To build a successful email marketing strategy, you must effectively manage and integrate three key elements: audience, content, and delivery platform.
Audience is your subscribers, the target of your email marketing effort.
Content is your newsletters; what you send to your subscribers.
Platform is the tools you use to send your content to your audience.
This guide covers the most common email marketing challenges for small and mid-sized businesses and explains how to fix each one, from list building and newsletter creation to deliverability, email integration, testing, and compliance.
Small and mid-sized businesses face difficulties in managing effectively each of these three key elements. Let's break them down and analyze them one by one.
At a glance: list building, newsletter creation, deliverability, data analysis, testing, integration, compliance, and long-term consistency.
The definition of a small or medium-sized business varies by country (based on turnover and number of employees). In this article we consider businesses without dedicated marketing departments neither having specialized staff for email marketing activities. At the same time we offer insights that are applicable to any business regardless of its size.
One of the biggest challenges for small and medium-sized businesses is building a substantial email list from scratch. It's crucial to have a list of individuals who are genuinely interested in your products or services to ensure effective email marketing.
There is a dual difficulty with newsletter creation: the content should be interesting and at the same time properly designed.
In practice, creating newsletters is one of the biggest challenges small businesses face in email marketing. The obstacles are usually consistency, design, and finding a clear message that drives clicks.
Let's assume that you know your audience and know what they find relevant, interesting, valuable and engaging. How do you go about putting all these into a nicely structured, visually appealing and mobile friendly newsletter?
Your objective should be to build a collection of one or more newsletter templates which you will use as basis for your future newsletters.
Depending on the quality of your mailing lists a number of your emails can sometimes end up in the spam folder. Ensuring that emails reach the recipient's inbox is a common challenge.
An email that lands in the spam folder is also considered delivered. If your subscriber has indicated you as a trusted sender then your email will land in the inbox.
If you are a cold or unknown sender the Mailbox Provider will still evaluate your email, your domain's reputation and decide accordingly.
A common misconception and actually a question we often hear is how to know if your email went into the inbox or in the spam folder. There is no way to know this. That would imply that we have access to the subscriber's inbox. Also Mailbox Providers do not report this. Think about it from your side; would you like an outsider to know what happens in your mailbox?
Here are some technical tips for improving deliverability.
At a high level, you can either use your own email marketing tool (self-hosted, such as nuevoMailer) or purchase email sending as a service from a SaaS provider.
In the following paragraphs we assume that you are using your own email marketing tool and we cover the available email delivery methods since this is quite often a "small pain".
Broadly speaking, 2-3 options are available.
For many small businesses, email hosting challenges show up as restrictive send limits or policies that prohibit bulk mailing on shared hosting.
Practically every reputable hosting company will offer DKIM signing, option to add an SPF record and access to the DNS zone so you can add a DMARC record.
In most cases they add DKIM and SPF automatically when you create an email account.
But usually there is an email volume restriction with regular hosting accounts. They may allow anything from 400 to 800 emails per hour. This could be more than enough for many businesses.
When considering your Host's smtp for your email campaigns take into account the following:
nuevoMailer has all the utilities you need to evenly distribute the load within the hour (using batches) and even set specific hours or days you want a campaign to run.
This is the trend today. By external smtp service we mean providers such as Amazon SES, MailGun, MailJet, Mailersend, Mandrill, Postmark, Brevo and others.
The benefit in using such providers is that they undertake all the hard work of email delivery and take actions to keep their mailing servers clean.
They provide you SMTP credentials and / or an API endpoint with your own unique key.
Although they use different terms in general they will report back to you what's delivered, soft / hard bounces and spam complaints. In addition, they maintain suppression or block lists on your behalf (even if you neglect to do this) meaning that they will not send again to email accounts that bounced or complained.
Of course, you have to pay for their services and prices vary greatly. To give you an example the cost of sending with Amazon SES is $0.10 / 1000 emails. In other words US$1 for 10 thousand emails.
If you are evaluating a 3rd party smtp service provider consider the following:
nuevoMailer integrates with a number of major 3rd party smtp providers via the smtp or api methods. It also has webhooks to accept delivery, bounces and spam reports from these providers and update your campaign statistics and subscriber accounts. Check here for further details. We assist our customers with the integration work required: setting up sending methods, adding and testing the webhook endpoints and the related DNS entries.
Email marketing comes with a lot of data, including open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates and other engagement metrics. Businesses may struggle to understand and analyze this data in order to evaluate and optimize their email marketing strategies.
For example, a low open rate might indicate that your subject lines aren't engaging, while a low click-through rate (CTR) could suggest that your email content isn't compelling enough. Understanding such data and what the various metrics mean will help you improve your strategy.
For instance, if certain types of content or specific subject lines consistently lead to higher engagement, it would be beneficial to use more of these elements in your emails.
List segmentation: data analysis can also help you in segmenting your email lists more effectively. By analyzing how different demographics interact with your emails, you can tailor your content to better suit each group, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates. List segmentation is critical in creating targeted email campaigns.
To give you an idea how nuevoMailer can help you with data analysis let's describe one of the many possible options.
Testing is the fastest way to improve engagement. The best testing strategies for email marketing start simple and build from there.
Laws like the CAN-SPAM Act in the U.S. or the GDPR in Europe and CASL in Canada set strict rules for email marketing. Non-compliance can result in hefty fines. Many businesses find it challenging to fully understand and comply with these regulations.
In this article we cover some basic concepts that apply to most countries and laws. Specifically, we elaborate on the following:
There is a number of other elements you should consider once you get started with email marketing such as:
Integrating email marketing with your website forms, CRM, ecommerce platform, or helpdesk is a common email integration challenge for businesses. It often means connecting different IT tools so data flows reliably, while also dealing with inconsistent fields, missing consent records, and duplicate or outdated contacts.
As teams grow (especially in mid-size companies with 250-1000 employees), email signature management becomes a branding and compliance challenge. Centralized templates and controlled updates prevent inconsistent signatures across teams.
If you operate at enterprise scale, additional governance and approval workflows come into play. Many of the same principles still apply, but the operational complexity is higher.
The most common challenges include list building, creating newsletters, deliverability, understanding campaign data, and staying consistent with limited time and resources.
The hardest parts are producing valuable content consistently, designing mobile-friendly layouts, and aligning copy with clear calls-to-action.
Shared hosting SMTP often limits hourly send volume and may restrict bulk mailing, which can slow campaigns.
Typical issues include syncing forms, CRM, and ecommerce data, ensuring clean fields and consent, and avoiding duplicate or outdated records.
Start by A/B testing subject lines to improve open rates. Then, test calls-to-action (CTAs), content blocks, and send times to increase clicks. Testing on specific audience segments often provides more valuable insights than testing on your entire list.
Key compliance steps include obtaining explicit opt-in consent, clearly identifying your business, providing a simple unsubscribe option in every email, and maintaining records of consent.
Deliverability means an email was accepted by the recipient's server. Inbox placement is where it actually lands (e.g., inbox, promotions, or spam). An email can be "delivered" but still go to spam, making inbox placement the more important success metric.
In mid-size companies, it's hard to ensure every employee uses a consistent, on-brand, and legally compliant email signature. Without a centralized tool, signatures can become inconsistent, hurting brand perception and creating compliance risks.
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