Getting Started with Email Marketing

Email marketing is a large, mature and well-established industry that can be a great source of revenue for many businesses. A successful email marketing business can easily become the backbone behind your marketing efforts and help clients stay in touch with you as your business grows.

It's also a vast industry with a very high barrier to entry. This is why it can be, for some businesses, a very profitable part of their marketing strategy, or even the main focal point of their business. Effective and often low-cost email marketing campaigns can help you to keep your name in front of your potential customers, ensure that clients are reminded of your products and services when they need them most and get new email addresses added to your mailing lists.

Know your audience

We've all heard the saying "know your customer," but it's also important to know your audience. Defining your target audience helps inform so many areas of content marketing and lifecycle emails. Without knowing who you want to market to, you won't be able to develop specific messages for these people, nor will you know which channels they engage with most.

Choose the right email marketing software.

When it comes to business, email is a power tool you cannot do without. A good email marketing software can help you with marketing, improve customer service and increase sales. But how do you know which is ideal for you?

When you're getting started with email marketing, the first thing you have to decide is which software to use. There are a lot of options, but when choosing email marketing software, you need to carefully consider what kind of platform works best for your business' specific needs.

Set goals for your email marketing campaign

Setting goals before an email campaign allows you to measure the return on investment (ROI) and determine whether your efforts were successful. To begin the process of setting goals, ask yourself a series of questions. These questions help you identify who your target market is, what you want them to do (the call to action), why are you sending this email, how many people do you want to reach and what metrics are used to measure success.

Always begin your email campaigns with a clear purpose. Start by asking yourself what you want your recipient to do, why are you sending the email and how you plan to measure the outcome. When you know the answers to these questions, it will be easier to create an effective email that piques interest and gets results.

Create an email marketing plan

Email marketing is an essential tool for any Internet marketer, business owner, blogger or someone who wants to generate additional leads for their business. However, to see any real results from email marketing you need a plan.

The key to a successful email marketing campaign is to define clear goals for your activities. By choosing your objectives wisely, you can easily monitor the effects of your decisions over time. This will enable you to make strategic adjustments to your marketing campaigns and realize measurable results.

Determine the purpose of your email

Many marketers have already discovered the many benefits of email marketing, and it seems everyone is trying to cash in on the craze. This has lead to a lot of poorly executed, misdirected emails which have only hurt email marketing's reputation. But while many marketers are trying to sell you their wares with email — those marketers who have taken the time to discover why they are sending an email (and what they hope to accomplish), and tailor their message to precisely meet that need, are reaping the most rewards. Before you start sending out your next campaign take a step back and ask yourself: Why am I sending this email? What do I want my subscribers to do as a result of reading this?

If you can answer these questions then emails will become much more effective in getting your message across – not only that but they will also be consistent with your overall brand messaging.

Create a lead magnet and landing page

Email marketing is a great way to communicate with your customers and prospects. But before you can start sending emails, you need to set up a few things first.

The first step to email marketing success is creating a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is a type of content that your subscribers can download to receive in exchange for their contact information. The content could be an ebook, video, or resource that will help them solve a problem they're having.

The second step is to create a landing page where people who sign up for the lead magnet can go and download it.

Now that you have your lead magnet and landing page set up, it's time to start collecting subscribers. You can use social media, PPC ads and other forms of advertising to bring in new email addresses.

Personalize your emails

Personalization is the number one concern for consumers when it comes to emails. With data from your website, you can personalize each email with the prospect's name and location, which leads to higher conversions and lower costs for your marketing campaign.

You want your emails to stand out on a prospect's crowded inbox. You want your brand to be memorable, and you want your campaign to be personalized. Your prospects will get a more personalized experience that leaves them confident about your brand.

Write an engaging subject line

If you're considering using a new email marketing platform, one of the things that you might be most interested in exploring is your subject line. An important part of any marketing campaign is to draw in as many potential customers as possible, and a subject line is just one way you can get more people reading your emails.

A targeted subject line can help you reach more people, which means that your email will be read by more readers and increase your chances of business.

Incorporate visual content

Incorporating visual content into your emails adds some variety and helps break up the text-heavy nature of an email. You can also use images as links so readers don’t have to click through multiple pages just to see something as simple as a product image or video clip.

Improve results by A/B testing different aspects of your email marketing campaigns.

A/B testing is all about comparing the two versions of the webpage (in our example) to see which one performs better. In this case, it can be two emails, or two different subject lines, etc. The change is made on only one part of your strategy — and the rest stays the same — so you can see what effect that change alone has on your overall results. For example, if you think a different subject line will work better with your users, you only have to change that in your email template. Everything else stays the same and compared with the original version of your email, you can see if this new subject line gets more opens (or clicks, or sales) than before.

Email marketing can be tricky, so it's important to know the tricks of the trade. There are many things you can try such as changing your email subject lines and creating segmented audiences. And these two changes alone can have a HUGE impact on how many sales you make and how effective your email marketing campaigns are.

Wrapping Up

Email marketing gives you a great way to get your content in front of the right people, and there's a lot more to this channel than simply sending out a newsletter or promotion. Through segmentation and automation, you can improve how customers engage with your business and make it easier for them to convert. From basics like building an email list to advanced features like automated workflows, campaigns, and drip campaigns, there are countless ways to integrate this marketing channel into your other efforts. Ultimately, email marketing is all about the conversation between you and your customer, and it's one that should be ongoing—and effective—in order to reach your goals.