Email marketing is a popular marketing strategy that has been around for years. Its popularity is due to its simplicity.
It’s one of the easiest and most effective ways to connect with your customers.
Over 70% of global marketers say that email marketing is an excellent way to reach customers. In fact, email marketing statistics show that email marketers claim that email marketing can give them a return on investment of as high as $44 for every dollar that you spend on it.
We’ve come up with this ultimate email marketing guide and tips for beginners and experts to help you get started on your path to email marketing success:
Building email list
1. Use lead magnets
Your lead magnet is a free offer that attracts prospects to your email list. The offer can take a number of formats, should be valuable to your prospects, and is given away for free in exchange for an email address.
What is a lead magnet that is relevant and useful to your prospects, and makes their lives easier?
Here are a few types of lead magnets you could create:
- Ebook
- Whitepaper
- Infographic
- Report or Study
- Checklist
- Template
- Webinar or Course
- Tool
If you lack resources, you can still generate lead magnets by recycling your existing content.
How to create a great lead magnet
Your lead magnet should be something that your potential clients would find valuable. Here are a few guidelines to ensure that your lead magnet is valuable to them.
Make your offer solution-oriented and actionable
Helpful tips that offer a simple and effective way to fix a problem.
Ensure that the asset is easy to consume
The lead magnet should be delivered in a digital format that is easy to obtain and consume.
Create your offer with future content in mind
It’s disappointing when you sign up for a great offer and the content isn’t as good. Make sure your offer aligns with the value you’ll provide throughout your relationship so you don’t damage trust.
Treat your lead magnet as a stepping stone to your paid solution
The purpose of your email list is to eventually lead subscribers to buy your product or service. You offer free content to show the value that you provide as a business, and those freebies should eventually lead to your paid products.
Create offers that are relevant to each stage of the buyer’s journey
It is your responsibility to know which stage of the buyer’s journey every new lead will be at.
You can create different offers for each stage of the buyer’s journey to get more information about the customer. The type of content the customer consumes can give you insight into their mindset.
2. Create an enticing opt-in form
The opt-in form is how you get a prospect’s information to add them to your list. It’s the gate between your future leads and the incredible asset that you created with them in mind.
Here are some tips for creating an enticing opt-in form:
Create an attractive design and attention-grabbing header
Your form should be visually appealing, stand out from the page, and entice people to sign up. You want to excite readers with the offer.
Make the copy relevant to the offer
The goal of your form should be to get people to enter their information, not to deceive them. All of the information on your form should be an accurate representation of what you are offering.
Keep the form simple
One of your first interactions with your prospect should not be a long form with several fields, as this may scare them away.
Ask for the information you need to get started, such as the person’s first name and email address.
Set your opt-in form for double confirmation
It may seem counterproductive to ask your subscribers to opt in to your emails twice, but some research on open rates suggests that customers may prefer a confirmed opt-in (COI) email more than a welcome email. A COI email is an email that a customer receives after they have completed an action, such as opting in to a mailing list, that confirms their subscription.
Ensure that the flow works
Make sure you test everything from the perspective of a user before you launch it. Checking that the form works properly, the thank you page is up, and that your offer is fulfilled as promised is vital.
When you first meet your new lead, make a professional and positive impression.
3. Choose an email marketing service
An email marketing provider can help you with your email marketing if you’re looking for any level of support.
There are features to help you create successful email marketing campaigns to support your email marketing goals.
You can also use HubSpot’s Email Marketing service to track the success of your email campaigns and share the most important data with your team. The best part is that it’s free to use.
Here are examples of features services like HubSpot offer to consider when choosing an email service provider:
- CRM platform with segmentation capabilities
- Good standing with Internet Service Providers
- A positive reputation as an email service provider (ESP)
- Easy-to-build forms, landing pages, and CTAs
- Automation
- Simple ways to comply with email regulations
- Ability to split test your emails
- Built-in analytics
- Downloadable reports
4. Use email marketing tips
You probably don’t think much about the formatting or subject line of an email you send to a friend, but email marketing requires much more consideration. Everything from the time you send your email to the devices on which your email could be opened is important.
Let’s touch on the components of a successful marketing email:
The text you include in your email should be in a style that is consistent with your voice, and should only contain information about one topic.
It is important to choose images that will look good on all devices, are attention grabbing, and are relevant to the subject matter.
Your call-to-action (CTA) should be attention-grabbing and lead to a relevant offer. It should be distinct from the rest of the email content in order to effectively encourage the reader to take action.
The best time to send an email, according to a study that looked at response rates from 20 million emails, is Tuesday at 11 AM ET.
Since over half of all emails are opened on mobile devices, it is important to optimize your email for this platform as well as all others.
Address your reader as if you are writing to a friend. Be personable and use a familiar tone.
The subject line of your email should be clear, actionable, and enticing. It should be personalized and aligned with the body of the email.
5. Implement email segmentation
Segmenting your email list involves creating sub-categories based on your subscribers’ unique characteristics, interests, and preferences. This helps you to better target your messages and improve your results.
We should not send generic email blasts because our subscribers are humans and we should treat them as such.
The importance of segmentation is that it allows you to send the right content to the right people, and avoid losing subscribers.
6. Incorporate email marketing automation
Automation is putting your list segmentation to use.
You can create targeted automated emails by dividing your mailing list into smaller groups. This allows you to send more focused emails. There are a few ways to do this.
Autoresponders
An autoresponder is a way to automatically send a series of emails. The emails can be triggered by a certain action, such as someone downloading your eBook.
Autoresponders are great because you can set them and forget about them. Every user that you have set up to receive autoresponder emails will get each email in the series.
Workflows
Workflows take autoresponders a step further. Workflows have two key components:
- The enrollment criteria, or the action that would qualify a user for the workflow.
- The goal, or the action that would take a user out of the workflow.
The workflow tool will automatically send an email series or change a prospect’s lifecycle stage based on the user’s actions.
How to succeed in email marketing
Build your email list
The first step to a successful email marketing campaign is building your email list. You need to consider your target audience when growing your email subscriber list so you can effectively target them with your marketing communications.
It takes time, effort, and patience to gather email addresses from multiple sources.
A website is a great place to get people to sign up for emails and build an email list.
Email sign-ups are a great way to increase website conversion rates. Adding an email sign-up form to your most popular landing pages is an easy way to increase the number of people who sign up for your email list. When creating an email sign-up form, make sure it is short and doesn’t have too many fields.
Many people may choose not to sign up for something simply because it looks like too much work to fill out the form. Therefore, it is important to keep forms short and sweet by only including essential information.
In fact, many businesses only require an email address.
Use email templates
The next step in email marketing is to design and send emails to your subscribers. The more engaging your emails are, the higher your return on investment will be.
However, it is not smart to create emails from scratch. It takes more time, effort, and money to do that.
Instead of using the default email templates, it is better to create your own email templates or get them from third-party websites.
Choose an email template that captures the personality of your brand and is easy for your subscribers to read. Consider factors such as layout, typography, color, visual media, and calls to action.
There are several websites that offer free email templates that can be easily customized to fit your needs.
Async Ottawa offers a selection of templates for different types of email correspondence that can be used by businesses.
Create an email drip campaign
Popular types of email drip campaigns
There are a few objectives you can have when you create an email drip campaign:
-Transactional emails, sent after a purchase is made in order to provide information about the purchase, like a confirmation or shipping update
-Time-sensitive emails, sent in order to promote a limited time offer or sale
-Welcome emails, sent to new subscribers in order to introduce them to your brand
-Educational emails, sent in order to teach subscribers about your products or services
A welcome sequence
Welcome sequences are important for every brand. A typical drip campaign to subscribers starts with a thank you for signing up.
You can also send an email with a call-to-action prompt to read your latest blog post.
You should take this opportunity to show your new subscribers how great your company is and convince them to become paying customers.
A mini-course
There are many types of lead magnets you can use to create a drip campaign. These include a cheat sheet or checklist that you can send out over a couple of emails.
If you follow this approach, you will send a series of emails containing valuable information over the course of a few days or weeks.
You can use this type of structure when you’re offering a webinar as a lead magnet to entice potential customers.
You’ll need to send an email invite for people to sign up, and then you can send a reminder and follow-up email after the event. The follow-up email should summarize some key takeaways from the event.
Shopping cart abandonment
Abandoned cart emails are key for eCommerce businesses. With an automated series of such emails, stores can recover some of the sales they would otherwise lose.
Within a few hours of creating a campaign like this, you’ll usually send out a first email to remind customers of their items in their shopping cart and to keep your brand top of mind.
Upselling or cross-selling
After a customer buys something from you, it doesn’t have to be the end of your business relationship. You can also create an email drip campaign to encourage them to buy more from you or buy related products. This way, you can turn customers into repeat customers.
Planning your email sequence
To optimize your email drip campaign, you need to choose how many emails to send and how frequently to send them.
The length of your email sequence will depend on your goals. You will want to send enough emails to reach your goal, without sending too many.
Educational emails can be sent every other day.
You can send a maximum of four emails in 24 hours if you are promoting a big sale. The key is to find the balance between emails that are sales-oriented and those that offer value.
The vast majority of your emails should be focused on offering value to your recipients, with only around 20% of them being dedicated to trying to make a sale.
Email marketing summary
The most important rule for sending a marketing email is treating your subscribers like humans.
This post covers the basics of email marketing and how to get started with it.
After reading this article, you should feel comfortable enough to start investing in email marketing, or be able to improve your current campaigns with the new knowledge you’ve acquired.
It will take some time before you see the results you were expecting.
Templates and automation are key to success in email marketing. You need to be able to track your progress, make changes, and test again to ensure that your campaigns are effective.