What Is Email Marketing? A 101 Guide
Email marketing is a segment of online marketing that is a lot like direct mail of the past. Marketers send letters to a group of people in the hope of generating sales. Of course, the difference between email marketing and direct mail marketing is the speed. With the former, you only need to click on a button to send a message to thousands of people. Compare this to direct mail marketing which goes through snail mail.
But aside from the speed of delivery, there is little difference between the two. Your success will largely depend on how much your recipients trust you, and if they want to hear from you.
What is email campaigning and what is it all about? It’s all about building relationships with the people on your mailing list. The worst email marketers spam people with different messages that sound the same, along with the lines of “Get this product for only £___”. Of course, this kind of message often ends up in the recycle bin and forces people to unsubscribe from the erring marketer. So, how should you do email based marketing? Read below to know.
Build your reputation online. You can do this, by providing valuable content on your website and different places on the Internet, like forums. Help people. If people see that you like to help, they will trust you and will learn to expect your emails.
The 5-to-1 ratio. For every hard-sell, buy-this message, there have to be five valuable emails you send before that. By “valuable,” we mean something that is packed with information that your subscribers will find useful. Don’t know what message to send? You can start with problems. What are the issues your subscribers are facing that you can help?
Vet what you sell. This ties to your reputation. Whatever you promote, it has to be something that you have used yourself and hence, for which you can vouch.
Automate. The beauty of email marketing is that you don’t need to send emails individually. You can use software like Aweber, Mail Chimp, GetResponse, etc to automatically send messages to your subscribers.
Make it personal. The worst thing that any email marketer can do is to sound cold and impersonal in their emails. Remember that email marketing is all about building relationships. You can’t build one if you don’t even sound like a real person in your emails.
Hire a professional copywriter. Email marketers are only as good as their email subject. If it’s not compelling enough, people are not going to open the email. If you’re not confident about your writing skills, make sure to hire a professional.
The items mentioned above are general tips for when you are already in the thick of doing things. If you want to get started in email marketing, here are the specific steps you should take.
- Build a website
- Subscribe to an email marketing service
- Integrate an email capture form on your website
- Give an incentive for people to enter their email address
- Create a welcome message
- Design an engaging newsletter
- Create at least ten different emails to be sent as follow up messages
If the steps for getting started in email marketing sounds easy enough, it is. However, you might get challenged in creating an incentive. There are only three types of bait that will work: Free information, freebies, and discounts. What you offer to your website visitors will largely depend on the kind of site you have. Be clear on your email campaign strategy.
If your website is there to market your restaurant, you can offer coupons for meals or free dessert. On the other hand, if you are selling yoga items, you might want to provide a meditation MP3. Be creative but don’t overthink it. If the first item you offer doesn’t work, then offer another, and then another, until you find one that works.
Another challenge that you will encounter in email marketing is getting traffic to your email capture form. The best way to solve this is by generating traffic to your website. Do SEO, so it gets found on the search engines. Create viral-worthy content and incorporate the link to your webpage. Do Youtube marketing and do the same – link to the webpage with your email form.
Aside from generating traffic to your website, you could also rent the email list of more experienced marketers. You can easily find them on Internet Marketing forums like the WarriorForum. With leasing, you pay the owner of the email list to email your message. However, be careful what you are purchasing and be sure that if you opt for this route, that the list contains names of those who’ve agreed to be on it.
Now that you know what email marketing is and how you should do it it’s time to get to work. In the beginning, it’s essential for you to spend at least 80% of your time promoting your website. Do not be too concerned about the design of your site and the email capture form – there are design professionals who do that for you.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help you, click on the button below, fill out the simple form and one of the team will be in touch within 2 working days.
