Every email you send to a prospective or current customer can be considered email marketing. The goal with email marketing is mostly to develop a relationship with your customers. If you are trying to figure out how to start, you can start by finding out what key industry players in your industry are doing for their email marketing strategy, get on their email list and study what they’re creating. You can then use that information to develop your own marketing strategy.
Understanding the key elements of email marketing will help you craft an effective strategy.
TARGET
The first element you need to know and understand is your target. These are the people you wish to directly market to with your email campaign. In order for your targets to begin receiving your emails they will need to become subscribers. Subscribers are those who have opted in to receive your email communications. This can be done through a web form on your website, manually from a trade show signup list, or perhaps they’ve bought a product from you in the past. All of these subscribers form what’s known as your list.
SEGEMENTATION
Another key element of email marketing is segmentation. This means categorizing your subscribers into different lists, groups, or subgroups. For example, you can segment your list by location, products they purchased, customers who’ve purchased in the last 30 days, customers who have bought over $100, or even have a group of prospects that have not yet bought anything or creating a group of just customers.
OPEN RATE AND CLICK THROUGH RATE
Another important element is your open rate and your click-through rate. Your open rate is how many people opened your email and the click-through rate is how many people clicked on the link that you included in your email. You look at these main metrics when determining the success of your email campaigns.
You can set up a flow or automated email series so that after a person subscribes, they are automatically entered into the flow. An example is a welcome email series or flow. After a person subscribes and is added to your list, they’re automatically entered into the welcome email series or flow that you pre-set. Email number one would say something like thanks for joining. Email number two would be more of a general follow-up with a subject like commonly asked questions. And email number three, this could be the final email before you enter them into your general newsletter mailings. You can share some testimonials and I might ask if they have any questions.
Go through each element discussed as you set up your own email campaign and begin testing the various elements to see which works best with your intended audience.
DETERMINE THE NATURE OF YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
Your first step to adding email marketing is to determine the nature of your email campaigns. You can decide to focus on newsletters and include recent company blog posts, upcoming events, new products or unique content catered to your audience. This will help you drive brand awareness and keep your customers and prospective customers up-to-date on what is going on with your business.
If you are a solopreneur and especially a newbie, it’s always good to start simple and gradually increase the complexity as you learn the tools, test your campaigns and become more familiar with email marketing.
RESOURCES
Another important step will be allocating the proper resources to your campaigns. You have to start adding email marketing tasks to your calendar to ensure that you allocate enough time per day, week or month to handle the new workload.
FIND AN EMAIL SERVICE PROVIDER
Once you have determined the nature of your campaigns and allocated your resources, you will need to find an email service provider (ESP). This is because you can’t send out emails to customers or prospects without the use of one. There are two main things to consider when choosing a provider, compliance and features. Due to strict spam and privacy laws, be sure to find a provider that is in compliance and most large ESPs like MailChimp are. Sending from your personal email account is not in compliance.
As for features, it’s better to find an ESP that you can easily integrate with your online store and also have the ability automate your email marketing. This will make it easy for you to scale your email efforts. You can always switch providers as your needs grow, but it’s even better to choose a provider who’ll grow along with your business’s needs and email list.
If you’ll be sending out a lot of emails, you might want to choose a provider with adequate pricing so that you aren’t charged every time you send out an email. If you are a beginner, I recommend starting with MailChimp or Drip.
Adding email into your existing marketing efforts can be seamless while increasing your brand’s awareness, driving traffic to your website and boosting your bottom line.
thewebpreneur 