Email Marketing Made Simple: A Step by Step Guide
Email marketing is the most direct and effective way of connecting with your leads, promoting your brand and increasing sales. There are lots of things you can do with emails, like sell products, share news, improve your cart abandonment rate, or tell a story. Whatever platform you use, there is always a simple way to create templates and send any kind of message you wish. In this blog, we will walk you through the entire process of creating an email marketing campaign, how to acquire leads and generate sales.
Importance of email marketing
We have covered what email marketing is, now we will to discuss why it is so important when it comes to marketing. Despite the clear rise of social media and unsolicited spam emails, email remains the most effective way to nurture leads and boost your customer loyalty. There are many reasons why email marketing should be a top priority for your business, such as; email is the number one communication channel, you own your list, and email generally converts better.
How-to email marketing
Email marketing is made up of several pieces, although this doesn’t mean it needs to be complicated to start up. Here are a few tips on how to begin;
Start with your list: you can’t begin an email marketing campaign without having a list of contacts. You will also need to make sure that the list you have are the right audience for what you are trying to sell or promote.
Add an email service provider: this lets you segment your audience, organise your lists and distribute email campaigns to your audience. This is also a good way to track your results to improve future campaigns.
Growing your email list
Most people start with a small list to begin with and work their way up to increase it. Most people when growing their list usually add an opt-in form to their website for people to sign up to, although this isn’t an effective way to gain contacts. To grow a list you need to have a compelling discount or voucher code to use, and the way to get this code is to sign up to your newsletter.
Improving your Email open rates
Having a good size email list is vital, but it is also just as important to have a good open rate. There are several factors that play a role in whether or not your emails get opened, such as;
- Avoiding spam filters
- Removing inactive subscribers
- Perfect your timing
- Make a great subject line
- Write amazing content
Choosing an email marketing service
There are many different platforms to use to send and create email marketing campaigns. Here are just a few; MailChimp, Sendinblue, Drip, AWeber, ConvertKit. We would recommend using MailChimp as it is easy to use and navigate and a great platform for beginners to start creating their own campaigns. You will find a number of different templates on there for different uses.