Email Marketing For Beginners
Email marketing. Sounds boring, right? Who uses this channel anymore? Well, you’ll be amazed to see how much potential email marketing holds to this day. It’s still the most effective marketing channel for any business.
In this post, we will go through the ins and outs of email marketing and how you can improve your business’s visibility and conversion rate. Stay tuned to the end of the post to learn what you thought was impossible.
What is Email Marketing?
In simple words, email marketing is the process of sending emails to potential buyers and convince them to make the purchase. However, you wouldn’t buy anything from one random email on your spam folder, would you?
The same goes for your audience. There is more to email marketing than what meets the eye. It’s the most successful digital marketing strategy for a reason. Before you start sending emails, you need to identify your target customers and build your email list. You need to dedicate a lot of time to fine-tune your emails to get the most out of your marketing campaign.
Email marketing even beats social media and all other channels of communication. Half of the world’s population might be using social media every day, but more people are using emails for communication. And the number is likely to increase in the upcoming years.
Another big reason why email marketing is more effective is that you don’t have to constantly fight against algorithm changes, which is a common occurrence for Google and social media platforms.
The sad reality is, the majority of today’s marketers don’t understand how to utilize email marketing to their benefit. You find a lot of unread emails in your inbox for this sole reason. And we don’t want you to end up in someone else’s inbox as well.
Why Email Marketing is So Important
You might be thinking why would someone click on the emails you send out to promote your or someone else’s business. Well, there are plenty of reasons why. Let’s take a look at a few of them.
Email is the Biggest Communication Channel
If you’re a working individual, whether a businessman or an employee at some corporation, how often do you check your emails? Every day, right? If not, every other day is the minimum. And that’s why email remains the largest channel for communication. It’s bigger than any social media you can imagine.
By 2023, emails are supposed to see a whopping 4.3 billion user base! And experts say that almost all of them check emails every single day!
You Have Your Own Target Audience
Instead of shooting in the dark with a minimal sense of direction, you get your own email list when doing email marketing. You know for a fact that these people are interested in your product or service. How you target your audience is very different in email marketing when compared to social media.
In social campaigns, you can only select a demographic that you ‘think’ will be the likely customers. But with email marketing, you can narrow down your audience by a fair margin. And so, your conversion rate goes higher automatically.
It’s Low Cost
If you can tackle the manual labor, email marketing doesn’t cost anything! It’s a benefit you won’t find in any other marketing channel. If you don’t the hassle, you just need to pay a monthly subscription for sending bulk emails automatically.
By opting for professional software like the GetResponse or MailerLite, you get to choose your monthly plan. You need your email list and a strategy to address the audience with these tools. You get unlimited sending, autoresponders, landing pages, integration with Facebook ads, personalize, etc. features. And all of this will cost you around $10-$15 a month for 1,000 subscribers!
You Get Absolute Control
With email marketing, your imagination is the only limit. You have superior control over what you want to do with your emails and how you want to approach the campaign. You have the freedom to select the assets like web forms or landing pages.
You can also personalize the emails for individual targets to give them a sense of priority. You are free from all community guidelines or algorithm restrictions and get to express your mind.
It’s an Owned Media
When it comes to digital marketing, you get three media channels. They are defined as paid, owned, and earned. Paid media includes paid promotions on Facebook, Instagram, Google, etc. Earned media is when other channels talk about your business for the efforts you made.
Email marketing comes into the middle, as an owned media. It means you have absolute control over your marketing strategy, just like we said earlier. With paid media, you need to stick to the ads guideline and shape your content according to the terms. The same with earned media, you don’t have control over what other media is saying about you.
So, why don’t you utilize the potential email marketing offers to you?
It’s Very Easy to Use
You don’t necessarily need a professional marketer to run your email marketing campaigns. You can do it yourself. All you have to do is select your template, put in the text you want to send, and add your email list to send automatic emails. It’s one of the easiest things you can do to see dramatic changes in your business’s ROI (Return on Investment).
Emails Convert Like Nothing Else
‘Conversion’ is a common term used in marketing, especially in digital marketing. Believe it or not, B2C (business to customer) email marketing boasts an ROI of 4200%! That’s higher than all the other channels combined!
Also, 21% of the emails you sent will be opened within the first hour! That’s a solid 21% of your audience very interested in your product or service!
The bottom line is, email marketing is unlike any other marketing strategy. If you do it right, you can expect extraordinary outcomes from your campaigns. You build trust by nurturing leads in a very personalized way. And in return, it builds credibility for your business.
How to Make Money with Email Marketing
If you don’t own a business, you may think that email marketing is not for you. But did you know that you can make money from this marketing strategy alone? You can sell your products or do affiliate marketing through emails as well. The principle of email marketing remains the same no matter what your ultimate goal is.
Let us look at a few different ways you can make money from utilizing this evergreen channel.
Sell Your Products or Services
If you sell products either online or offline, why not use emails? Just because it’s known as a digital marketing strategy doesn’t make it exclusive for large businesses. All you need is an email list to start with.
One of the main benefits of using email marketing over other strategies is the fact that you can personalize the message. When you run paid ads on Facebook or Google, you write the copy for a mass audience. You have to find a common ground where all of the people’s interests intersect. Email marketing is free from that shackle.
You can address your audience by their first, last, or even full name if you want. You can select when to send the email, what the subject should be, what assets you want to put, and other customizations. You can draw a very unique picture of your product or service with it which is otherwise impossible.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting a third-party (merchant) product in exchange for a commission. Affiliate marketing is only feasible when you can convert the potential customer to a confirmed one. And email marketing can help you beyond your imagination.
For example, with the Amazon Associates program, you get a 24-hour window starting from the moment your link generates a click. If the lead (the potential customer) doesn’t buy that product or any other product from Amazon within 24 hours, that’s a lost sale.
So, why not send him or her a personalized email within that 24 hours? There is always the slim chance that the prospective customer forgot to get back on Amazon and click the buy now button. You are using the email as a reminder.
Apart from the generated clicks, you can send out bulk emails to your email list. You can add some context and add an affiliate link to promote the product. If you’re dealing with a small audience, chances are it won’t cost you anything. Why would you want to leave that slim chance up to fate?
Redirecting to Landing Pages or Product Pages
It’s another area where email marketing has immense potential. If you sell a service or want to promote the service as an affiliate, you can simply include the link to redirect the audience to that page. And if you have your own website, it’s a surefire way to increase your traffic to generate more AdSense!
The Classic Use of Psychology
You can improve the likelihood of conversion in all of the aforementioned areas by simply using a few power words. Humans have an inherent attraction for things that are hard to get. You can use this principle to market your product as ‘limited edition’ or ‘stock limited’. These are two very powerful terms to use in your email marketing strategy to upsell the product.
But don’t go out of your way to pretend. Fake strategies may show immediate results, only to discredit your ethics and credibility. So, use power words that actually resonate with your business. Only use a limited stock when you really have limited stock.
How to Get Started with Email Marketing
This is the fun part. You get to experience the journey of becoming a successful email marketer. There are quite a few steps from narrowing down your email list to converting the lead. And we will go through each of them.
Build an Email List First
Before you go through any of the email marketing stuff, you need to identify your audience. It’s known as building a list. Remember, no matter how much you spend on campaigns, it won’t bring any revenue if the audience is wrong.
Another huge reason to get your list ready is the cost associated with it. According to statistics, you need to spend five times more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. An email list keeps your costs down in the long run.
Your social media page can be the perfect starting place to build the list. All you need to do is run a CTA (call to action) ad and encourage people to sign up. You can utilize the same method if you’re into writing blogs or have your own blog website.
The ad may reach a lot of people, but only the interested ones will go through the process of signing up. Those are your prospective leads.
To make the ads or website pop-ups even more engaging, you can use what is known as reverse psychology. For example, if your business revolves around skincare products, your CTA should include two different buttons. One will say ‘No, I don’t want better skin’ while the other one will be ‘Yes! I’d love beautiful skin’. Which one do you think will attract more clicks?
Email marketing is fun and lets you be creative when you know about different user behaviors.
Growing the List
When you get a few sign-ups, you know that your method is working. Now, it’s time to grow the list. And to that, you need a lead magnet. A lead magnet can be anything you want. You need to offer something to your mass audience for free and collect their email address in return.
If we use the same example of skincare products, your lead magnet can be a coupon for their first purchase. You will guarantee the reader that they will get an X% discount on their first purchase if they sign up now!
One Time Email Broadcasts vs Automation
Many rookie marketers go wrong while deciding on broadcast emails and autoresponders. What you have to keep in mind is that both have their merits and demerits. Both of them are equally important for any email marketing campaign. All you need to do is use the right one at the right time.
Broadcast Emails
Also known as bulk or mass emails, broadcast emails mean you send the same email to your audience. You have some flexibility in terms of personalization like adding their name and customizing who gets the emails and who doesn’t, but your selected audience will get the same email at the same time.
You can set a date and a time to roll the emails out. Broadcast emails work great when you’re trying to send a message. A new discount offer, a stock clearance sale, an announcement, etc. are some areas where broadcast emails can generate amazing results.
Autoresponder Emails
Autoresponder emails are automated, just like broadcast. But it serves a different purpose. Instead of the same email to many people, it’s a series of emails that you send to specific leads based on their actions.
For example, you can schedule a welcome email when someone subscribes to your newsletter. When the same lead adds a product to their cart or claims a lead magnet, you can schedule another follow-up email to nurture the lead.
Autoresponders work progressively and they are the best when it comes to conversion. They take the recipients through a journey of persuasion and make sure that the customers are happy about their decision.
Autoresponders are a prime choice for specialized campaigns like drip campaigns, follow-up emails, automated conversion workflows, etc.
If you think that’s a lot of work, don’t worry because there are very helpful tools out there. You just configure them once and let them do their job.
Let’s take a look at such tools briefly.
Selecting the Right Email Marketing Service
When your email list is short, you can get away with manual emails. It means that you personally send your message to each of your leads. But it can become hectic very soon. And that’s why you need a dedicated email marketing service.
The internet is swarming with such services, both free and paid. Free tools are a great way to get the feel of how professional email marketing feels like. But you are pretty limited in terms of features and the number of emails you can send in a month.
Let’s take a look at MailerLite and ConvertKit, a free option and a paid option respectively.
MailerLite
MailerLite is a very popular free email marketing tool that you can use at the beginning of your journey. It’s a great platform to start when you have less than 1,000 subscribers. You get an opportunity to send 12,000 emails every month for absolutely free.
MailerLite is a drag and drop tool that makes it very easy to use for beginners. You get to choose your template and choose your assets in the newsletter. Then you can drag and drop the asset on the newsletter and get a real-time preview.
You can customize it with different design blocks, add buttons, add your logo, and so on. You can also connect your e-commerce website if you have one to seamlessly create emails for each of your products.
When it’s time to send the email, you can send it to all members on your list or categorize them by groups. MailerLite allows you to create custom recipients as well by setting rules and adding filters to your list.
Another great feature is the integration of social media posts. You can directly insert your social media content in your newsletter to boost your marketing potentials.
Sending personalized emails is quite popular among successful marketers. And you can do it easily with MailerLite by including {$name} in your email. For example, ‘Hey {$John}, It’s your lucky day!’.
Believe it or not, these are all part of the free version of MailerLite. You can supercharge your marketing by opting for the paid plans.
The pricing mainly changes with the number of subscribers. Even the $10/month package allows unlimited emails a month. But your subscriber count must be under 1,000.
You can get MailerLite for up to 10,000 subscribers and you have to pay $50 every month for unlimited emails.
Sign up here for MailertLite as the best email service available
ConvertKit
We know we’ve told you that ConvertKit is a paid subscription service, but you’ll be glad to know that it has a free version as well for up to 1,000 subscribers. But for your small needs, we recommend that you stick to MailerLite, it’s an overall better option when you are not paying anything.
On the other hand, the paid packages by ConvertKit are the best email marketing tool you can invest in. You get to connect unlimited landing pages and forms in your emails, send one-time email broadcasts, migrate from another tool for absolutely free, engage automated funnels and sequences, etc. These are the feature for the $29/month package!
And when you move up the ladder even higher and opt for the $59/month package, you truly unleash the beast. Along with all of the features from the previous package, you get to add a custom audience from Facebook, use a newsletter referral system to grow your list, subscriber scoring, and access to advanced analytics.
CovertKit is generous enough to offer two free courses on building and launching an online business as well.
Most importantly, all of the features we talked about in MailerLite are also present in the CovertKit paid tool.
Sign up here for ConvertKits trial.
Tips for Successful Email Marketing
For your marketing campaigns to be successful, you need to follow a few simple tips that we are going to share right now.
Segment Your Audience
You may come across many email marketing guides on the internet and all of them will tell you to build a list. But very few of them will tell you to break your list into segments. What you need to understand is that your entire list didn’t sign up for the same purpose. They are different people who belong to different demographics.
And to effectively reach each of them, you need segmentation. You can do it by age, preference, purchase habits, or any other filter you think is appropriate. It allows you to create more customized content for the right audience.
Don’t End Up in the Spam Folder
If you navigate to your email inbox, you will find numerous emails in the spam folder. These are emails that you didn’t sign up for. You may have visited one of the websites or purchased a product a long time ago. But they decided to send mails to you anyway. The result? They’re in your spam inbox.
So, don’t send emails to people who don’t sign up. Explicitly ask your leads whether they want to opt for the subscription or not. Using a good email marketing tool like ConvertKit is an effective way to get a good start. And don’t use too much salesy language. Excessive use of words like ‘offer’, ‘Buy now’, ‘clearance’, etc. get picked up by the email domain and automatically marked as spam.
Update the List from Time to Time
You need to differentiate between a cold lead and a dead lead. There’s no reason to keep dead leads on your list. You need to get on the analytics and identify them first. But before you delete them permanently, send one last email with an intriguing title such as ‘Are You Bored of Us?’ to see if they respond. If they don’t, get rid of them.
Focus on Your Timing
You need to figure out what’s the most appropriate time to send an email. If your audience receives your message at 3 AM in the morning, there’s very little chance that they will check it out.
It’s especially true if you operate globally. You need to make use of the segmentation feature for your audience by active hours. It will prevent you from sending emails at the wrong time.
Give the Subject Line Enough Thought
Instead of spending hours on the template and the assets, spend the time on the subject line. The subject of the email you send can bring in 100% more traffic alone! You can make clever use of numbers and power words on the subject to grab the attention of your audience.
Write in 2nd Person
Instead of writing for the mass audience, write your newsletter for one person only. Use ‘You’ instead of ‘they’ or ‘people’. It gives your entire content a conversational tone and the reader feels more engaged with you and your business.
Also, don’t forget to add some humor to your text. Plain text will bore your audience in no time. Get out of your comfort zone from time to time and add a punch line here and there. A good example would be ‘Hey! You’re not responding to my emails. Should I call 911?’
Optimize the Assets for Mobile
If you’re adding pictures, forms, or landing pages in your email, don’t forget to optimize them for mobile devices! Because more than half of your audience is more likely to open the email from their smartphone. And if they find a picture that had shrunken or got cut-out, it won’t leave a very good impression, would it?
Monitor the Results
One of the perks of getting a paid email marketing tool is analytics. You need insights for each of your campaigns to see what you did right and what you did wrong. You need to improve your campaign constantly to get the most out of email marketing.
Information like deliverability, open rate, and click-through rate can tell a lot about your campaign. If you get a good open rate but not nearly as good click-through, it means you’re doing something wrong in terms of content. Switch it up for your next batch and see if things change.
Final Words
The concept of email marketing is far greater than the term ‘email marketing’ can conceal. It’s more than sending emails to see if people are interested in your products. It can be the most powerful tool for you to boost your business when done right. And now you know how.