Beginners Guide To Email Marketing

Email marketing is one most crucial ways of communicating with your audience.

Email Marketing has been around for a long time.

It is used to send direct & the most effective information to your audience. It helps build relationships with customers & businesses.

Every business owner should have an effective email marketing strategy for their business.  

It will help their business build a long-lasting relationship with customers.

As marketing costs are increasing day by day, it makes perfect sense for any small business to invest in email marketing.

Email marketing done right will provide you with the Highest ROI(returns on investment) for your business.

In this Email Marketing Guide will learn about 

•  Why Email Marketing is Important?
• What are the benefits of email marketing?
•  How to do email marketing in the right way?
• What are the email regulations one should follow?
• Where to Use Email Marketing?
• How to Make an effective email marketing strategy?
• How to Build an Email List Organically?
• What is list segmentation in email marketing?
• What are lead magnets?
• What are opt-in forms?
• What are automated emails or autoresponders?
• How to build an autoresponder for your business?
• How to choose the best email marketing tool based on your needs?

Email Marketing and its Importance for your Business

1) Email is one of the most preferred communication channels by consumers. Most of us check our emails regularly.
2) You will have complete control over your email list as you own the list.
The case is not similar to other social media platforms
Eg:- you may have followers on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter & youtube.
You don’t have any control over these followers & they are
Owned by social media companies.
You might lose your followers in case of account bans or account deletion, but that is not the case with your email list.
3) Email marketing gives the highest return on investment for your marketing campaigns

What are the benefits of email marketing

Economical – Email marketing is cost-effective if you have an email list of 1000 people. You could launch your email campaigns the right way.

All you need is an email marketing strategy and the right email service provider to launch your campaigns.

An email marketing tool will cost you around $10 to $15 a month for a list of 1000 subscribers.

Effective Communication– You could communicate with your customers easily as everyone has a smartphone, people can read & take action on your emails on the go.

Permission-Based:-  The best part of email marketing is that it is permission-based. 

A user joins your email list willingly by subscribing on an opt-in form.

You could send newsletters, promotional emails & gifts to your email list.

You could personalize your emails for your audience, feel more connected with you or your brand.

Easily Create an email campaign and inform your audience about the launch of a new product.

Automate your marketing campaigns, Eg:- You could set up a welcome email whenever a subscriber joins your email list.

How To Do Email Marketing In The Right Way

The ethical way to do email marketing is by building an email list organically.
Email marketing will work effectively when you have the right set of audience in your email list.
You can’t send emails to anyone without their consent.
A user has to be subscribed to your email list & provide consent to receive marketing emails or newsletters.
If you send emails to people without their consent, such mails are called spam.
Spamming will not help you grow your business, Your email service provider will block your account for spamming and may have legal implications or fines.

What are the email regulations one should follow?

To safeguard people’s privacy Email regulations law was drafted in 2003, that no one can send unsolicited marketing emails to people.

This law is called as CAN-SPAM Act.

Everyone in the Email Marketing Industry has to comply with CAN-SPAM ACT.

CAN-SPAM ACT – Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing

How one can be compliant with these laws:

• One should include the company name & address in every outgoing email.
• Users have to be given the option of Unsubscribing from an email list voluntarily. So every email you send should have a visible unsubscribe link placed in the email body.
• Should use a real Email Address in the From And reply-to field of an Email, so that the communication can be two-way.
• Should have a clear subject line for emails. The user can figure out the content of the email.

GDPR Compliance

GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation.

GDPR helps to build lasting relationships with your customers.

GDPR applies to businesses that operate in EU (European Union) countries and protects the rights of EU Citizens.

Not complying with GDPR will result in fines & risks.

Complying with GDPR

• Inform the user in a direct & clear way that you request their consent to store their private information when they subscribe to your email list.
• Collect the data that is only relevant to your business.
• Make sure to save the data securely, and the data should be only used for what the users have agreed upon.
• Delete the data from your email list, when a user wishes to unsubscribe.
• It should be easy for users to unsubscribe from an email list.

How To Not Land In SPAM Folders

Email marketing has grown exponentially in recent years & unsolicited mails have also increased. To prevent Spammers from sending unsolicited emails, email-providing companies have built spam filters to trap emails.

The Emails look scammy, and if the emails seem a threat to a user’s info.

Email service providers use triggers red flags, which are called spam triggers. 

Once Spam Filters are triggered, Your emails would land in the Spam folder.

• Have a unique subject title.
•  Avoid ‘spam’ trigger words. 
• Keep the format simple. 
•  Use fewer graphics. 
• Use a limited number of URL links. 
• Send mails only to the people who have opted in to receive emails.
• Choose a Good Email Service Provider
• Send Emails through Verified domains
• Don’t use deceptive content
• Add your business address and unsubscribe link in emails.

Where to Use Email Marketing?

There are many ways you might incorporate email marketing into your marketing funnel or business.

Welcome emails:– You could set up email automation to greet a new subscriber with a welcome email. 

A welcome email can set the right expectations for your subscriber.

A welcome email helps to build a solid foundation to build relationships with your subscribers.

Keep Them Informed:- You might ask people to subscribe to weekly, monthly newsletters so that they can receive content on a weekly and monthly basis. You can inform them about your products, services, or new product launch. Helps in building brand awareness.

Generate Leads:- You can generate leads using a lead magnet and opt-in form. All you have to do is drive traffic to the landing page, and people will subscribe to your lead magnet if they find it useful.

You may nurture your audience with interesting content they like.

How To Make An Effective Email Marketing Strategy?

Without an effective email strategy, your email marketing efforts will fail. Lets us learn how we can build an effective email marketing strategy.

Define Your Goals – The first thing to do before thinking of a strategy, figuring out what you want to achieve with your email marketing campaign.

You may have the following goals for your email marketing campaigns.

• Increase your Brands visibility
• Generate More Sales By educating & nurturing an audience.
• Increase your email signups to acquire new customers
• Interact with your audience to understand their needs.
• A well-Nurtured audience becomes loyal to your brand.
• You might drive traffic to your blog using your email list.

Building An Organic Email List 

Email lists should be built gradually and in an ethical way.
Never make the mistake of buying a purchased list.
Scrapped List will never work out for you.
Mailing a person who has not subscribed to your email list, will not give any results.
The person might not open your email or might report your email as spam.
Sending Emails to your target audience will help you achieve your desired goal in email marketing.
Building an email list is simple. You may add a subscribe opt-in form on your website or landing page.
Encourage users to signup with an email in exchange for a freebie.

Create a schedule of email campaigns –  You Have to decide how often you want to send emails to your audience. 

Inform your audience while subscribing, that they will receive periodic emails from your weekly or monthly. Make sure to mail them regularly on your decided schedule so that your users remember you.

What is list segmentation in email marketing?

Email list segmentation is the process of dividing your subscribers into subgroups depending on specific criteria so that you can personalize your emails to your audience.

Segmentation helps you engage the audience uniquely, 

You can promote content that interests only a few people in your email list.

Promoting unique content will give you higher open rates & conversions.

Once you have segmented your email list with specific tags you could add automation and conditions for which the autoresponder will send emails.

Segmentation can be applied based on the interest for eg:- if you run a food blog. 

You can segment audiences based on their diet – vegetarian, non-vegetarian, vegan,& pescetarian.

You could also use segmentation to find out how & from which digital platform the user got into your email list.

you may categorize the list in the following ways

• New subscribers
• Preferences
• Interests
• location
• Open rate
• Inactivity
• lead magnet
• shopping cart abandonment

How to Measure your Email marketing campaigns

Measure the outcome of the email campaigns is crucial.

By analyzing your email campaigns, you can decide how it is helping your business. Are your users happy with your content,

You may measure your email campaigns for

• Deliverability
• Open rate
• Click-Through Rate (CTR)
• Unsubscribe
• Bounces
• A/B testing 

Deliverability – It measures how many emails are delivered to your user’s inbox.

To Ensure the good deliverability of emails, ensure the email addresses in your email list are valid.

You might use an email validation tool to validate and clean your email list.

Periodically check for nonactive members in your email list and remove them.

Check For Bounces (invalid emails) in your email list and remove them regularly when you find one.

Open rate- 

To get maximum open rates for your email, use enticing subject lines.

You Can use Coshedules headline analyzer to analyze your subject lines.

You can test with time & day for sending your email campaigns.

CTR(Click Through Rate)

The Click-through rate is calculated based on the percentage of people clicking your email links.

You might test your email copy with different CTA(call to action), images, content to see what interests your audience’s curiosity.

Unsubscribes

Measures the no of people who opt out of your email list.

If your unsubscribe rates are too high, you will have to revaluate your content strategy and figure out what your audience wants to hear from you.

Bounces

There are two types of bounces in email

Soft Bounce – In Soft bounce, the mailbox of the user is full.

Hard Bounce- In the hard bounce, the email of the user is invalid.

A/ B testing

In simple terms, you do a slip test of emails and see which email performs better.

For A/b testing, you can test the following things

• test your subject lines
• test your Images
• Test your CTA
• Create two versions of your email
• analyze your results 
• Choose the email which performed better

How to analyze your email marketing campaign reports

Every email service provider service will give you a report of your email marketing campaigns,

You can organize your reports based on these metrics

• Measure the total number of emails sent
• Number of emails delivered 
• Deliverability rate
• Bounce rate
• Open Rate
• Clickthrough Rate
• Unsubscribe Rate

You may use these questions to check your performance:

• How is the deliverability rate of your emails, is it consistent, decreased, increased?
• Compare your open rates with your click-through rates
• What is the unsubscribe count of your campaign
• What type of email format is performing better- text, HTML version, short form, or long-form
• Which CTA performed better

How to Build an Email List Organically?

There are many creative ways to build your email list

• Creating Unique Email Content For your audience
• Ask your subscribers to share your emails with their friends & family.
• Create an enticing lead generation campaign
• Provide online resource or a tool that requires signup
• Create give away freebies as a bonus
• You could host a giveaway on your youtube channel.
• Promote your lead gen campaign on Twitter.
• Promote on Pinterest and create an interesting visual content
• Utilize Facebook page cover area, add a Cover photo encouraging people to subscribe to a newsletter
• Add a CTA for signup on your Facebook business page
• Give a sneak peek to the audience what they will receive in their emails
• Create a locked content and promote it on Facebook, To view the content audience have to signup.
• Add a Short link on your Instagram bio links
• Share posts on Instagram and add a mention in comments for signup click the link in bio,  
• Utilize the swipe up features in stories 
•  Add signup links in the featured section of LinkedIn profile

What are lead magnets?

To Grow your email list, you need to provide value to the subscriber.

The irresistible free offer that you provide for people to subscribe to your email list is called the lead magnet.

Here are few examples of lead magnet

• Ebook
• Buyers guide
• Infographic 
• study or reports
• Checklist on tips & tricks
• free trial of a software
• Webinars
• free course or tutorials

Ways to make your lead magnet irresistible

 Should solve their problem

 Should be easy to read

 Provide a valuable info

Your audience can implement easily

What are opt-in forms?

Optin forms are used to collect information about your subscribers.

Optin forms are used to convey the benefits of lead magnets.

Create an opt-in form that converts

You may include the following elements to have a converting opt-in form :

• A Good headline which informs the user benefit of these lead magnets
• Use bullet points to describe key points and features
• Create a 3d mockup cover image for your lead magnet.
• Keep the form elements simple, name & email id is enough
• Have Clear & attractive CTA on Button

You may also add an exit-intent popup for your site visitors to grab the lead magnet.

What are automated emails or autoresponders?

An Autoresponder is a process where you send automated email replies which are triggered by specific events such as signing up to an opt-in form, cart abandonment, downloading a PDF, or buying a product.

Every small or large business needs an autoresponder for their business for two reasons :

To nurture leads– providing valuable information about your product or service, giving them a buyers guide.

Turn cold prospects into customers- YOu have to build trust with an audience.

 Educate them how your product or service will solve their problem or add value to their lives.

you can use an autoresponder to send 

Welcome emails – sending welcome emails to people who join your email list

Cross-sells & upsells– recommend products to customers who have purchased from you.

Send a lead magnet to provide a free guide or mini-course for people to join your email list.

Drive sales on autopilot – You could set up a series of drip campaigns to nurture the audience and help them to decide to purchase your product.

Cart abandonment emails – encouraging people to make the purchase who have abandoned their shopping cart by providing them a discount to complete the purchase.

How to choose the best email marketing tool based on your needs?

Choosing an email service provider depends on your marketing needs. For beginners, we have listed few tools which are best in business.

Convertkit

This tool is made for bloggers and entrepreneurs.

They have the easiest way to set up lead magnets, landing pages,

and you can use their built-in opt-in forms to capture emails for signups.

They have an awesome unique feature to build landing pages and update content in a jiffy. They have prebuilt landing page templates for you to choose from lead magnet signup, event registration, book a meeting, & webinar registration.

The user interface is beginner-friendly, you don’t need to break your head on how to get started, they even provide a virtual tour of their tool and guide you on how to use it.

This tool is what every blogger needs, though advanced users might find some limitations for their needs.

You can Checkout the review & guide to convertkit

Active Campaign

To have the right impact on your email marketing goals,  

Active Campaign can help you take your business to next level with their advanced automation features.

You can create various funnels depending on your needs, they have automation features – like a flow chart to draft your automation and visualize your email flow.

They have an option of tagging your subscribers, segment your audience into lists and groups.

You can Do A/B split testings on your emails to optimize conversions.

There is a bit learning curve in this tool, the features of 

Active-Campaign can be overwhelming to a beginner. 

None the less you can consider this option once your list starts to grow big and you need power full automation to manage your email operations.

Getresponse

This is an email marketing tool every drop shipper needs.

Getresponse helps to build an email list, automate your emails.

They have all the latest features for email marketing, and they also have features to support eCommerce businesses as well.

Getresponse is a one-stop solution for all eCommerce store owners.

They have a huge list of professionally designed email templates that cater to all industries.

They even have the templates grouped into categories focused on your marketing goals (nurturing, promoting & selling).

You can decorate or style your email with attractive web fonts.

The user interface is easy to use.

They have a conversion funnel feature that small businesses can utilize to manage all their marketing assets in one tool.