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Email Marketing for Startups: Best Practices and Getting Started
How To Set Up Email Marketing for Your Startup Business
Nicola Vaughan
January 17th, 2025
Growing a business from the ground up is tough; and, as a startup, marketing can seem daunting. One marketing channel that can transform your startup business is email, providing direct communication with your customer base and helping to push your brand out there.
This guide will give your startup business everything it needs to get started with a comprehensive email marketing strategy.
You’ll learn the importance of email marketing, from email lists and content, to design and automation. We’ll even touch on measuring success, so you can track results and keep doing more of what’s working.
Table of Contents
The Role of Email Marketing in Startup Growth
Email marketing plays an important role in startup growth. If you have a startup business, you’ll know that when you first start, it feels like you’re putting content out to… well… no one. You can practically hear the tumbleweed drift by as you wait to hear what your audience thinks of your latest update.
This is where email marketing can help. Sending out regular emails can build a direct link between you and your audience, helping to build brand awareness and those loyal subscribers that every brand depends on.
Why Startups Need Email Marketing From Day One
Email marketing is crucial for startups right from launch. Here are some key reasons why you should turn to email marketing from the start of your business journey:
Cost Effectiveness: Email marketing is known as one of the cheapest forms of marketing, being more affordable than traditional methods such as direct mail.
High Return on Investment (ROI): ROI is generally higher from email than other marketing channels. Customers who purchase products from emails spend 138% more on average (Digital Strike), resulting in a higher ROI.
Build Early Customer Relationships: Starting email marketing for your startup from day one can help grow key customer relationships from the inception of your business. This can result in subscribers becoming invaluable brand ambassadors, supporting your business from the very start.
Measurable: One of the most popular aspects of email marketing is that it’s highly measurable, particularly compared to other marketing methods. This is super important to get right early on in your business’s marketing strategy so that you can drill down into what works well for your brand and what doesn’t.
Building a High-Quality Email List for Startups
Crafting an email list for your startup is one of the first tasks you’ll need to complete in establishing your email marketing strategy.
Your email list should be made up of people who you want to hear from your brand regularly. Building a high-quality email list is about collecting data from people who will be engaged with your business -- it’s all about quality over quantity when it comes to subscribers.
Innovative Strategies for Collecting Emails as a New Business
So how do you go about growing your email list from the ground up?
A useful way of getting those first subscribers signed up is by offering an incentive in return for joining your mailing list. This could be in the form of offering early access to beta versions of your product offering or by providing an exclusive discount code for first subscribers.
You’ll find that you won’t get something for nothing, so give new audience members something back for supporting your new business.
Another way to collect emails as a new business is via social media contests. This involves collecting a user’s email address as a requirement for entering a competition on your social media channels. This can be highly successful as an email address is a small price to pay for the chance of winning something great and usually results in creating a good-sized list to market to.
Ensuring GDPR and CAN-SPAM Compliance for Startups
Building an email list for your startup can be fun, but making sure that your lists comply with General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (CAN-SPAM) is something you must get right from the beginning of your marketing journey.
GDPR guidelines emphasize that you must obtain explicit consent from subscribers. These regulations protect users from receiving unsolicited emails and having their data shared without their consent.
Obtaining consent from new subscribers will not only help you comply with these regulations but will also build trust with your audience from the outset.
CAN-SPAM is a law that ensures that recipients can opt out of emails at any point, with companies being penalized if they don’t remove data from mailing lists when requested.
The best way to comply with this law is to include clear unsubscribe information in the footer of your emails.
While you don’t want your subscribers to leave, you should never make it difficult for them to do so if this is their intention.
Crafting Content That Resonates With Startup Audiences
With the average email user receiving 121 emails per day (Venngage), it’s clear that your email content needs to make an impact. Crafting content that resonates with startup audiences is crucial, so how can you do this to keep your subscribers engaged and coming back for more?
Personalizing Emails To Reflect Startup Culture
Personalizing your emails is a great way of engaging your audience and ensuring that your emails are the ones they choose to open.
Your content should reflect the unique culture and values of your startup business to make your email stand out from the crowd and offer a more personal approach than your competitors.
You could further personalize your emails by targeting different segments of your mailing list. By sending personalized content to groups of subscribers such as early adopters, investors, and new customers, you’ll be providing more relevant information to your audience. This will ultimately result in your subscribers being more engaged and more likely to convert -- everything you want as a new start-up!
A super valuable way of sharing content with your subscribers is by keeping them updated with your startup milestones and stories. This could include details on how your business was founded and introducing them to the people involved; this will help to bring your audience behind the curtain of your brand and make them feel more involved with your business.
You could also share details on behind-the-scenes stories or updates on product development to show your subscribers that you want them to be included every step of the way in your startup business success.
Designing Effective Startup Email Campaigns
While content is important, email design is another key factor in successful startup email campaigns.
Your design should be eye-catching and slick, and there are plenty of design tools that can help you create professional emails without breaking the bank.
Best Practices for Eye-Catching Email Designs
There are some key practices to bear in mind when creating an eye-catching email design to ensure that the visual aligns with your start-up’s brand identity.
These include the use of the following features within your email:
High-quality visuals: Make sure that the imagery and visuals in your email are super high-quality. This will not only make your designs stand out but will also provide a level of professionalism to your content that will be highly appealing to your subscribers.
Clean layouts: A clean layout can make all the difference with an email campaign. A design that is busy and text-heavy can put people off, so make sure you have a good ratio of clean space to text, with visual content placed appropriately.
Clear CTAs: Clear CTAs can be the difference between an email that converts and one that doesn’t. You need to make it obvious what you want your subscribers to do (visit your website, book an appointment). Otherwise, opportunities for conversion can be missed. Including clear CTAs in the form of buttons or banners can be a great way of achieving this.
Mobile-friendly design: Responsive emails are a must in this day and age, with 48% of emails being opened on a mobile device (Tech Report).
Your email should display properly on a range of screen sizes to produce the best results; make sure to carry out cross-device testing to ensure that your design always displays correctly.
Why Listen to Me? I have been working in the digital marketing space for nearly 10 years, predominantly helping brands with their email marketing and online presence. I now specialize in creating great content for beehiiv to help people nail their email strategies!
Using Cost-Effective Email Design Tools
There are many cost-effective email design tools to help produce beautiful emails for your startup business.
Here’s a list of some free email platforms you can use to start creating professional email templates without breaking the bank:
beehiiv: beehiiv’s newsletter platform is a great place for startup businesses to produce their first email newsletter. Their free plan, Launch, allows creators to email a generous 2,500 contacts, providing a range of design elements that can be easily embedded. You can even get a 30-day, free trial of beehiiv’s paid plans.
Mailchimp: One of the most well-known email platforms, MailChimp, offers a range of template options within its free plan to get creators started. It’s known for being easy to use, and its free plan is well-suited for startups with small subscriber lists.
Substack: A newer platform that you may have heard of more recently is Substack, a brand focusing on newsletters and content with simplistic design. It’s free to publish on Substack, making it a great choice if you’re focused on providing your subscribers with quality content without it costing you an arm and a leg.
AWeber: If you have under 500 subscribers, the free plan from AWeber is worth a look. AWeber provides eye-catching email templates and landing pages, with a focus on high deliverability rates and integration abilities.
Omnisend: Omnisend is a platform that offers a free plan to up to 250 subscribers. It’s ideal for startup businesses looking to hone in on e-commerce, omnichannel capabilities, and automation.
Leveraging Automation and Segmentation for Startups
While design and content are important in email marketing for startups, you’ll need to go further than this to produce the best results for your brand. This is where automation and segmentation come in.
When used properly, these techniques can take your email marketing to the next level, resulting in more engaged subscribers and quicker workflows.
Setting Up Automated Welcome Series for New Subscribers
A highly effective method of automation for startups is to set up an automated welcome series for new subscribers.
This would involve designing at least two emails that would be sent to people who sign up for your mailing list.
The first would be an email that welcomes the subscriber to your brand, creating a great first impression and setting the tone for what’s to come.
The second email would invite your subscribers to connect further, providing opportunities for them to reach you and ways they can connect with your brand.
With each email in this series, you should introduce subscribers to your brand, highlight key features you want them to be aware of, and encourage them to connect with you.
A strong welcome series will solidify the relationship between your startup and new subscribers, and automating this process will save you significant time in the long run.
Segmenting Your Audience for Targeted Campaigns
There are several ways that you can segment your audience to produce more targeted, effective campaigns.
Segment criteria could include:
User behavior: You could segment data based on user behavior to get the best from your email marketing. This could involve analyzing KPIs such as click-through rate or open rate to see which users are most engaged with your content and would, therefore, be most likely to convert if sent a follow-up email.
Purchase history: A user’s purchase history is a great way of segmenting data. If a subscriber has a history of purchasing a particular product, you could regularly remind them of these products to encourage repeat purchasing. You could even send these customers a subscription opportunity to save them time and ensure that they regularly purchase with you.
Demographic: Demographic targeting is one of the easiest ways to segment your audience. This involves marketing to specific users based on age, income level, geographic location, and other demographics to show the right content to different users.
Buyer Journey: Segmenting data by buyer journey can be highly effective in increasing a user’s chance of converting. For example, you could target subscribers who have added a product to their basket but have not completed a purchase. This would involve emailing them, reminding them of their interest in a product and offering them an incentive such as a limited-time discount code.
Measuring Success and Optimizing Email Campaigns
One of the most important tasks for startup businesses with their email campaigns is measuring success and optimizing campaigns accordingly.
If your email marketing isn’t analyzed properly, you won’t have results to inform future campaigns. This could result in you missing key opportunities to market to your subscribers and prevent your marketing efforts from improving.
Key Metrics Startups Should Track
Some key metrics that all startups should track are listed below:
Open rates: Your open rate is one of the most used KPIs for email marketing. The open rate indicates how well your email stands out in your subscribers’ inboxes, the success of your subject line, and how engaged your subscribers are with your content. Aim for an open rate of over 30%. As a guide, beehiiv customers achieve an average open rate of 38.7%, depending on the industry.
Click-through rates (CTR): CTR tells the percentage of subscribers that clicked on a link within your emails. This can indicate how well your CTAs are performing and what can be improved. You should aim for a CTR of over 2% (Campaign Monitor). If your average CTR is less, focus on making your CTAs more prominent or give your subscribers more incentives to convert.
Conversion rates: Conversion rate assesses how many users complete an action after clicking on your link. This could be purchasing a product, or getting in touch with your brand. The conversion rate will inform the ROI of your email campaign, telling you whether the money you’ve put into your email marketing is resulting in sales for your business.
Subscriber growth rates: Monitoring the growth of your mailing lists is important to ensure that your marketing efforts are increasing subscriber numbers. It can also indicate whether your email lists are stagnating or decreasing, giving you indications of when you should be offering incentives for joining your lists or cleaning your lists based on subscriber engagement levels.
Using A/B Testing To Improve Startup Email Performance
A/B Testing is highly successful in optimizing the email campaigns of your startup business. This can help improve startup email performance by trialing different techniques to get the best results from your campaigns.
There are many methods you could use with A/B testing. A popular use of A/B testing is optimizing subject lines, by sending out the same email twice with varying subject lines to see which one provides the best open rate.
Other A/B testing methods include changing email scheduling for different subscriber types.
For example, you could segment users by country and try sending campaigns at different times to see how results differ.
You could also experiment with the frequency of your email sending by sending an email three times a week versus sending it twice over the same time period.
It’s important to keep certain elements of your email the same to ensure that your results can be deciphered easily and change specific elements so you can see what effects results.
Nurturing Long-Term Relationships With Email Marketing
A key benefit of email marketing is allowing startup businesses to build long-term relationships with their audience.
Obtaining new customers is of course important, but retaining existing subscribers can lead to significant growth over time. Long-term customers can become your brand ambassadors, shouting about how great your brand is on social media for example.
Referral Programs
Referral programs are a great way of nurturing your existing subscribers by encouraging them to recommend your newsletter to their friends by providing them with an incentive. This could be exclusive access to content or even a discount code for your product line.
beehiiv’s Referral Program allows creators to set up milestones that subscribers would have to meet in order to gain rewards -- this could be recommending five friends – and then creators can monitor results to see how successful their referrals are.
A referral section can then be added into your regular newsletters to let subscribers know that they can benefit from recommending your mailing list.
Loyalty programs such as referrals are a great way of keeping your existing subscribers engaged by offering them rewards for recommending you. They also help to generate new subscribers, too. Win! Win!
Feedback and Re-Engaging Inactive Subscribers
Another tip for retaining subscribers is to regularly ask them what they expect from your content.
If you don’t know what your audience wants, it can be tricky to keep engaged. Polls are a good way of doing this.
You can simply drop a poll into an email asking what your customers like; and, more importantly, what you could improve. This can help guide not only your newsletter strategy but also your brand, as you may want to make tweaks based on what your subscribers recommend.
Re-engaging inactive subscribers is also helpful in nurturing long-term relationships with your audience. Also known as ‘low-hanging fruit’ in the marketing world, winning back users who are already subscribed to your mailing list but who may not have opened an email in a while can be an easy way of generating interest.
You could segment your subscribers by interest level and email those who haven't engaged recently with a newsletter with a punchy subject line, reminding them why they subscribed to your content in the first place.
A targeted email could push these subscribers back to your brand and reignite their love for your content.
Conclusion
We hope that this help guide has given you some key insights into how you can implement a strong email marketing strategy for your start-up business.
Some key points to remember are:
Make sure you build a strong email list that complies with GDPR and CAN-SPAM guidelines
Ensure that your content is clear, informative, and, most importantly, personalized to ensure that your subscribers are kept engaged.
Keep your design clean and make the most of free tools such as beehiiv to keep costs low in the early days of your business.
Leverage automation and segmentation techniques to get the best results from your email marketing efforts and save time where you can.
Measure results to learn how you can improve your campaigns in the future.
Using these email marketing strategies together will help you enhance engagement rates, increase leads, and drive your business growth.
Good luck with your new business! We can’t wait to hear how you create your email strategy for your startup business!
FAQ
Check out the below frequently asked questions for more information on email marketing for startup businesses!
How do I start an email marketing startup?
To start a business in email marketing, you’ll want to ensure that your business is skilled in creating great content that can be marketed to audiences effectively.
Here are some steps in starting an email marketing startup:
Choose a business name: Your business name should reflect the industry your business is in and briefly indicate your brand values.
Select an email marketing platform: There are many email providers that have free plans, enabling you to benefit from a range of features to create your email without breaking the bank.
Build your marketing lists: Collect emails via incentive offerings or social media competitions to build a unique set of subscribers that will be interested in your new startup.
Start sending emails: Sending your first marketing email is a scary step. But the sooner you do it, the quicker your startup business will be off the ground!
Is email marketing still profitable?
Email marketing is still considered to be profitable, with an average ROI of $42 per every $1 spent (Ecosend).
There is also data from Statista that shows that global revenue from the email marketing industry will reach over £17 billion by the year 2027.
If you’re struggling with the ROI of your email marketing campaigns, beehiiv can help you to better monetize your emails. By using the beehiiv Ad Network to feature well-known brands in your newsletters, you can earn money from your email marketing while also giving credibility to your content.
You could also use the beehiiv Boosts feature to earn money by recommending other newsletters to your subscribers. When a subscriber opts in to one of your Boosted recommendations, you’ll get paid within a matter of weeks. Try it out here!
How much money do I need to start email marketing?
While money can grant you access to advanced email marketing features, in reality, you don’t need a penny to start an email marketing campaign for your startup business.
There are many free plans available with different email marketing providers, allowing you to shout about your new brand without spending a fortune. Most of these plans will be limited to a set number of subscribers, but this isn’t an issue as a new brand, as it’s unlikely that you’ll have large mailing lists at this point.
Is email marketing good for small businesses?
Email marketing is highly beneficial for small businesses as it provides a cost-effective marketing channel that offers both brand awareness and conversion opportunities.
With a strong ROI, small businesses can benefit from email marketing by seeing a clear revenue stream from email marketing, particularly when combined with monetization techniques such as sponsored content.
Email marketing is also useful for small businesses in helping them to analyze their audience. The more a business knows about their audience, the better they can market to them in the future. This can lead to improved results and stronger brand loyalty.
Can I start email marketing for free?
You can absolutely start email marketing for free with a free plan offered by an email marketing provider.
A great free plan to get your new business started is the beehiiv Launch plan. With this plan, you won’t be required to pay a penny, and there’s no commitment/contract. You can email up to 2,500 subscribers, and the following features are included:
Custom website
Custom newsletters
Campaign analytics
Unlimited email sends
Up to 3 publications
Recommendation network
Optimized deliverability
Subscriber Tagging
Audience Segmentation
Custom domains
API access
To get started with the beehiiv launch plan, click here. If you’re looking for more features within your email marketing, check out some of the other beehiiv plans. You can start a free, 30 day trial and get access to premium features such as the beehiiv Ad Network, Boost Network, Premium Subscriptions, and 3D Analyics!
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