Email Marketing – Beginners Guide To Email Marketing

Everyone has heard it and everyone has had at least a dozen marketing emails sent to them, but how do they do it? How is email marketing done and how can you start email marketing as well. In this guide, we will teach you what you need to get started with your email marketing, how to do email marketing, and most importantly how to succeed in email marketing.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing in short means sending promotional messages to people in mass quantities. It typically generates sales or leads and it may contain advertising.

Why is email marketing important?

Why is email marketing important and more likely now than it was before? Simply put email marketing is your best way to connect with your readers, customers, or followers. No kind of algorithm change will affect them meaning you will never lose them as long as the user doesn’t stop reading their email for whatever reason or they don’t unsubscribe from your list.

Another important factor is that email marketing is one of the most profitable ways to market. Just in 2015, it was reported that every one dollar that was spent on email marketing brought in 38 dollars. That’s a huge 38x ROI.

How does email marketing work?

Email marketing in short works in three steps:

1. Collect users emails and get their permissions for marketing
2. Send your sales/marketing email to the user
3. User reads your email and clicks back to your site

The Benefits of Email Marketing

When thinking about email marketing most people might think about spamming or just discount codes but in all reality, it’s so much more. Email marketing has huge benefits and it still is one of the most effective ways for the marketer to reach their target audience.

Brand awareness

The first and probably the easiest benefit to understand is of course brand awareness. Unless people know about your brand, how can they find it, ask for it or buy it? By creating a strong following through email marketing it’s easy to showcase your brand and share the latest news regarding your company and brand.

Customer loyalty

For some, it might be news, but email marketing still is one of the leading ways to convert a user to a paying customer. On top of this, it can turn your basic customers into loyal customers, by letting you send highly targeted emails to customers who often shop at your store, buy your products or otherwise connect with your company, brand, blog, or even store a lot. Creating customer loyalty is as important as it has ever been and those who know it are using and will use emails to generate it more.

Should I buy email lists?

The simple answer to this is no. You should never buy email lists for a few reasons:

• You don’t know what or what kind of emails it contains
• You are not allowed to send emails to users who have not accepted to receive marketing emails from you (GDPR and CCPA)
• Spamming is a crime, so when you buy a list of users who have not explicitly given you permission to contact them through email to sell or market products or your services to them, you might be breaking the law.

Considering all this, we highly suggest that you never buy email lists, despite how much you might be tempted.

Best tools for email marketing

Now before you get started with email marketing you will probably need an email marketing tool, if you haven’t got one yet. For that, we recommend either choosing AWeber, GetResponse, or Moosend. All of these tools are great for anyone starting out their email marketing journey.

How to get started with email marketing?

Now for the important part meaning how to get started with email marketing. As mentioned earlier the first thing you need (or at least what we recommend) is to get a good email marketing SaaS like AWeber, GetResponse, or Moosend.

Set up your account and create your email list. After creating your email list you will need to start capturing the emails. To do this you are usually prompted to create a form where you can collect the emails.

Creating your first email

What is a good email? What should my first email be about? All great questions when thinking of creating your first email. Usually, the first email the user will receive from you is the “Welcome email” considering this you should create an email that gives a lot of value.

Your first email could be a discount code (if you are running an eCommerce store) or even simply an email about your most loved blog posts if you are running a blog.

Most importantly the welcome email should always be about the user and making sure that they are noticed and that they are receiving exactly what they are expecting when they joined your email list.

How to collect more emails?

To collect more emails you first need to create an email list. One easy way to do this is with SaaS like GetResponse, Aweber, or Moosend. After setting your email list you can create different ways to capture and collect emails from users who want to receive your newsletter, discount codes, or just emails regarding your company or brand.

One way to collect these emails is to use tools like Hello Bar that will help you create full-page captures, PopUp windows, or just a simple top or bottom bar that shows an input field and a small CTA which users can then add their email to signup to receive your emails.

Decide your email marketing goal

Something a lot of email marketers, entrepreneurs, affiliate marketers, and others tend to forget when creating their first email marketing list and email is to define their email marketing goal. So remember to ask yourself, “What is my goal? What am I trying to achieve when I send these emails?”. This is important to ensure you will build an email that answers this and it will also help users do what you want them to do.

For example, the goal of your email could be to sell product X. To sell this you need to have a picture/video of the product you’re selling, a compelling story or explanation of why the user needs it, clear pricing, and a nice Call To Action button to ensure the user clicks it and instantly gets to buy it after clicking the product.

Compare this to a general email where you tell a product X is available for purchase, which one would you guess would convert better in the end?

Best practices to succeed in your email marketing

1. Never buy email lists
   • Just don’t OK. Nothing good comes out of this for you or the people you are trying to reach. Not forgetting the fact that in most cases it will be illegal to send unsolicited emails to the owners of the emails you bought.
2. Use double opt-in
   • This is to to ensure the lead quality and to ensure no one is spamming useless emails to your list.
3. Segment your lists
   • Segmentation helps you to send the right kind of content to the right people.
4. Optimize your emails for mobile
   • Temember that a lot of users use their phones or tablets to read their emails as well.
5. Create beautiful emails
   • Design matters and beautiful emails are joy to read.
6. Clean your email lists from spammy emails
   • This ensures you’re not trying to send them to emails that don’t work and you pay less in the long run for your email service provider.
7. A/B testing is your friend
   • By testing what design works, you can be sure to increase your click-through rates and conversions.
8. Automate the boring stuff
   • Automation helps you send welcome emails and other important emails at the right time to the right people. Meaning you save time, effort, and most importantly money.

Provide value

In the end, email marketing is not hard if it’s done right and you follow the rules and regulations. The most important thing we want you to grab from this blog post is that to actually see some results, you need to provide value through your emails. Users, readers, and customers aren’t going to stick around unless you can provide value to them and the best way to do this is to:

1. Send them content that interestes them. Content is king in emails
2. Make unsubscribing as easy as it is to join your list
3. A/B test your design

After all, who would want to join an email list, they can never get out of.