HOW TO START EMAIL MARKETING

Email Marketing Step 1: Build Your List

Before you can start sending out emails, you need people to send emails to. How do you get started building your list? Start by adding a banner or form to your website simply asking people to subscribe. Then, follow these tips.

1. Offer an Incentive: Think of email addresses as a currency: you wouldn’t give money away for free, right? Offering an incentive is the simplest way to gather email addresses.

2. Follow Email Marketing Laws and Regulations: You’ll also want to make sure your emails follow local rules and regulations.

Email Marketing Step 2: Provide Great Content

Email marketing is all about expectations, and it’s up to you to set them. If your call to action is strong, and your follow-up is consistent, then you can count on a successful email campaign. However, if you promise to send one email per week and instead send them daily, then you’re setting yourself up for failure.

1. How to Write a Great Email Newsletter

Let’s talk about the difference between a good newsletter and a bad newsletter. The first sign that you’ve received a bad newsletter is that you don’t recall ever asking to receive it.

Typically, this happens when a business either fails to maintain a regular email routine or manually adds someone to their list after receiving a business card or personal email.

Make sure everyone remembers you—the best way to do this is not to let your emails lapse for too long. Try to send an email at least once a month, or once a week if you can.

2. Use Email Automation Carefully

If you’re just starting out with an email list, it’s easy to imagine you’ll have time to personally respond to every new subscriber.

Once you start getting more than a handful of subscribers, it becomes next to impossible to keep up. You’ll start to get more and more complex campaigns, and following through with everyone all the time is impossible. The secret is email automation. It automatically sends out emails that you schedule in advance.

Email Marketing Step 3: Analytics and Segmentation

Now that you understand the basics behind an effective email campaign, let’s talk about how to take things to the next level. Specifically, using segmentation and analytics to refine your broadcasts and generate even better results than a basic campaign.

How to Segment Your Email Marketing List

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, email segmentation is the practice of splitting up your email list into more targeted groups.

Here are a few ways to segment a larger list:

customer list (in comparison to leads who haven’t bought)
Newsletter subscribers
Daily email list (in comparison to weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc)
Demographics, such as age, location, or job title
Interests, such as marketing or sales topics

With segmentation, you can send a broadcast only to those that didn’t open your last message (ask them why), or to those that showed interest (a second pitch).

Finally, you can move on to email segmentation and analytics once you’ve mastered the basics. Start sending separate types of emails to different groups of people so you can deliver more useful emails.