Lets get started with Email Marketing
If you know the power of email marketing in today’s business scenario, you are probably wandering how to get started with email marketing.
Email marketing is one of the most important components of digital marketing and is being widely used by companies to promote their products and services.
But how exactly do you get started and what are the steps you need to take to get up and running with email and ensure your campaigns are a success?
In this article, I’ll walk you through the steps of getting started with email marketing and ensure your first campaign is a success.
Lets start with email marketing understanding step by step
Step 1: Set Your Goals
I guess you would be a little disappointed to read the step 1. You would have probably wanted to sign up for an email marketing tool and send your first email.
But, it’s not how it works, and you know that too.
Before diving in head first, you should take a moment to think about your goals, agenda and what you want to achieve with email marketing.
Because, it’s the goal that’ll dictate everything else you do – the type of campaigns you send, whom you send, what content you include, and how you measure the performance.
Mostly people start with signing up to an email marketing tool and then don’t do anything else. The culprit is not having goals.
Without a destination to reach, you wouldn’t be able to pick a route to travel.
Email marketing, being the single most powerful digital channel to reach your audience, can be used to achieve a number of different goals.
So, it’s worth spending your time thinking clearly about the results you want to achieve with it before jumping in.
It could be anything.
– Driving new signups for your product or service
– Generating and nurturing leads for your sales team
– Driving more attendees for your upcoming events or webinar
– Generating more sales
Step 2: Build Your List
Congrats!
Now you’ve decided your goals. It’s time to build your list (or grow your list if you already have one).
All you need to build a list is a simple straight forward formula and a right email marketing tool.
An incentive (also referred as the lead magnet) + simple signup option = huge email list.
Let me explain it.
To build a list, there are only two components you need to get right.
– The lead magnet and simple signup process.
Let us talk a bit about these components.
1. The lead magnet
People are skeptic by nature. They don’t want to share personal details like email address and mobile number. There is an intrinsic resistance to share such personal details.
The lead magnet is an incentive (or an ethical bribe) you need to give to your prospects to break the resistance and share their email address with you (thus giving you permission to send them emails).
The lead magnet can be anything to entice people in signing up includes:
– An Ebook
– A webinar
– An email course
– A free course
– A case study
– An infographic
– Discounts (voucher)
You need to remember one rule. The lead magnet what you choose should be relevant to the goal you want to achieve.
2. A simple signup process
People are lazy by nature. Unless you make the signup process as simple as possible, they won’t be signing up even if your lead magnet is worth a lot.
The email marketing tool:
After people optin to your email list, you also need a right email marketing tool to capture and build your email list.
I suggest MailChimp / MailerLite as the free options to start with. But, choosing the right email marketing tool is a big decision and it depends on the objective fulfilment and spending on tools using for the campaign.
MailChimp free plan include upto 2,000 contacts 10,000 sends p/m, with a daily send limit of 2,000. Whereas MailerLite free plan include upto 1,000 contacts 12,000 sends p/m.
Step 3: Picking The Right Campaign Type For Email Marketing
Congrats again!
You are halfway through it.
Though you’ve completed selecting the goal and building the list, now is the time to pick a right campaign type that’ll help you achieve your goals.
There are several types of email campaigns you can use, but we will focus on the top 2 here.
- Newsletter: This is the most common type of email campaign used by both B2B and B2C businesses. A newsletter is a great way to keep in touch with the list of people who already know you. It will help to place your product or services top of mind and drive people back to your website.
- Announcement Emails: Whenever a new blog post done, an email is circulated to the entire email list announcing the new content just published.
This is a great way to announce your specified email list about the new content or product or service you’ve launched. It instantly drives a massive traffic to your business (depending upon the size of your mailing list).
Both these email campaigns can be used to drive visitors to the website, get signups to new products, create awareness, and nurture your leads.
Step 4: Set Up & Measure Your Email Campaign
Now we have reached the final step of the email marketing setup process.
Now it’s time to put email marketing in action and measure the performance through the set tools.
Setting up the campaign: Login to your favourite email tool and set up your first email campaign (following their specific instructions).
Start the campaign.
Remember that you’re a guest in their inbox.
Step 5: Measure Your Campaign Performance
Once your first email is out of the door, getting opened and clicked, you’ll be able to track and measure the performance.
You can track the performance in two places – your email marketing tool report section and your website analytics tool.
You can track a variety of metrics like open rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, bounce rates, and spam complaints etc. from your email marketing tools report option.
It will give an insight of the email performing.
That’s it.
You are all set to start your email marketing campaigns.
Well, I know this just covered the overview of starting with email marketing.
But worry not.
You’ll learn a lot more about email marketing in few upcoming posts.
Take a moment to reply and let me know your feedback about this article.
Cheers and Happy Learning!
