E-mail advertising has been around for a very long time, and for good reason. It’s the most direct and effective way to communicate with your prospects, nurture them and turn them into customers, saving time and efficiency. If you’re new to email marketing, or just starting out, you need to master the basics before you can begin to see the benefits. Here’s a guide to getting started with email marketing.
First of all, what is email marketing?
Email marketing is a highly effective digital marketing strategy that involves sending emails to prospects and customers in bulk or in a targeted manner. Email marketing helps to communicate and convert prospects into customers. It also helps to turn one-time buyers into loyal, repeat customers.
There are many reasons why you should do email marketing regardless of your online business:
Email is still the primary communication channel. Even with the development of alternative means of communication, almost all internet users and prospects regularly use and consult their email address.
You have a backup of your contacts. While having your prospects on various social networks or forums, with email addresses, you can always keep a list.
Email marketing is known to be the best converting communication medium. This is surely due to their many possibilities that allow to convert prospects.
Before doing email marketing effectively, you have several steps to put in place and an email tool to choose to use for this purpose.
To start, you must choose an email marketing service
In order to be able to send marketing emails, you obviously need to collect the email addresses of your prospects but above all you need to get their consent to receive your different messages.
People who do not agree to be in your mailing list are not the ones who buy from you anyway. Sending them anything by email would be a total waste of time and money.
What you need to get off to a good start is first a signup form and then an email marketing tool.
To create a registration form to put on your site, you have the online tool OptinMonster. It allows you to create dynamic and attractive forms. You can even integrate it into your WordPress site with a plug-in.
Regarding online email marketing services, you have a lot of choices: Sendinblue, Getresponse, Aweber, etc…
Some of them include the functionality to create a registration form and a contact form.
In addition, you can start with free or low-cost plans to try out the tool before investing a lot of money.
With this base, you can start sending marketing emails to your first prospects or customers.
Expand your mailing list
What most people do, and what you will probably do to build a mailing list, is put a sign-up form on your website and hope that people sign up. Unfortunately, this strategy has its limitations and will not get you a large mailing list.
To grow your email list, you need to attract people with a compelling offer that will get them to sign up on your form.
So you’re going to offer something great and enticing that you give away for free in exchange for an email address. This product should cost you nothing or almost nothing to design.
So most “gifts” to expand your mailing list are in digital format such as PDFs, MP3 audio files or videos that you can create yourself at little or no cost.
It can be absolutely anything you want, as long as it provides value to your visitors for free and is related to your theme or niche.
For example, you can offer:
An ebook,
a white paper,
a webinar,
samples,
tools in PDF format
digital resources,
promotional offers or coupons…
The important thing is that your gift is easily accessible and consumable, in a format that can be used by everyone, relevant to your theme or niche, that it brings added value to the prospect and finally, that it is directly available to him.
Segment your mailing list
Mailing list segmentation is the process of dividing your subscribers/prospects into smaller subgroups based on specific criteria so that you can send them more personalized and relevant emails.
Segmenting your list increases your email open rates, increases your click-through rates, and decreases your unsubscribe rates because you are only sending your emails to the people who are most interested in that content. That’s why email marketers use segmentation to dramatically improve the effectiveness of their email campaigns.
Here are different ways you can segment your email lists by :
New subscribers: send new subscribers a welcome email.
preferences: subscribers who want to know more about blog posts versus those who only want sales notifications.
interests: subscribers who like something in particular can be placed in the same sub-broadcast list.
geographic area: inform subscribers who live in the area of your event that you are organizing.
open rate: reward your most engaged subscribers with a special offer just for them.
inactivity: remind subscribers who haven’t been active for a while of the next step you want them to take.
Cart abandonment: Remind subscribers who have put items in their cart that they have not yet checked out.
Contact forms are an easy way to collect information about your prospects, which can then be used to create your list segmentation and therefore more targeted messages.
How to write your marketing emails
The subject of the email
The subject of your email will determine if your subscriber will open this email or not. For this, you must think of writing a subject that makes them want to open it:
A subject line that piques curiosity: you need to make your subscribers curious enough to open and click, but without being too cryptic, because the subscriber needs to know what you are talking about.
Use a friendly, conversational tone.
Use a writing style that your subscribers use themselves to build proximity.
The content of the email
It is much more effective to write as if you are talking to a specific person, with a personal subject line and a personalized message. To do this, you need to know the different tastes and personalities of your subscribers (thanks to a good segmentation).
In addition, you need to put aside your business hat and address your subscribers as if they were your friends. In this sense, you must address them directly. You must appeal to your subscribers in a personal way so that they have an interest in opening your email.
The content of your email also plays an important role in your open rate. If your subscribers are satisfied with your content, they are more likely to open your emails in the future. They may even look forward to your next emails.
Your email must be unique and bring a real added value to the readers: propose new features, original resources (Ebook, webinar, article or a special offer…).
Also think about adding a dose of humor in your marketing emails. This will have an entertaining effect and will stay in people’s minds. To have a good dose of humor, you obviously need to know a minimum of your subscribers’ tastes. You can also rely on animated GIFs that add a touch of humor. You can easily add them with Gifing.
