An email doesn’t cost you a click. Once someone is on your list, you can reach them again for little more than the cost of your email platform, and unlike a Google Ads click or a social post, you’re writing to someone who already knows who you are. That’s the case for email marketing in a nutshell: it’s one of the cheapest ways to get more from the enquiries and customers you’ve already worked hard to win.
Where it goes wrong for small businesses is rarely the writing. More often the list never gets built, or it sits in a spreadsheet and doesn’t hear from you for a year.
You probably have the start of a list already
Most small businesses already hold contact details for people who could hear from them: past customers, people who asked for a quote but didn’t go ahead, trade contacts, and anyone who signed up on the website at some point. The trouble is that they’re usually scattered across an inbox, an accounting package and a booking system, and nobody has pulled them together or made sending anything someone’s job.
Before you gather them into one list, check which of them you’re allowed to email. The rules are clear, and they rule some contacts out.
Who you’re allowed to email under UK rules
Marketing emails in the UK are covered by two sets of rules. The Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) decide who you can send marketing emails to, and UK GDPR covers how you handle the personal data involved. The ICO sets out the detail in its guidance on complying with the PECR email marketing rules. In short:
- Individuals need to have consented, unless the “soft opt-in” applies. Sole traders and ordinary partnerships count as individuals here.
- The soft opt-in covers customers and people who’ve enquired. You can email someone without separate consent if you got their details while selling, or negotiating to sell, them something, you only market your own similar products and services, and you gave them a clear chance to opt out when you collected their details and in every email since. The ICO says a person doesn’t need to have bought anything: requesting a quote or asking for more details about what you offer counts.
- Companies are treated differently. PECR’s consent rule for emails doesn’t apply to limited companies, LLPs and other corporate bodies. UK GDPR still applies when an address identifies a person, such as firstname.lastname@company.co.uk, and anyone can object to direct marketing at any time (ICO guidance on business-to-business marketing).
The soft opt-in doesn’t cover bought-in lists or new contacts who have never asked about buying from you. The ICO’s position is that a bought list of individuals can only be used if everyone on it specifically consented to that type of message from you, and generic consent covering any third party isn’t enough. In practice, that rules out most bought lists for emailing consumers.
Whichever route applies, every email must make clear who it’s from and give people a working way to unsubscribe, and you must stop emailing anyone who asks. If you add a sign-up box to your website, say what people will receive, don’t pre-tick the box, and keep a record of when and how each person joined.
Use a proper email platform, not your inbox
Send marketing emails from an email marketing platform rather than Outlook or Gmail. A platform handles unsubscribes automatically, keeps a record of sign-ups, and stops you exposing your whole list through a mistyped CC field.
It also matters for deliverability, which has tightened up. Google requires anyone sending to personal Gmail addresses to authenticate their email, and bulk senders (close to 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail accounts) must set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication, support one-click unsubscribe and keep spam complaints low. Google also recommends processing unsubscribe requests within 48 hours (Google’s email sender guidelines). Yahoo and Microsoft’s Outlook.com have brought in similar rules for high-volume senders.
Most small businesses send nowhere near those volumes, but the same steps are good practice at any size. Ask your email platform how to authenticate your own domain (it usually means adding a few DNS records wherever your domain is managed), and make sure the unsubscribe link is easy to find. Someone who can’t find it is more likely to press “report spam”, which does more damage to your future emails than an unsubscribe.
Keep the list healthy
Contacts who haven’t engaged with anything in a long time drag down how well your emails get delivered, and on many platforms you pay per contact. Cleaning them out periodically usually does more for results than adding new names.
Be careful using open rates to decide who’s inactive. Apple Mail’s Mail Privacy Protection downloads email content in the background when a message arrives rather than when it’s read, so many “opens” aren’t real. Clicks, replies and bookings are more reliable signs that someone is paying attention. Before you remove a long-quiet contact, a short “do you still want to hear from us?” email is a sensible last step.
How often to send
Sending once and then going quiet for a year does very little, and emailing every day usually annoys people. Once or twice a month suits many small businesses, but it depends on the business: a seasonal firm might email around its busy periods, while a business with lots of repeat custom might do better more often.
Consistency matters more than any single brilliant email. Picture a garden landscaper near Cheltenham who sends one enthusiastic newsletter in spring, gets a few replies, then doesn’t send again until the following spring. By then some addresses no longer work, and plenty of people have forgotten they ever signed up, which is when spam complaints start. A shorter, simpler email sent regularly keeps you in mind in a way an occasional masterpiece can’t.
Send things people want to open
Emails that are only ever about a discount or an announcement get ignored fastest. People open emails that are useful to them, so mix in things like:
- a practical tip related to what you do
- a seasonal reminder, such as a boiler service before winter or booking garden work before the spring rush
- the answer to a question customers ask you all the time
- a recent job or project, with the customer’s permission
- a friendly nudge about something you offer that they may not know about
Offers have their place, particularly around a specific event or a quiet time of year, but if every email is a sales pitch, people stop reading. Use a sender name people will recognise, write a subject line that says what’s inside, and give each email one clear thing to do next. A plain email that sounds like a person wrote it often feels more personal than a heavily designed one.
Where email fits alongside Google Ads and SEO
Email works best as the channel that follows up on what your other marketing brings in. Someone who asked for a quote through your Google Ads landing page and then went quiet, or a customer who bought once last year, is exactly who a well-timed email can bring back, without paying for another click. Because they enquired about buying from you, the soft opt-in usually applies, as long as you gave them the chance to opt out when you took their details.
Measure it the same way as everything else. Add UTM tags to the links in your emails (many platforms can do this automatically) so that Google Analytics shows email visits and the enquiries they lead to. We cover how to set that up in how to know which marketing is bringing you enquiries.
A simple way to restart
If your email marketing has stalled or never started, skip the grand strategy. Pull the contacts you’re allowed to email into one list on a proper platform, check your unsubscribe link and domain authentication, and send something short and useful this month. Then put the next one in the diary.
Email won’t replace Google Ads or SEO for finding new customers, but as a way of getting more from the enquiries and customers you already have, it’s hard to beat for the cost.
If you’d rather hand the whole thing over, from list clean-up to writing and sending, take a look at our email marketing services or call us on 0330 223 0847.
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