Email Marketing Strategy Guide: Tips for Small Businesses

When done well, email marketing benefits businesses in several ways—from fostering relationships to encouraging new subscribers to convert.

But it’s also a commitment. An effective email marketing strategy addresses every stage of the customer journey, coordinates multiple email marketing tactics, and creates the groundwork for campaigns with distinct goals.

“Email marketing is both an art and a science,” says Josh Rosenblat, email marketing expert and senior editor at Shopify. “The science of it is picking and choosing how you’d like to segment your audience, and the art of it is being able to write and create emails that stand out in everyone’s super-crowded inbox.”

Here’s how to find that balance so you can create and launch a successful email marketing strategy for your brand.

What is an email marketing strategy?

An email marketing strategy is a plan that outlines how a business will use email to reach its business goals. Effective email strategies use promotional, transactional, customer life cycle, and newsletter campaigns to target goals around sales, service, customer relationships, and customer loyalty, respectively.

Here’s what a solid email strategy documents:

• Marketing strategy background. Email marketing is one arm of your business’s marketing strategy, so include your business’s value proposition, key messages, marketing goals, and target audience research findings. Adding key dates from your marketing calendar (like product launches or holidays) can also help you integrate email into your other promotional activities.

• Email marketing goals. Your email marketing goals are sub-targets that ladder up to your larger marketing goals. They outline how your email marketing campaigns will support your company’s overall business and marketing objectives.

• Newsletter value proposition. If a newsletter is part of your strategy, include a section on the benefit your newsletter offers to email subscribers. It’s distinct from your business’s value proposition, which focuses on the benefits your overall business provides to customers.

• Email list. Include information about your lead generation strategy, or the tactics you use to collect prospective customer contact information.

• Key platforms. Platform information includes your email marketing platform, your ecommerce store, and any other key platform or tools, like your customer relationship management system (CRM) or your website analytics provider.

• Email marketing content. Content creation is an ongoing process, but many business owners build out key transactional email flows and customer life cycle emails before launch and begin building a content library to maximize the benefits of marketing newsletters.

Why is creating an email marketing strategy important?

Successful email marketing campaigns can help ecommerce businesses attract new prospects, strengthen relationships with existing customers, increase brand awareness, and boost sales. These benefits aren’t guaranteed, but they do tend to be cost-effective: According to a 2025 report from Hubspot, the average return on investment (ROI) for email marketing efforts is $36 for every dollar spent.

At a minimum, a good email marketing strategy helps you manage multiple email campaigns at once. That gives you the chance to see which types of emails generate the best results. It also connects the dots between what your business offers and what your audiences need, allowing you to create email campaigns that improve your relationship with existing customers and build authority with your broader target audience.

How to launch an email marketing strategy

1. Choose an email service provider
2. Set goals
3. Build your email list
4. Know the law
5. Configure email automations
6. Plan your email marketing newsletter
7. Segment your audience
8. Monitor performance

Email is a powerful, flexible marketing channel—and a good email marketing strategy helps business owners maximize the benefits of email marketing campaigns. 

Here’s how to create and launch an email marketing strategy in eight steps:

1. Choose an email service provider

Email service providers (ESPs) are software platforms designed to help businesses plan, execute, and monitor email marketing campaigns. A good platform simplifies the process of collecting customer data, maintaining an up-to-date contact list, sending emails, segmenting customers, and running email marketing reports. Many platforms also offer additional email marketing tools like built-in marketing automations, customizable email templates, user-friendly design interfaces, and flexible marketing integrations. 

Josh recommends selecting email marketing software that integrates with your online store, like Shopify Email for Shopify store owners. “It’s amazing to have your email marketing strategy so integrated into the back end of your business,” he says. “You’re able to connect the different products that you’re selling to the way that you’re able to communicate with your customers.” 

This kind of integration also improves your ability to track performance. “Being able to have those so integrated allows you to test different things, to measure different things, and then be able to kind of capitalize on those insights,” Josh says.

2. Set goals

Review your marketing strategy and set goals for your email marketing campaigns that support your overall business and marketing objectives. For example, if one of your business goals is to increase traffic to your website by 20% in the upcoming quarter, you might set the email marketing goal of driving a 10% increase in traffic from email campaigns.

3. Build your email list

One of the major benefits of an email marketing strategy is that email marketing is an owned media channel. Instead of relying on a third party like an ad network or a social media platform to reach potential customers, you store customer information internally and contact audiences on a marketing channel you control. This reduces your business’s risk exposure: If Meta collapses or you get banned from Google Ads, you won't lose access to your target audience.

The flip side of this, of course, is that you’re responsible for acquiring customer contact information in the first place. Josh recommends using discount codes or gated assets (sometimes referred to as lead magnets) to build your email list.

“You need to have something that makes your clientele feel comfortable giving up their contact information. Give your target audience something in return for signing up, such as discount codes, exclusive content, or quiz results,” Josh says. “You could also host a social media giveaway that requires email opt-in to register.”

Best practices include using splash pages, landing pages, pop-ups, and contextual calls to action—such as at the end of a blog post or product category page—to promote incentives and encourage sign-ups.

4. Know the law

Effective email marketing strategies follow the law. Failure to respect your customers’ privacy and protect their data can erode trust in your business, and compliance violations can carry significant fines.

Email marketing and digital privacy laws vary by jurisdiction, so start by reviewing your local data privacy and email marketing compliance guidelines. Attention to local laws isn’t enough: Many email marketing regulations—including Canada’s CAN-SPAM Act and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—are based on the location of the email recipient, not the sender. For this reason, many businesses default to the most stringent requirements to which they could be subject.

Here are two key email marketing compliance best practices:

• Use double opt-in. Double opt-in email signup involves obtaining a reader’s consent to receive marketing emails twice—once through a contact submission form, and once through a verification email. This strategy provides a record of the user’s consent to receive marketing emails and helps businesses ensure that their contacts represent real people, not bots or abandoned accounts.

• Make it easy to unsubscribe. Many laws also require email marketing campaigns to include unsubscribe links in all marketing emails. Making it easy to locate unsubscribe links and manage email preferences can also help you build strong relationships with customers.

5. Configure email automations

Automated emails ensure the timely delivery of key messages triggered by specific actions or events.

These automated emails typically fall into two categories:

• Transactional emails. Businesses send transactional emails after a subscriber takes a specific action or when the business completes an activity relevant to that subscriber. Order confirmations, shipment confirmations, payment receipts, and double opt-in emails are all common types of transactional emails.

• Customer lifecycle emails. The trigger for a customer life cycle email is a customer action or event. Examples include welcome emails, birthday offers, customer anniversaries, and abandoned cart emails.

Many email service providers provide pre-built workflows for automated emails. “There are certain automations that, in my opinion, people should always have turned on at really key moments in the customer journey,” says Desirae Odjick, a product marketing lead on Shopify Email. “Welcome is definitely one of them. Make sure that when someone decides to take that step and gives you their email address, you’re ready to welcome them—you’re building a relationship.”

6. Plan your email marketing newsletter

Newsletters can be an effective way to build relationships with your target audience through content marketing, a marketing strategy that involves creating and distributing informational, educational, or entertaining content to build trust and authority in a particular niche. “A newsletter is a way to use your expertise and engage with folks in a non-transactional way,” says Josh.

“The newsletter aspect of an email marketing strategy is a bit complex because you need a base of content to go with it,” he adds. “If your company already has a blog, that’s a really good place to find content.” If you don’t have a blog, create an alternative plan for consistently delivering high-quality content to your subscribers’ inboxes.

7. Segment your audience

“Segmentation can boost your email deliverability and your email performance,” Desirae says. When you send relevant emails to the right audience, you decrease unsubscribes and spam complaints while building brand trust.

“As a smaller merchant who really knows their business, who is talking to customers every day, you can bring that customized-interaction feeling to hundreds of people at a time by using what you already know about your customers to create segments,” Desirae says. You can create segments based on your most engaged subscribers, your most loyal customers, or customers who have purchased a specific product.

8. Monitor performance

“The great thing about email marketing is that you’re able to iterate on which messages are successful, which messages might not be successful. And then you can kind of change and adjust based on what you see,” Josh says.

Decide which email marketing metrics are most important for your goals and create a system for tracking and measuring performance. Your email marketing strategy should be constantly evolving. Set aside some time each month or quarter to evaluate your progress and update documentation.

5 email marketing strategy tips

1. Include clear calls-to-action (CTA)
2. Keep it short
3. Plan for engagement
4. Optimize subject lines
5. Be authentic

Once your email strategy is up and running, focus on optimizing email content, layout, and subject lines and using email channels to improve customer communications.

Here are five email marketing tips to help you run effective campaigns:

1. Include clear calls to action (CTAs)

“Be explicit about what action you want the reader to take,” says Josh. “Even if you’re sending an informational newsletter, you still want there to be an explicit opportunity for the recipient to take an action that benefits your business,” whether that’s completing a checkout process, leaving a review, or learning more about the diet of the clownfish.

This is where design comes into play: “That CTA cannot be hidden,” says Josh. Effective CTAs are visually prominent, often highlighted by brightly colored buttons or placed on header images. Email CTAs give readers the opportunity to engage with your brand beyond the inbox and help you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.

2. Keep it short

Josh recommends keeping your email marketing content relatively brief. “In most cases, people only have 30 seconds to a minute to read emails,” says Josh. “The copywriting needs to be quick. It needs to be witty, and it also needs to be informative.”

Instead of overwhelming email subscribers with information, Josh recommends using email to drive readers to other marketing channels, where they can learn more. “You can let the product page on your ecommerce website do most of the talking,” he adds. “What an email really does is get someone from their inbox to your ecommerce site.”

3. Plan for engagement

Email isn’t just a chance for you to reach your customers—it’s a chance for them to reach you. “Email is inherently a two-way street,” says Josh. He recommends using email campaigns to request feedback, ask questions, and solicit user-generated content (UGC).

“One strategy that I love, especially for small businesses, is asking for replies,” Josh says. This strategy helps you build customer relationships and provides valuable insights into your customer base.

“These are the customers that not only probably have bought something from you, but they’re actively taking time out of their day to read or learn more information about your brand,” Josh says. “Engaging with them and offering that two-way communication is a really unique way for small businesses to make customers feel seen and get value in terms of feedback.”

4. Optimize subject lines

Effective email subject lines increase open rates and prime customers to take an email's intended action. “Being able to write subject lines will always be extremely important, and oftentimes can be the thing that separates successful email programs from ones that maybe haven’t quite gotten off the ground,” says Josh.

Subject line best practices include keeping subject lines at less than 50 characters, creating a sense of urgency, and using email A/B testing to maximize open rates and identify strategies that drive engagement with your customer base.

5. Be authentic

Josh also recommends using email to showcase your authentic brand voice. “Consumers are looking for a deeper personal connection with the people behind the brand that they’re purchasing from, and emails are a great way to express your brand values and vision in an authentic way,” he says. “If you have the desire and the creativity to share that aspect of your business, that can be a really effective way to draw folks in.”