How To Get Started With Email Marketing?

 

What are the best strategies to get started with email marketing?

How to run a successful Email Marketing Campaign?

Does this campaign really help you get more attention, engagement, leads, and sales?

There must be such questions in your mind while getting started with email marketing.

First of all, let me assure you that Email Marketing is not dead.

It still is the most effective marketing tool.

If done right, it does help you get more engagement, leads, and sales.

Related: What Is Email Marketing?

There are so many things you can do with Email Marketing:

• You can send welcome emails to introduce your business to the people who subscribed to your email list.
• Send out special offers or discount coupons to generate new sales.
• Wish your leads and clients happy birthday and happy holidays by sending birthday emails and holiday emails. This will improve relationships with them as you make them realize that you care.
• It also helps you stay connected. You can give your subscribers information about your business, tips, and advice, or include your recently written blogs in the form of an email newsletter.

In this article, we’ll be discussing the 6 best strategies to get started with Email Marketing.

 

6 Best strategies to get started with email marketing:

#1. Establish Your Goals

#2. Build Your Email List

#3. Segment Your Subscribers

#4. Choose An Email Marketing Platform

#5. Decide The Type Of Email Campaign

#6. Measure Your Results

 

#1. Establish Your Goals

 

To make your email marketing campaign successful, you need to have a clear and specific goal in mind.

What exactly do you want to accomplish with your email marketing campaign?

You may want your emails to drive sales, boost your online profile, improve your email engagement, or generate new leads for your business.

As far as reaching your audience is concerned, email marketing is the most powerful channel.

So, before jumping in, do take out some time to think about what you want to achieve with your email marketing campaign.

This will help you decide the type of content you should include, the type of campaigns you send, and also how to measure success.

Here are some typical and easy-to-measure goals of an email marketing campaign:

• To Drive More Traffic To Your Website

For this, you need to send email newsletters regularly containing links to the stories on your website.

• To Increase The Sales Of Your Products and/or Services

You can send promotional emails to your subscribers to convince them to purchase your products and/or services from your online or offline store.

• Bring Attention To A Cause

In this case, you need to send a newsletter to educate the people on projects you are undertaking, give details on community activities, current events, or ask for donations.

• Welcome New Subscribers

With this objective in mind, you can send welcome emails to collect important information about new subscribers.

Welcome emails also help you to tell the people about your business and build relationships with them.

So, after setting your goals, you start sending more targeted emails as it becomes easier to identify what to send and who to send.

 

#2. Build Your Email List

 

After establishing your goals, the next step is to build your email list.

And this is the most important strategy to get started with email marketing.

Because

Your email list is the most important asset for your email marketing campaign.

To whom will you send your email campaigns if you don’t have the list of your subscribers who are interested in whatever your business offers?

Note: Make sure that you have your subscribers’ permission to send them emails. This will increase the open and click-through rates of your emails.

When you send your campaigns to your subscribers without getting their permission, chances are that the number of spam complaints you receive will increase and lower will be the deliverability rates.

There are many ways you can build your email list.

IMPORTANT! There’s a big NO to buying emails.

Out of many, two important methods of growing your subscribers’ list are Lead Magnets and Opt-In Forms.

• Lead Magnets

According to HubSpot,

A Lead Magnet is a marketing tool that generates leads by offering a long-form resource in exchange for prospects’ contact information.

So, whatever you offer your prospects for free that is valuable in exchange for their email addresses, is a lead magnet.

The lead magnet should be relevant and useful. It should also solve your prospects’ real problems and give them what they really want.

Below are a few examples of lead magnets you could create:

• Ebook
• Whitepaper
• Training Videos
• Templates
• Case Studies
• Checklist
• Coupons/Discounts
• Webinars or Courses
• Samples

 

• Opt-In Forms

You can use the Opt-In Form to solicit your potential customers’ permission to send them promotional and other types of content about your brand.

When you send solicited messages to your prospects, your emails won’t be counted as spam.

Why is email opt-in important?

• With the help of opt-in, you can create big lists of subscribers really fast.
• The open-rates of emails sent through opt-in are higher.
• When your prospects subscribe to your emails through opt-in forms, you can easily predict the type of content that would be appealing to your subscribers.

While creating an opt-in form, the following are the important things you need to keep in mind:

• The headline should be enticing.
• Keep your form simple.
• The description should be brief, clear, and to the point.
• The form should be optimized for mobile users.
• Keep the form branded.

 

#3. Segment Your Subscribers

 

Segmentation is the technique of organizing your large email list into smaller categories based on your subscribers’ interests, behaviors, preferences, demographics, or statuses.

But why is segmenting your subscribers list important?

Sending the same email to everyone on your list is never a good idea.

It will be like sending the wrong email to the wrong people.

And you may end up losing your subscribers.

Everybody wants better results from their email marketing campaign.

And so do you. Don’t ya?

This is the most important reason why you need to segment your subscribers’ list.

By segmenting your list of subscribers you always send the right content to the right people.

It gives you better email marketing results because your subscribers get the content relevant to them.

Also,

As per the study of Campaign Monitor, there was an increase of as much as 760% in email revenue for marketers who used segmented campaigns in their email marketing.

 

#4. Choose An Email Marketing Platform

 

Are you really serious about making your email marketing campaign a success?

If yes, then you need to choose an email marketing service provider.

Sign up for an email marketing platform and never make the mistake of sending your campaigns using standard email accounts.

Email marketing platforms offer many benefits:

• They offer automation.
• Provide a CRM platform with segmentation capabilities.
• Help you design attractive emails.
• You can build your forms, landing pages, and CTAs easily.
• They make it sure that your emails land in your subscribers’ inboxes and not in their spam folders.
• When you sign up for an email marketing service provider, you just rest assured that your campaign is being run in compliance with email marketing laws.
• Using their extensive email tracking and reporting features, you can study every aspect of your email marketing campaign.

There are many easy-to-use and inexpensive email marketing service providers you can choose from.

Some of the popular email marketing platforms are:

• Mail Chimp: It offers a free plan for up to 2000 subscribers or sends 10000 emails per month.
• Constant Contact: Its plan starts at $5 per month. You can get your first month free with all the plans.
• Aweber: 30-day free trial and the pricing starts at $19 per month. Quarterly and annual billing options are also available.
• Get Response: It also has a 30-day free trial and the pricing plan starts at $15 per month.

 

#5. Decide The Type Of Campaign

 

Choosing the type of email marketing campaign is very important.

What is an email marketing campaign, by the way?

Get Response defines it as:

An email marketing campaign is a coordinated set of email marketing messages delivered at intervals and designed to influence subscriber action to buy, subscribe, download, etc.

There are many different types of email campaigns you can send to your subscribers.

But always choose those that help you achieve your goals.

Here are some general types of campaigns and decide for yourself which are the best to achieve your goals:

• Welcome Emails:

  You send the welcome email campaign to welcome the new subscribers to your mailing list.

But what is more important is the way you welcome them.

Keep your welcome email simple.

And to build lasting relationships and increase engagement, you need to send a sequence of such welcome emails.

• Announcement Email:

  The purpose of this email campaign is to announce the launch of a new product, event, holiday, etc.

By sending this campaign, you encourage your subscribers to buy your products or to attend the event.

• Newsletter:

  This email campaign helps you to keep in touch with your existing subscribers.

With the help of newsletters, you provide your customers with valuable information about a particular topic.

• Invitation Email:

  You invite your subscribers to attend a conference, webinar, etc. by sending this campaign.

• Sales Email:

  The main focus of this email campaign is on conversion and generating sales.

• Re-engagement Email:

  When some of your subscribers stop opening and clicking the links in your emails, you can run a re-engagement campaign to that segment of subscribers.

This campaign helps you clean your list of inactive subscribers regularly.

 

#6. Measure Your Results

 

After sending your email campaign, the next step for you, as a marketer, would be to analyze the effectiveness of your campaign.

Here are the best ways to analyze the effectiveness of your campaign:

• A/B Testing

It’s also called Split Testing.

In this method, you send two variations of your email to group A and group B of your subscribers.

Then you analyze the results of group A against group B.

This will help you decide which is the high-performing email in terms of generating more engagement and sales.

• Track the success of your campaign through your email marketing tool and your website analytics tool (such as Google Analytics).

In the report section of your email marketing tool, you need to pay attention to the following key metrics to track the success of your campaign:

• Deliverability:

  It gives you the rate at which your emails reach the inboxes of your subscribers.

• Open Rate:

  This is the percentage of people of all the subscribers in your list of subscribers who opened your email campaign.

• Click-Through Rate:

  The percentage of people who after opening their emails, clicked on your CTAs.

• Unsubscribe Rate:

  This measures the percentage of subscribers who unsubscribe from your email list once they receive email through your email marketing campaign.

• Number of Bounces:

  This is the number of your subscribers’ email addresses to which your email campaign could not be delivered.

• The number of Unique Opens:

  This is the number of unique subscribers who opened your email campaign.

• Spam Complaints:

  The percentage of people who clicked on the “Mark as Spam” button when you sent them your campaign.

• Shares:

  The number of people who shared your campaign either to their friends or to their network on social channels using the forward icon in your email template.

• Conversion Rate:

  This is the number of people who took some action after opening your campaign like purchase, download, or subscription.

Tracking these metrics will help you get a complete picture of how your campaign is performing and what changes you need to make to your emails that may yield great results.

Also,

Integrating website analytics tool such as Google Analytics tool to your email marketing platform will enable you to see the details of all the visits to your site.

You can see how much time your subscribers spent on your site, what pages they visited, and more.

 

Conclusion:

 

Email Marketing can do wonders for your business.

And there should be no doubt about that.

It’s the best and the most effective and low-cost, low-risk marketing strategy.

Just get started and follow these six steps and make your campaign a success.

1. Establish Your Goals
2. Build Your Email List
3. Segment Your Subscribers
4. Choose An Email Marketing Platform
5. Decide The Type Of Email Campaign
6. Measure Your Results

Do you have any questions regarding creating a successful email marketing campaign? Do let me know in the comments section below.