The email marketing guide for small businesses

You need sign-up forms to build an email list, but what’s arguably just as important is their placement and timing. 

Instead of timing sign-up forms for the moment users land on your homepage, consider timing them for when visitors engage with your website meaningfully, scroll through to a certain depth, or show exit intent.

You can also time sign-up forms that offer future updates on deals and discounts for after someone places their order on your check-out page. Additionally, embedding sign-up forms in the headers and footers of your website is a nonintrusive way to make it easy for subscribers to join your email list.

Discounts are the go-to incentive to offer in exchange for someone’s email address. According to our future of consumer marketing report, exclusive discounts are the main reason consumers sign up for ongoing communications from brands. But educational resources, digital tools, and early access to events or new products with clear value propositions can be just as effective. 

Educational resources can be style guides for fashion brands, recipe collections for kitchenware companies, and care guides for beauty products. Digital tools can be size calculators and fit finders, budget planners, and buying guides. Early access might mean pre-sale shopping windows, new collection previews, and flash sale notifications. 

Also, don’t forget to optimize your sign-up forms for mobile. Our future of consumer marketing report found that most people shop on their phones more often than their laptop.

According to our future of consumer marketing report, the most important brand value for consumers is strong data protection policies, so gathering zero- and first-party data is a must. 

• Zero-party data: information someone voluntarily shares with you, like their email address or phone number on a sign-up form

• First-party data: information you collect about someone on your owned properties, like what webpages or email links they clicked on

That said, you want to maximize the odds of a sign-up when people first visit your site, so make sure the form and the ask align with both your goal and the viewer’s stage in their journey with your company. For example, consider the user’s intent. Is it their first time on your site? Ask for their email address, phone number, and a personal preference that you can use to tailor a welcome offer to them.

Consider collecting customer data through the answers to sign-up forms, quizzes, and surveys, Google Analytics data, buyer behavior on your website, and engagement data from email and SMS. According to Alexandra Paula Conde, an email marketing strategy consultant and Klaviyo Champion in 2024 and 2025, which data you collect depends on your personalization and segmentation strategies.

The newsletter is a go-to email marketing campaign. It strikes a healthy balance between educational content, deals, and promotions, giving your subscribers value in a multitude of ways. 

Emu Ridge, a small business that sells 100% pure Australian eucalyptus essential oil, kicks off their newsletter with educational content about making DIY cleaning products with their essential oil. Then, they slot in a deal for one of their seasonal bundles and an offer for one of their new products. 

The structure of their newsletter starts with a high-value offer, and keeps the reader engaged throughout, encouraging them to scroll all the way to the bottom. DIY content is free, the bundle offers a discount, and the product promotion is a new release. If Emu Ridge had led with the bundle or new product, subscribers might have exited out of the email because the first thing they saw would’ve been a sales pitch.

Depending on the amount of time you can dedicate to your email newsletter, try to send it once per week. And if you need to scale back to sending biweekly or monthly, just make sure you stay consistent.

Sending a promotion to your email list can be a surefire way to drive revenue, especially if it’s in tandem with a seasonal event, product launch, or exclusive offer. These one-off sends can shine a light on a holiday sale, a new product, or a limited-time offer, which your subscribers will be more than happy to see in their inbox.    

Compass Coffee, a small coffee shop based in Washington DC, sent their subscribers this limited-time offer to load $25 into their app and get a $20 bonus for free. This promotional campaign provides a ton of value—get $45 worth of coffee for only $25. It also uses a weekend deadline to create urgency.

A welcome email introduces your brand and mission to new subscribers. It usually offers an exclusive deal to make a good first impression on them, driving potential early sales. In fact, according to the latest Klaviyo email marketing benchmarks, the top 10% of welcome flows achieve an average placed order rate of 9.89%.  

Otherland, a small business that sells candles, used Klaviyo to craft this highly visual, vibrantly colored welcome email that offers 10% off to their new subscribers, includes a “Find Your Fire” CTA that directs new subscribers to Otherland’s candle selection, and explains their founder’s story and Otherland’s brand mission.  

An abandoned cart email reminds your customers about the items that are still in their cart, nudging them to complete their order. And they’re quite effective—according to the latest Klaviyo email marketing benchmarks, abandoned cart flows boast an average revenue per recipient of $3.07, which is 30x higher than the average email campaign. 

It’s standard to offer a discount in your abandoned cart flow. But Manly Bands, a small business that sells wedding bands for men, decided to do something different with theirs. Instead of reminding people about their abandoned cart or dangling an incentive to check out, they sent a one-question survey: “Why didn’t you want to buy?”

The people who replied received a personalized follow-up that included a coupon—and it worked: Manly Bands’ abandoned cart placed order rate was 4.8x the median for their peer group, according to Klaviyo benchmarks.

A browse abandonment email reminds your website visitors to keep checking out the product they were just eyeing or to browse similar products. Browse abandonment emails, per the latest Klaviyo email marketing benchmarks, tout a 0.82% average placed order rate, which is over 10x higher than the average email campaign. 

Usually, you send browse abandonment emails to anyone who views a product but doesn’t add it to their cart or start the check-out process within a set time frame, such as 2–3 hours after their visit. But it’s important to avoid sending these emails to anyone who just ordered one of your products or received an abandoned cart email. That can come off as intrusive.  

To be even less intrusive, try to write these emails with a fun, lighthearted tone rather than a pushy, salesy one. And if possible, recommend similar products to be genuinely helpful. Little Sleepies, a small business that sells pajamas for babies and toddlers, writes their browse abandonment emails with this exact tone. The main header and the subheader, “We saw you sneaking a peak at this adorable zippy,” could make anyone crack a smile.

And how cute is that baby in the zippy that the user was just browsing? That picture alone could get the subscriber to complete their order. Little Sleepies also does a great job highlighting the benefits of their zippy and relevant customer testimonials, which is compelling social proof.

A post-purchase email typically confirms an order, but it can be so much more for your small business—especially since, according to the latest Klaviyo email marketing benchmarks, these types of emails have an average open rate of 59.77%.

If it’s your customer’s first time buying your product, you can send them an onboarding email that educates them on how to best use it, which builds brand loyalty and affinity. You can also send personalized follow-up emails that cross-sell and up-sell products based on a customer’s recent and repeat purchases.

When you’re first starting out with segmentation, try focusing on the following 3 criteria:

1. Purchase behavior: high spenders, loyal customers, and at-risk customers  

2. Engagement levels: people who regularly engage with your email and/or SMS marketing, vs. those who don’t

3. Geographic location: people on your list who live near your store 

During this time, be sure to avoid the most common email marketing segmentation mistakes: oversegmenting, undersegmenting, ignoring key exclusion groups, not using zero-party data, and sending to recent purchasers.

Once you’ve got the fundamentals of email marketing segmentation down, the next phase of segmentation is dividing up your list based on interests, customer lifecycle stage, and recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) analysis. 

You can segment your list based on interest by directly asking your customers for this information or inferring it from their purchase behavior and website activity. Your B2C CRM should have information on which lifecycle stage each of your customers is in, and with RFM analysis, you can segment your list based on how recently your customers have bought something from you, how often they buy, and how much they’ve spent. 

Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report found that most consumers shop via mobile websites. It’s important to use an email marketing platform that lets you build mobile-responsive emails. 

Mobile-friendly email designs should include:

• Big, clear, and well-positioned call-to-action buttons

• Optimized images that load faster and have smaller file sizes 

You can build the most visually stunning email in the world, but if the subject line isn’t compelling, no one will see it. And if the body copy isn’t personalized or is too long, people won’t finish it. 

With your subject lines, consider crafting concise sentences that create curiosity. And if you ever need to get the creative juices flowing, Klaviyo’s subject line generator can help.

The length of your body copy depends on the type of email it is (newsletter, promotional, automated flow), but a good rule of thumb to follow is to write just enough to make the reader want to click. Then stop.

Here are the most important email marketing metrics we recommend measuring as a small business:

• Click rate

• “Active on site” 

• Conversion rate

• Revenue per recipient (RPR)

• Deliverability rate

• Unsubscribe rate

• List growth rate

• Return on investment (ROI)

Don’t forget to set realistic goals for these metrics based on industry averages.

According to the latest Klaviyo email marketing benchmarks, average email marketing metrics based on industry include:

Connect your POS system and ecommerce software to your email marketing platform to upload any customer email addresses that you’ve already collected. Then, launch sign-up forms on your website to start building your list.

Build your welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, and post-purchase flows in your email marketing platform to start firing off automated emails that can generate revenue for you.

Consistently create and send newsletters that provide value to your subscribers, and promotional campaigns that highlight seasonal events, product launches, or exclusive offers.

Using your email marketing platform’s data analytics, track the essential metrics to see what’s working and what’s not and then iterate from there.

Once your email marketing is firing on all cylinders, start incorporating SMS marketing to complement your email program.