is not a free pass, but it is not the impassable wall many imagine either.
What you cannot do, under any circumstances, is write to somebody who never gave you their address. Not bought, not scraped from a directory, not «I had it from an event».
The mistake of writing «news»
Almost everybody's first email is titled «News from [business name]» and explains that the premises have been refurbished. Nobody opens it, and rightly so: it says nothing useful to the person receiving it.
The rule is the same as for articles: write about the customer's problem, not about your company. If the only thing you can think of is how well your business is doing, better to send nothing that month.
Five emails that do get opened
- The useful reminder. «Time to service the boiler before the cold sets in». It arrives when it helps.
- The short tip. Three lines on making what they bought last longer.
- The change that affects them. A regulation, a deadline, a new requirement.
- The finished job. A before-and-after photo and two sentences.
- The direct question. «Would it be useful if we did X?» Replies are worth more than opens.
How often, realistically
Once a month is fine. Every other month is fine too. What does not work is four emails in January and then silence until September: by then nobody remembers who you are and the unsubscribes pile up.
If you pick a month, pick the day and the hour too, and stick to them. Consistency does half the work.
What if I have nothing to say?
Then do not send. One email every two months with something in it beats a monthly filler. And if that feeling lasts half a year, the problem is not email: it is that you are not writing down what customers ask you. Everything comes from there, exactly as in a business blog.
The subject line is half the job
That is where the open is decided. Specific and short works: «October's service», «Three things before we close for the holidays», «The warranty period has changed». Vague or over-promising does not, and a subject in capitals with exclamation marks is the fastest route to the spam folder.
Which address to send from
Your own, on your own domain. A commercial email sent from a free address loses credibility and delivers worse, because spam filters pay close attention to that. How to set it up is in business email with your own domain.
And there are three technical records worth having in place —SPF, DKIM and DMARC— so your messages land in the inbox rather than in spam. Google explains them on its page about email authentication methods. It sounds impenetrable and whoever manages your domain sets it up in ten minutes.
An easy unsubscribe is in your interest
It is compulsory, yes, but it also suits you. A visible unsubscribe link at the end of every message clears out the people who are no longer interested and stops them marking you as spam, which is what really hurts: once a few recipients flag your emails as junk, the next ones stop reaching everybody.
A list of three hundred people who read you beats one of three thousand who ignore you.
What tool you need at the start
At the start, very little. The tool is not the point: the point is not sending two hundred emails from your own mailbox with everyone in blind copy, because that ends with your domain flagged as suspicious and even your ordinary company email landing in spam.
With a sending tool, even the free tier of any serious provider, you get a list, automatic unsubscribes and statistics. When the list grows and starts bringing in money, then you look at whether paying is worth it.
The minimum it has to do
- Record the date and the place where each person gave you their address.
- Handle unsubscribes on its own, without you touching anything.
- Let you export the list the day you want to switch tools.
That third point is the one most people forget and the one that costs most later.
What never to do
- Buy lists. Neither legal nor effective: nobody gave you permission.
- Send to everyone in blind copy from the company mailbox.
- Attach an eight-megabyte PDF instead of linking to a page.
- Only write when you want to sell. If the year's only email is the offer, it shows.
- Copy and paste the website copy. Email is read differently, closer to a message than to a brochure.
How to measure without going mad
Opens no longer say much, because many systems load images on their own and count opens that never happened. Watch three numbers: how many clicked a link, how many replied and how many unsubscribed. That tells you whether the email was useful or annoying.
And the final question is always the same: of this month's calls and visits, how many came from the email? How to tie that down without building a dashboard is in where your customers come from.
Where the list lives
A spreadsheet is where everyone starts, and it ends badly: duplicates, people who unsubscribed being written to again, addresses typed by hand with an extra letter. Past a couple of hundred, the list should live in the same place as the customer record, which is what a CRM for small businesses is for.
We'll tell you in a ten-minute conversation
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
Email and the rest of the house
Email replaces nothing; it fits alongside everything else. The website form is where the address is collected, and it had better work: how to check is in your website contact form. WhatsApp covers the immediate and email covers what gets read calmly, as we explain in WhatsApp Business for your business.
And when somebody replies to your email, reply fast. Response time decides more sales than people think: how fast you reply.
A three-month calendar
No paid tools and a couple of hours a month.
Email marketing for small businesses: the first three sends
- Month one. Gather the addresses you already have, strip out duplicates and send one short email explaining what you will send and how often, with the unsubscribe clearly visible.
- Month two. A useful seasonal reminder, the kind that arrives when it helps.
- Month three. A finished job with a photo and a question at the end.
By the third send you know who reads you. And those are the people who will buy from you at the lowest cost all year.
What email marketing for small businesses costs
The sending itself can cost you nothing for quite a while. What you do need is email on your own domain, and that is included in all our plans: one mailbox with Tu Landing, at 100 € a month; two with Tu Web, at 200 €; and ten, fifteen or twenty-five with the presence plans at 400, 750 and 1,500 € a month. All plus VAT and with no lock-in.
If what you want is somebody to handle the calendar, the copy and making all of it fit with the website and the Google listing, that is digital marketing, and it sits inside the presence plans.
From Sant Antoni de Calonge, with businesses across Girona and Barcelona
If you have six years of invoices and no idea how to pull the addresses out of them, write to us through the contact form or by WhatsApp. We will tell you what can be used and what is worth asking for again.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.