 Email marketing is the most effective way of staying in touch with your audience. It’s not about advertising, it’s about building a close relationship and trust with your customers. But before you continue reading, just stop for a second and think if you are ready to commit to a long-lasting relationship? Are you ready to fully concentrate on your customers and make them look forward to hearing from you? If yes, keep reading. This guide is for you. Email Marketing Basics Email marketing occurs when a business sends promotional or informational messages, newsletters or event announcements to the different groups of people via email. The main purpose of email marketing is:
In this case you have a full control on who you want to send your content. If you are not sure if you should read further, check the numbers:
When to Choose Email Marketing? Email marketing allows you to directly reach to your customers and measure your campaign results quite fast. But the question is, when you should choose email marketing and if it’s suitable for all business types. Start with it if you want to:
By now it’s obvious that you can use email marketing if you sell products, offer services or have a blog or a website. But, before you start, you should have:
How to do Email Marketing? There are simple steps for starting with your email marketing campaign:
Identify Your GoalsBefore starting with your first email marketing campaign, take your time and think about your end goal and what you want to achieve with it. Goal setting is critical for email marketing campaign success. Defining your goals helps to measure your success. To help you to better understand your goals, they need to be:
If you still have difficulties formulating your purpose, try to answer to these questions:
Here are some examples of email marketing goals:
Define Your Target AudienceIt’s crucial to make sure each email you send reaches the target audience. It means that the individuals who receive your emails will be more interested and there is a big chance that they will open it. But first, you should create a list of segments. You can segment your email list by:
The easiest and simplest way to understand who your audience is - by building customer personas. Except all the above mentioned, the next important step is identifying the device your target audience will open their emails on, the approximate time they will open those emails. After you have defined your target audience, you should build your email list. Build an Email ListOne of the difficult parts of email marketing is collecting emails. Believe it or not, your website’s or blog’s visitors will not give you their emails easily. People are very skeptical of giving their personal information, which includes emails as well, to any random website. So, the task of building an email list is really challenging. Keep reading to learn how to easily collect your target audience’s emails. Lead MagnetBefore starting, ask yourself, why would your website’s visitors want to offer you their email? The answer is, you should give them something valuable in return. Here are a lead magnets types:
As you can see, lead magnets don't have to cost you anything and are mainly digital materials that you can create yourself. Note 1: You can add multiple lead magnets to your website. This will increase the chances of collecting more emails. Note 2: The more valuable and informative your lead magnets are, the more emails you’ll get. Opt-in FormsIt doesn’t matter if you have one lead magnet or multiple ones, it’s a good idea offering more than one opt-in form. Your form needs to have:
Note 1: Be cautious to not have subscription forms come out from everywhere on your website. This will only annoy your visitors. Squeeze PagesA squeeze page is designed for collecting email addresses from the potential visitors. And if you can make the visitor think that the page was made and designed specifically for him/her, it’s more likely to get the email address. Install AI-Powered ChatInstall a chat software, which will sit at the bottom of your website that will show predefined messages to your visitors. Try to engage them in a conversation and then ask for their email. Ask To Subscribe in Blog PostsWrite engaging blog posts and ask the readers to subscribe to your newsletters. Be creative and try to not force anything. You don’t want to make them annoyed and leave your website without an intention to get back ever. Content CliffhangerPublish a post and try catching your reader’s attention with the first paragraphs. Keep a part of it hidden and for more ask them to give you their emails. You can also keep some posts hidden and give access after email subscription. Use Social MediaOccasionally remind your followers on social media channels to subscribe to your newsletters. Be creative and persuasive. Design Your EmailConsumers receive random emails from different brands every day, therefore it’s crucial to send appealing and unique emails that stand out. Use simple and clean design:
Personalize Your EmailIf you need your audience to open your email you need to know and understand them. Your readers will interact with the content that is relevant to their interests and seems to be written just for them:
Segment Your Email ListIf you want to improve your email marketing effectiveness, segment your list. This will help you with email open rates, click-through rates and unsubscribe rates. You can segment your audience by different criterias:
Choose Email Marketing ServiceSmart email marketers know that there is now way to handle large campaigns. An email marketing provider is a great way if you want to multiply email marketing efforts, analyze the data and improve your performance. Before choosing an email marketing provider, consider price, features, interface, analytics and support. The most popular email marketing service providers are:
Measure Your Email Marketing Results Without tracking and measuring your campaign you will never know if you are getting results or there is a need for A/B testing and changes. Before launching a new campaign, set KPIs to track your efforts and improve your strategy.You can use your email marketing tool or Google Analytics. The main KPIs of your email marketing success are:
These metrics allow you to analyze how your email list subscribers interact with your campaigns and give you an opportunity to compare different campaigns success. How to Improve Email Opening Rates The most important part of the email marketing is persuading your recipients to open your emails. There are several factors you should consider: Sender NameWrite your or your brand’s name into the sender name:
Spam FoldersIt’s frustrating when you make efforts to create an outstanding email campaign and your email gets sent to a spam folder. All you need to do is to follow some email marketing best practices to avoid spam folders:
Inactive SubscribersKeep your email list fresh and leave only engaged subscribers - removing inactive subscribers who have not engaged with your emails during the past x (you can decide the time span later) months. Before removing the subscriber, outreach to them one more time and try to engage them. Email TimingTest with a couple of emails or campaigns to identify the best timing for your email receivers. Although, there are many studies and researches on the topic, but for understanding the time suitable for your target audience, you should try it yourself and perform some A/B testing. Subject LineFor CTA the subject line is everything. You have to create catchy and creative subject lines to attract your receivers attention. Keep reading on how you can craft appealing email subject lines:
Email ContentWrite unique and informative email content each time. Try to be friendly and use humor (not mush) to win your recipients trust. Don’t be too professional or sound boring. Start with easy lines and catch your reader’s attention with valuable news, funny jokes or a great offer. You can include external links to free resources, online books, free courses, etc. Automated Email Marketing It will save your time and resources, if you use email automation to send pre-written welcome emails, information on your offers or congratulations on special dates. When choosing an email services tool, always test its automotive emails if they have one. Believe me, later this will be one of the most used features. The success of your email campaign will not only depend on your email list or great text and design, but also how smart you are using tools and softwares. Here are some email marketing automation advices:
I put together some automotive email ideas that you can create beforehand:
Is Email Marketing Still Important? Time by time you will probably hear that ‘Email is dead’. But opposite to it, email is getting bigger and bigger with time. If you don’t have email marketing strategy yet, you are missing out on conversions, sales, brand awareness and customer loyalty. If you are not sure if you should include it in your general digital marketing strategy, keep reading on its benefits:
Email Marketing Cheat SheetAs a bonus, I added a cheat sheet that you can keep if you want to look at the points mentioned in this post. 
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