Inbound Email Marketing: Guide for Small Businesses

Have you ever gone into a store “just to look” and ended up chatting with someone who works there? They’re so helpful, and they give you so many great recommendations that you ask them if there’s a way to keep in touch about new promotions and products.

The digital version of this experience is inbound email marketing. Instead of shouting promotions into the void, you give people useful, timely reasons to invite you into their inbox. Think valuable content like restock alerts, early access opportunities, and genuinely helpful updates that keep them coming back on their own. This guide covers what inbound email marketing is, how it supports business growth, and how to build an inbound email strategy that fosters customer loyalty.

What is inbound email marketing?

Inbound email marketing is a strategy built around sending valuable, tailored messages to email subscribers who have already opted in to hear from your brand. This email strategy follows general inbound marketing principles, like appealing to existing and potential customers with content that speaks to their needs and interests rather than solely focusing on sales-driven messaging.

For example, a shopper who voluntarily signs up for back-in-stock alerts is inviting you into their inbox because they want that update. A customer who checks a box at checkout to receive care tips, early access, or loyalty rewards is doing the same. Inbound email marketing starts with that permission, then rewards it with useful, relevant messages tied to what the person actually asked for or showed interest in.

Inbound emails meet people where they are on the customer journey, whether they are new to your brand or an existing customer. Through strategies like audience segmentation and mapping a customer journey, inbound email marketing delivers the right content to the right person at the right time.

Outbound vs. inbound email marketing: What’s the difference?

The biggest difference between inbound and outbound marketing is how the relationship starts. 

Inbound email marketing is permission-based. Customers opt in through sign-up forms, purchases, or account creation because they want to hear from you. 

Outbound email marketing is brand-initiated and campaign-driven, and often uses sponsored emails—emails that show up in your inbox with a Sponsored tag and include limited-time offers and discounts. Outbound email marketing can also involve using rented or cold audiences, partnerships, or prospecting lists to introduce your business to new people. While sponsored emails and partnering up with a complementary brand to send an email to their subscribers are legitimate outreach strategies, renting or buying email lists and sending cold emails isn’t considered best practice. Your messages can end up in spam folders or get filtered to someone’s junk folder. In fact, it’s recommended to never purchase or rent email lists for your outbound email marketing strategy. Instead, research potential customers or clients and their contact information to ensure it’s correct and you’re sending relevant information.

Ultimately, while inbound email marketing focuses on relevance and long-term engagement, outbound prioritizes reach and awareness by putting your message in front of audiences who may not yet have a relationship with your brand. 

Advantages of inbound email marketing

Inbound marketing using email can help you build closer relationships with your customers. Here are some key benefits that might arise if you implement this kind of strategy:

Improved deliverability

You need your emails to get into inboxes, whether you use an inbound or outbound strategy. The nature of inbound email marketing means that people have opted in and have given consent to receive emails from you. This genuine desire to hear from you improves your email deliverability (i.e., the chance that your email goes to an inbox instead of spam or a junk folder). Outbound emails can make it to inboxes too, but there’s a higher risk they’ll get flagged as spam.

Better personalization 

When people opt in to receive messages from you, they can provide information about who they are and what they’re interested in. When signing up for a newsletter, for example, recipients can check boxes for only the topics they’re interested in. From there, you can segment your target audience by these interests and send messages tailored to their preferences. 

Challenges of inbound email marketing

While email marketing has many benefits, it doesn’t come without a few challenges. Here are some considerations before developing your inbound email marketing strategy.

Requires ongoing effort

Asking people to opt in to receiving emails is a double-edged sword. It improves deliverability, but it also takes time to build a list of subscribers. You need to set up email capture methods, like website pop-ups, sign-up forms, and organic traffic from social media. Once your list is built, you’ll also need to keep up good list hygiene. This means ensuring all addresses on your list are working, honoring those who have unsubscribed, and re-engaging inactive subscribers. These actions take time and effort. 

Complexity due to segmentation

In order to segment your audience, you have to have robust behavioral data and know what to do with it. And it can be challenging to strike the right balance: How many segments do you want to create? Do you want to segment based on demographics, behavior, other factors, or a combination? The more sophisticated your segmentation strategy, the more you’ll have to track and analyze, and the more campaigns you’ll need to create. 

How to build an inbound email marketing strategy

1. Build your email list
2. Segment your audience
3. Create valuable content
4. Use marketing automation tools
5. Test regularly to optimize performance

A successful inbound strategy for email can support a wide range of marketing goals, from acquiring new customers to strengthening the relationship with existing ones. Follow these tips to build your own inbound marketing strategy for email:

1. Build your email list

For anyone to become a subscriber, they need to know where to sign up. You can capture email addresses through website pop-ups, social media content, or even physical package inserts with a call to action to sign up for email updates. The key here is to make it clear why they should sign up, whether it’s for a discount code, to hear product updates, or for thought leadership from your brand.

To ensure subscribers genuinely want to hear from you, use a double opt-in process. This means after they subscribe, they confirm their subscription by clicking a link that’s emailed to them.

2. Segment your audience

Segment your audience into smaller groups based on customer data, like purchase history, browsing behavior, location, and how often someone shops with you. You can find this data on your ecommerce platform, CRM, or email platforms.

Body-inclusive clothing brand Dapper Boi, for example, integrates Klaviyo with its Shopify store to segment its audience based on shopping frequency and product interest. This allows the brand to be as efficient as possible with its marketing efforts, with email accounting for 54% of its sales.

3. Create valuable content

Inbound marketing is about fostering relationships by delivering value. Solving problems without overtly promoting your products can be another winning strategy. Based on what you discover from audience segmentation, you can start to craft different email campaigns to answer distinct needs. Common types of deeper emails include educational content, brand stories, and helpful tips.

For the natural skin care brand Three Ships, long-form written content about business updates is one of the formats it uses to keep its email audience engaged. “We won’t just say ‘Our prices are going up, shop now.’ It’ll be longer form, explaining what’s going on,” explains co-founder Laura Thompson on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. This kind of content, or “founder notes,” as Laura describes it, makes customers feel connected to what’s going on with the business. Those deep connections pay off. Laura says about 35% of Three Ships’ revenue is thanks to email.

4. Use marketing automation tools

Once you have your content ready to send out, you can eliminate a lot of manual work by setting up marketing automations that are triggered by time or behavior. Common trigger-based automated email sequences include a welcome series for new subscribers, back-in-stock alerts, and personalized product recommendations. If you have a newsletter, you can also set that to be sent at a regular cadence, whether it’s weekly or monthly. 

5. Test regularly to optimize performance

Once you put your inbound email marketing strategy into action, it’s important to track key metrics related to your goals and see what’s performing well. For example, Shopify Messaging sends you email performance reports so you can see which subscribers opened an email, what actions they took, or if emails bounced, helping you identify and remove inactive email addresses.

Try testing different:

• Subject lines

• Content formats

• Send cadences

• CTA language

• Send times

A/B test one variable at a time to get a sense of what moves the needle with your core audiences. Using this information, you can then optimize your email campaigns for better performance. If you see, for example, that one audience segment is responding to a particular message, you can put more resources into creating content like that for this audience.