Last updated on May 27th, 2025 at 09:52 pm
Wondering how to get your business off the ground when your marketing budget is extremely limited?
Today, we will share three shoestring marketing strategies you can use to reach your dream customers!
What is Marketing?
Marketing is about making your dream customers aware of your product or service.
Meanwhile, online marketing revolves around driving traffic to your website or sales funnel!
Time vs. Money Trade-Off
When it comes to marketing, there’s a time vs. money trade-off: you can either spend money and save time or spend time and save money.
Since the focus of this article is marketing on a shoestring budget, the strategies we will discuss will be low-cost but require a substantial time investment.
Moreover, while cold email can help you acquire your first customers relatively quickly, building a social media following and an email newsletter will probably take several years of consistent effort.
We are explaining all this to set realistic expectations because if you go into it hoping for overnight success, you’ll quickly get discouraged and give up.
Meanwhile, if you accept that these marketing strategies will take time to get your business off the ground, you will be more likely to persevere long enough to see your hard work pay off!
Shoestring Marketing Strategy #1: Cold Email
What is Cold Email?
Cold email is using email to reach out to potential customers who don’t know you.
What is the Difference Between Cold Email and Spam?
The difference between cold email and spam largely boils down to two things:
- Personalization – You should personalize each email instead of sending everyone the same copy-paste message.
- Scale – It’s best to start with just a few cold emails per day and gradually increase that number. The upper limit is probably 100 cold emails per day.
The line between cold email and spam can get blurry, especially at a high message volume. However, you need to stay on the right side of it. Otherwise, you might get into legal trouble!
Cold Email Pros and Cons
Cold email is arguably the most affordable way to reach potential customers. When done right, it can produce relatively fast results.
However, it’s a numbers game: while predicting the exact conversion rates in advance is impossible, you can expect 100 cold emails to lead to 10 sales calls and one sale.
Sending those 100 cold emails should take around 4 hours. In addition to that, there are follow-up emails, back-and-forth messages, and sales calls. Plus, if you are in the service business, you’ll also need to do the actual client work!
This is a highly time-consuming way to grow your business, so it doesn’t scale well.
Do This Before Starting Your Cold Email Campaign
You will need to put in some groundwork before starting your cold email campaign:
- Register a new domain name for your business – It should be the same or at least similar to your primary domain but with a different extension. For example, if your main domain name has a .com extension, you can use a .co extension for the new one.
- Create a new email account and connect it to your new domain name – You can use Google Workspace or an independent email service provider like Fastmail, Protonmail, or Tuta.
- Use email warm-up software to “warm up” your new email account – Once your new account is set up, use an app like Lemlist or Warmy to simulate back-and-forth messaging and establish a track record of regular email activity. This will likely take at least a month.
The first two precautions are necessary if your messages get flagged as spam. You don’t want your primary email address and main business domain name to get blocked by email service providers.
As for the last one, warming up your new email account before sending cold emails will reduce the likelihood of triggering spam filters.
Compile a List of 100 Leads
First, you should define your dream customers clearly and use objective criteria to qualify leads.
Then, either compile a list of 100 leads yourself or hire a lead generation expert. The latter should cost less than $50 on platforms like Fiverr and Upwork.
You can also buy 1,000 leads immediately, but we advise against it if you have never worked with that lead generation expert before.
Start With Just 3 Cold Emails Per Day
If you have spent a month warming up your new inbox, sending three cold emails per day is unlikely to raise any red flags in the eyes of email service providers.
After you are done with your original list of 100 leads, get more leads and begin gradually increasing your daily outreach volume until you hit 100 cold emails per day. Don’t go beyond that.
Use a Proven Cold Email Template
We recommended the template provided by Alex Berman and Robert Indries in their book “The Cold Email Manifesto.”
Here’s the formula that they use:
- Subject line
- Compliment
- Case study
- Call to action
- Email Signature
Here’s a sample email provided in the book:
If you don’t have any social proof yet, acquire some. You can do that by helping someone who meets your dream customer criteria get concrete results. Work for free if you have to. It’s the case study element that makes this cold email so effective!
Suppose the potential customer responds and expresses interest in having a chat. In that case, you can either do what Berman and Indries advise and suggest several different times when you are available.
Or you can just send them a link to your appointment booking calendar so they can schedule a call themselves!
Continue Following Up Until You Get a Response
If all you do is send someone a cold email and leave it at that, you probably won’t get a response. Why?
Because people are busy… especially the ones who are the decision-makers in their organizations.
Don’t take their lack of response personally. Follow up every week until you get a clear yes or no answer!
Give Potential Customers a Way to Opt Out of Follow-Ups!
One problem with persistently following up is that it can come across as spammy.
That’s why we recommend taking a page out of Leadfuze founder Justin McGill’s playbook and adding this “P.S” section to your emails:
If you provide a way to opt out, people will be less likely to mark your follow-up emails as spam. This will also help you leave a good impression, as it shows that you are considerate!
Shoestring Marketing Strategy #2: Social Media Marketing
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is about:
- Building a social media following
- Leveraging it to grow your business
The Pros and Cons of Social Media Marketing
It doesn’t cost anything to get started with social media marketing – you can simply create an account and start publishing content.
Moreover, popular social media platforms have massive user bases, which you can tap into via their algorithms.
Also, everyone is on social media these days, so whoever your dream customers are, you can find them there.
However, building a following will take time, most likely a few years. It’s easy to get discouraged and give up, especially when you don’t have any momentum yet. Those first 6–12 months can feel like a tedious slog.
In addition to that, if you are easily distracted, prone to developing addictions, and sensitive about what strangers say on the Internet, spending time on social media might take a toll on your mental health.
Finally, as anyone with a sizable social media following will attest, stalkers are not only a very real but also a seemingly unavoidable problem.
If you are considering building a personal brand, we highly recommend reading “11 Reasons Not to Become Famous!”
How to Build a Social Media Following
Here are the three keys to building a social media following:
Consistently Publishing High-Quality Content
The bulk of your social media content should be designed to provide value to your dream customers, such as novel insights, helpful tips, interesting links, etc.
In addition, you want to mix social proof in the form of customer progress reports, testimonials, and case studies.
Finally, while it’s okay to post promotional stuff occasionally, it should make up less than 10% of your content.
As for the publishing frequency, that will depend on the platform, but ideally, you should post at least once per day, seven days a week.
Creating Engagement
Social media algorithms are designed to optimize for engagement.
This means that merely publishing content is not enough. You also need to get other users to engage with it. But how can you do that?
The most important thing is to reply to each comment that people leave under your posts because it will incentivize them to leave more comments in the future.
In addition to that, you can encourage discussion by ending your posts with a question.
Finally, you can intentionally stir up controversy by sharing hot takes on contentious issues, a strategy known as rage-baiting. However, we would advise against it.
Questionable ethics of rage-baiting aside, it can seriously backfire. If you take it too far, you might end up alienating your target audience, facing social media backlash, and getting negative publicity.
That can cause irreparable brand damage, so it’s better to play it safe!
Networking With Other Influencers
The best way to get exposure on social media is to build relationships with other influencers in your space.
You can do that by leaving thoughtful comments under their posts, sharing their content, and introducing yourself in direct messages once you are sure they recognize you from previous interactions.
People who follow those influencers and participate in the discussions under their posts might follow you if they find your contributions interesting.
Moreover, the influencers themselves might eventually start following you and sharing your content with their audiences.
Also, if you continue investing in those relationships, they might lead to collaboration opportunities in the future!
How to Leverage Your Social Media Following to Grow Your Business
The best way to leverage your social media following to grow your business is to drive traffic from social media to your sales funnel.
Here’s how you can do that:
- Create a lead magnet that you are going to offer to potential customers in exchange for their email addresses.
- Build a lead generation funnel – It’s easy to do with our software.
- Promote your lead magnet in your social media bio.
We would argue that promoting it in your posts is unnecessary. If someone starts following you and likes your content, they will probably eventually check out your lead magnet!
Shoestring Marketing Strategy #3: Email Marketing
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is about:
- Building an email list
- Leveraging it to grow your business
The Pros and Cons of Email Marketing
Email marketing is the most potent form of online marketing.
In addition, according to Marigold’s research, it remains the #1 marketing channel in terms of purchase frequency, at least for European consumers.
That’s why it shouldn’t be surprising that an engaged email list will increase the valuation of your business if you ever decide to sell it.
Email lists are so valuable that they can be sold separately, especially if they revolve around a newsletter.
However, building an email list is much more difficult than building a social media following, so you should expect it to take even longer!
How to Build an Engaged Email List
The best way to grow your email list from scratch is to start a weekly newsletter:
- Decide on the concept – Every issue should follow the same template and provide information in a bite-sized format. What would your dream customers like to read every week?
- Come up with a name – Your newsletter should have a distinct brand from your business. Ideally, the name conveys what subscribers can expect from it.
- Be consistent, no matter what – Send your newsletter at the same time, on the same day, every week. You want your subscribers to develop a habit of reading it, making it part of their weekly routine.
A great example of an extremely successful newsletter that you can model is Tim Ferriss’ “5-Bullet Friday,” which has 1.5M+ subscribers.
Once you have your newsletter, build a lead magnet funnel for it, add a link to its opt-in page to your social media bio, and start driving traffic to it.
We recommend publishing a sneak peek of the upcoming issue on your social media the day before you send it out.
Since every issue is different, your followers won’t get bored of seeing a sneak peek every week, even if they already subscribe to your newsletter. In fact, it can help build anticipation!
How to Leverage Your Email List to Grow Your Business
When someone subscribes to your newsletter, they do so because they hope to get valuable information, not because they want to be bombarded with endless sales pitches.
That’s why it’s best to promote your products and services either in the “P.S.” section of your newsletter or by displaying a banner ad at the very bottom of it. Subscribers won’t mind it as long as it doesn’t get in the way of reading the main content.
Of course, if you have a big event coming up, you can send a separate sales email or even an email sequence. However, you should only do this one or two times a year, so reserve it for important events like product launches.
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