Email marketing – a beginner’s guide

Do you use email marketing? If you don’t and don’t know the first thing about building your ‘list’ or planning a campaign, this is your beginner’s guide to the basics of email marketing and how email marketing can support your business.

Email marketing vs social media

As consumers, we receive many marketing emails and even though we don’t read them all, we see the subject headings in our inbox before we scroll on by. The emails we’re genuinely interested in, we open and read.

You may already be posting to social media, but as little as 9% of your followers may see your posts. While we are constantly at the mercy of the social media algorithms, email marketing is not subject to the same game of chance, but lands directly in your subscribers’ inboxes.

What can I achieve with email marketing?

If you’re not sure why you might need email marketing here are some simple campaign goals that could benefit your business:

• Welcoming customers and what you do to help them 
• Building awareness around a new product or service/announcing a new product or service 
• Generating leads by offering a free download, useful advice in a blog or directing to a custom landing page 
• Nurturing leads with offers, discounts or extras 
• Generating traffic to your website via a blog article, discount or free trial or offer 
• Increasing sales revenue with reminders, links to your website, promotions and buy now offers

Getting started with email marketing

It’s easy to get started with your email marketing. You just need to follow a few simple steps to get up and running. Here’s what to do and what to consider.

Start building your list

The quality of your subscriber list is a factor in your success with email marketing. A solid ‘opt-in’ function will ensure your subscribers are bought into your brand and ready to receive your emails. Ask visitors to your website to subscribe by entering their name and email address on your website. Ask your followers to subscribe. And have an opt-in option for marketing on your communications with new customers.

Collate your email list using Excel or an email marketing tool and look at segmenting it by audience / customer type, or preference, so that you can create variations of your campaigns as appropriate.

Choose your email marketing platform

Do some research on the email marketing tools available and pick the one best suited to your purpose. MailChimp and HubSpot are examples of popular email marketing tools

Many email marketing tools are free to use but then charge you per contact, so it’s a good idea to keep on top of managing your subscriber lists, ensuring you promptly remove those who choose to unsubscribe.

Put your email ‘workflow’ together

To put your workflow together you will first need to decide what the goal is. Do you want to educate your customers by sending them a newsletter about new products that prompts them to buy? Do you want to encourage signups to a free trial? Do you want to convert prospects to book a call with you?

Think through the purpose of your email campaign so you have a clear goal and can plan the email content accordingly.

If there are enrolment criteria, you’ll need to set this up. For example, the email could be just for those who have downloaded an ebook or asked about a certain product.

If any assets are required for the workflow, for example a landing page you want recipients to click on, or blog post your want them to read, ensure these are in place.

Create your emails and set any timings on your email workflow. Perhaps you want to deliver a series of emails over a few days or weeks. Set the appropriate timings and be careful not to overload your subscribers.

Consider the time of day you want your messages to hit those inboxes.

Test and tweak

Always run a test prior to activating your email workflow, to check all works as it should. Keep a close eye on it and tweak as you need to, and on an ongoing basis once live.

Write the email content

Write to your subscribers’ problems and how you can solve them. Ensure your language is simple, clear, direct and in your brand voice.

You’ll need an enticing subject line to tempt recipients to open and read, and a clear call to action of what you want them to do.

Remember your messaging needs to be targeted, with every word working to achieve the goal you want to achieve with your email marketing.

Consider A/B testing subject lines and different wording with different groups to see what performs better. Let the results of testing guide you.

Proofread your emails and subject lines to ensure they are error-free and check links work.

Hit send!

No deep breath required if you’ve followed all the steps and checked your content. Step back and wait for the results!

Need help with your email marketing? Speak to our digital experts.

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