Email marketing is one of the most popular methods of marketing products and services to target audiences, and for good reason! Email marketing is incredibly simple to set up and can grow your customer base exponentially. Here's a short guide to help get you started on setting up your own email marketing campaign.
Get an opt-in form and email marketing software for your website
The most important thing you'll need before you start sending emails to anyone is their express permission to send them marketing emails. While you can technically buy email lists from sites online, this is never a good idea. People who don't specifically opt-in for emails from your business will most likely not buy from you, or ever pay attention to your emails at all. Any emails you send without permission is spam, and no one likes spam.
There are several email service providers online that make it easy to set up opt-in forms and start growing your email list quickly. Some of these email marketing services will have free tiers available while others will have a monthly fee.
Entice customers to opt-in to your email list
You'll need to give customers a reason to subscribe to your email list. This is called a lead magnet and is usually given in the form of something free that you give the customer in exchange for their email address. This shouldn't be anything that's costly for you to make. Most lead magnets are things like free e-books, coupons, lists of resources, webinars, etc. The important thing to keep in mind is that, whatever you offer, it should be short, gives the audience something relevant and usable, and is able to be downloaded or accessed instantly. People don't like having to wait for things!
Introduce yourself with your initial follow-up email
The first email a person gets from you is definitely the most crucial one. Most email marketing software allows you to set up an autoresponder sequence, or a series of emails that are sent out to new email subscribers. This is a key feature and it's very important to use it to your advantage. In your first emails, you should introduce yourself, tell the reader what kind of content they can expect, and how often they can expect to get emails from you. If a customer is expecting only one email a week, but you're sending emails out daily, they'll likely be a little annoyed and could unsubscribe from your list. Likewise, if a customer is expecting daily updates from you and you don't send emails that often, that's not good either.
Use analytics to improve your email marketing
After a short while, you should have a decent amount of customers on your marketing list and should be able to send sales pitches or newsletters whenever you see fit. From here, you should use the analytical tools that your software gives you in order to improve your email marketing strategy. For example, if you are using Enginemailer, you should be able to see statistics such as your open rate (emails sent vs emails actually opened) to find out which groups of people respond better to which emails, what time of day gets the most emails opened, etc. This info is crucial in order to keep your email marketing campaign going strong.
That's all there is to it. Over time, you'll want to look into more advanced techniques to grow your email list even more. But just these simple steps can have a drastic effect on your sales.
