What is email marketing? Is email marketing important? How to do email marketing if you have no idea how it works and no time on your hands?
At least one of those questions has stolen a few hours from your sleep schedule. We’re not judging: it’s easy to lose sleep when no one’s buying anything from you. Those shoes and socks ain’t gonna buy themselves.
If you’re just getting started in email marketing, you may feel like you’re stepping into unknown territory. There are so many terms you don’t understand, and it all seems impossible to implement. Not to mention, expensive.
We’re here to help. It’s a lot easier than you might think.
We’ll get to the goodies in a moment. But when it comes to email marketing, rule number one is clear: the more people you can capture at the top of the funnel, the more will come out at the end.
Before you lose any more sleep, remember that your goal isn’t to convert every single person. Your goal is to convert as many leads as you can with your email marketing campaigns.
Finally, the part you’ve been waiting for:
What’s the Importance of Email Marketing?
If you’re a beginner beginner, you’ve just found gold. Here are all the things you never thought emails could do for you:
- Drive qualified traffic to your website. The people who have opted into your email list are ripe to get their hands on what you’re selling. If they click through a link you’ve added to one of your emails, you’re doing something right.
- Increase your sales. Done properly, email marketing creates a deep connection with subscribers; and you already know that brand preference equals a peak in sales.
- Connect with your audience at the right time. Email marketing software allows you to send emails based on behavioral triggers. This way, everyone from your list sees the right messages when they’re in the prime of interest.
- Provides a sky-high return on investment. eMarketer conducted a study that shows the average email marketing ROI is 122%. Other marketing channels can’t hold a candle to that.
- It’s actually inexpensive. If you can earn $42 from investing a single dollar in a marketing campaign, what’s stopping you from doing it?
Here’s something you may or may not want to hear: you’ll get the knack of email marketing as you go. No one likes taking the longer path anymore, but technology still can’t automate everything. That’s not as bad as it sounds.
A word of motivation: the email marketing software you’ll use will cut down a lot of the work. A lot.
Now that you know what to expect, you’re ready to get started.
First, Start a List
From your groceries to the planning of your day, everything starts with a list. Or at least it should.
As far as websites and emails go, a “list” means something rather different. Your list is the people who are going to be opening and hopefully reading your emails. The question is: How do you start one?
First, you need to know who you’re dealing with. You already sort of do. They’re your customers and your lurking potential buyers.
If your business has already had its fair share of sales and repeat customers, you know what they want and what they’d be happy to get. If you’re still unsure, it pays to dive into some research for when it comes time to develop your lead magnet. Try to find out:
- What your loyal customers love about your product or service.
- What your one-time customers loved about what they bought -- and why they didn’t buy anything else.
- What customers would like you to offer, but you don’t.
Why is that stuff important?
In the following topic, you’ll essentially learn how to bribe your website visitors for their names and emails. A good kind of bribe. In other words, you’ll put a lead magnet together.
To make it interesting, you’ll need to offer something valuable enough to them. Something you know they’ll accept. You should only get those answers from their mouths, otherwise, you’ll run the risk of offering something they’re not that interested in. Talk about a waste of time and investment.
It’s a life lesson right here. If you need to know something about your audience, ask them. Don’t get stuck in the curse of knowledge.
Since you still don’t have an email list you can use to survey or interview subscribers, you can grab that information by adding polls to your website and asking the questions you want to be answered. Tools like HotJar can help you with that.
On to the lead magnet.
Then, Create or Optimize Your Lead Magnets
More often than not, you’ll bump into the following pop-up lead magnet:
It's not bad at all, but it doesn’t deliver. Plus, it sounds like an order. People don’t enjoy orders.
What else have you got? A free ebook that would otherwise cost them $20? A free consultation? A coupon? That’s more like it.
We like to say that lead magnets are AVS. We just made that up, but it’s easy to memorize. It stands for actionable, valuable, and short. The least you can do is offer something of value one single time since you’ll be sending content on a weekly or monthly basis.
Here’s the perfect example of an AVS lead magnet:
There are tons and tons of lead magnet ideas out there. But this one is perfect as an excample because:
- It’s permission-based. See that red area? If they read that text and still provide their email address, they’re consenting to your emails.
- Still, it lets people know they can unsubscribe at any time.
- It’s short, and offers something valuable that people can get their hands on immediately after signing up.
Unsure about what content to create, and for what audience to create it? Don’t be shy to ask about readers' goals and preferences. This can help you write emails that matter to them.
Here’s a perfect example of how to do that:
Got it? But that’s not all.
Pop-ups are cursed in the four corners of the world for a reason. They often wreck the whole browsing experience before visitors have had a chance to check a website out.
Prefer exit-intent pop-ups over traditional, intrusive pop-ups. They only show up when visitors are about to leave your site, which means they’ve had more than enough time to look for what they need.
By the way, lead magnets aren’t the only way to invite visitors to join your email list. Why not use your email list as a call-to-action on social media and on your blog posts? This will ensure you’re capturing as many visitors as you can, from every corner of the web.
Know Your Subscribers by Segment
Not all your subscribers are the same.
Some of them have been customers for a while. Some of them are brand-spanking new customers. Some have bought once and never bought again, while others are “just looking”.
Each of these segments wants something different from you.
In order to personalize and segment your audience, you need to know what they expect from your emails.
We’ll tell you what personalization means in just a moment. But first, you should understand that your audience covers:
- Leads
- Customers
- Inactive subscribers
- Raving Fans
Your leads have gone through your lead magnet and are part of your email list. They’re receiving your emails, and your goal is to nurture them with great email content until they’re ready to buy.
Your customers have already bought from you, so they need special treatment. They need to receive special discounts, earn a chance to participate in loyalty programs and get rewards every now and again.
Your raving fans are worth their weight in gold. They’re your repeat customers and the people who are the most engaged with your emails. They need special offers, discounts, and incentives created just for them (make that clear!). That’s the least you can do as a “thank you” for their continuous support.
Your inactive subscribers need a little push. Don’t take it personal. Most times, they’re too busy to even look at their emails. That’s what winback emails are for: to give them another chance to join the squad, or let them go if they want to.
Take a look at this unsubscribe slash winback email from Framebridge:
See? No pressure at all.
Pick an Email Marketing Software
An email marketing software will be your right-hand assistant. Without it, none of what we’re talking about here would be possible.
For beginners, an email service must be two things: easy to use, and simple to understand.
Prefer software that offers 24/7 support from real team members, because you’ll have a lot of questions. That’s an affirmation. There’s nothing worse than sleeping with nagging doubts gone unanswered.
Plus, you’ll be lucky to have some time to get used to them without paying a dime. For instance, Constant Contact optimizes its offer with a one-month trial. An entire month! Mailchimp is just one of the many that offer a free plan up to 2,000 subscribers. If you’re a complete beginner, you’ll have a lot less than that.
Here are some software for you to compare:
Want unfiltered opinions? Go here to learn how to make the right choice.
Personalize the Hell Out of Those Emails
Once your list starts to grow, you’ll have to do more than just send emails.
By the way, note that “growth” is subjective here. Earning 100 subscribers is considered growth, and so is earning 2 subscribers.
If you want to make sure your emails are opened, read, and clicked through, personalizing them is the way to go. How can you do that?
There’s no better way of personalizing emails than to segment your list. Don’t worry about learning how to do it just yet -- the email marketing software you choose will automate most of the process.
Your job is to create content that feels personal. You know, content that makes leads feel like they’re not just someone else on your list. Here are a few tips:
Send behavioral emails. Include emails that are triggered based on a subscriber’s activity. Have they abandoned their cart? Boom, reminder email. It’s their birthday? Email (with a little gift inside). Have they earned a badge? Congratulatory email!
Again, don't worry. All you have to do is create the content -- the software will help do the rest ;).
On to the examples. Nothing says “aw, shucks” more than someone who remembers important dates. If your significant other won’t remember your anniversary, Naadam has got you covered:
Grammarly here incentivizes users by wrapping up their weekly writing progress. Needless to say, every email is different for every user.
Call them by their name. Open your inbox right now to see your name pop up multiple times. Doesn’t that look good? Match someone’s most personal aspect (their name) to an outstanding email, and they can’t help but listen. That’s why you should always refer to your audience by their first names.
Reach out at the right time. An email marketing software will let you view the date and time when your emails were opened. You’ve probably seen posts that dictate the right times to send emails, but the truth is, it all depends on your audience, time zone, and seasonality.
A Few Best Practices to Get You Going
According to Mailchimp, you shouldn’t use more than 9 words and 60 characters on your subject lines. Keep them short, sweet, and sexy, like in the following examples:
“Life gets crazy. So I saved this for you.” -- CoSchedule
They saved something for me? What could that be? Let me check, real quick.
Your shower is out of order -- Beardbrand
No, it’s not!… Is it?
Use large headings and content hierarchy in your copy. It’s great for both skimmers and the visually impaired.
Make your emails readable. Don’t write huge chunks of text. Use lots of white space, and make your calls-to-action visible. Like this:
That last line, by the way…
It hurts, but why not give people the chance to unsubscribe forever if they want to? It shows character.
Match email design with your brand. The good news: You’ll have a lot of custom templates to choose from. The bad news: with so many personalization tools available, it’s easy to have way too much fun with them.
Matching your emails to your branding is essential. Always make sure to personalize emails with your logo and branding.
That darned owl. It’s Duolingo in all its splendor.
Finally, always check your email analytics. Remember we said you’d get the hang of it as you go? That’s what this part is all about.
You’ll only know what’s going well once you look at the numbers. The software you use will give you precious analytics to work with, including open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates.
Email Marketing is About One Thing, and One Thing Only…
And that thing is earning new customers.
You’ll connect with and nurture them later, but first, you’ve got to earn them. There’s a process to that, which involves everything you read above. All you’re doing is starting a bond, the same way you do when meeting someone new.
Although not everyone will buy your product, service, or course, the goal is to pack the top of the funnel so more people will come out of it.
Still wonder whether email marketing is worth it? Think of it this way: is earning new customers worth it to you? Then the answer is yes.