An Ultimate Step by Step Guide to Email Marketing
Planning and creating an email marketing campaign for your business calls for a strategic mind and perfect execution. However easy it may seem, email marketing is a different ball game that every marketer must ace. Understanding what your audience/subscribers want and striking that sweet spot isn’t an easy play. It takes practice and knowledge to leverage all the essential elements that are in our control and create an effective email marketing strategy.
Here’s a step by step guide to how to begin and create successful email marketing:
- Build Your List
Invite website visitors to sign up for your email list by including a web banner or a pop-up on the home page and landing page. Many businesses often provide an incentive such as email campaigns, ebooks, offers, etc. to further encourage them to share their email address.
Creating your email list will likely be the most time-consuming part of the process, but it’s a necessary one. Your email list is the most vital part of your email marketing campaign, as it creates your target audience. Avoid buying email lists, since it’s the best way to ensure you’re reaching people who want to receive your emails and will engage with your content. - Segment the list
Segmentation allows you to send targeted emails to your audience based on their interests or demographic information. There are three broad categories for segmenting email lists: geographic, demographic, and behavioural segmentation. The more relevant an email is to someone, the more likely they are to open and engage with it. Here are some examples of ways to segment your audience: - Geography
- Demographics
- Past purchases
- Buyer behavior
- Expressed interests
- Email engagement
- Design the Content
We create content for the audience, so it must add some value to their goals. Address your subscribers by using his/her first name. Customising your template based on your brand’s guidelines will help improve the brand’s recall. Calls to action (CTAs) included in the emails will further persuade readers to take an action.
Keep it visually enticing and include images that complement your content. If you want to persuade a reader to purchase a specific product then use the best photos of that product in the email. - Test your Emails
Before sending the final mail to your contact list, send a test mail to your address. This way you can save yourself from sending an email with mistakes. Thoroughly check your content and ensure it's free from spelling and grammar errors, broken or incorrect links, etc. Also, you might want to look at how it looks in different email hosts and on mobile. Click on every link and re-read for errors. - Send it out
Once you’re confident and checked every aspect of the email, it’s time to share the email with your customers and monitor its performance and results. - Monitor
The job is not done yet, after sending the emails to the email list, it's imperative that you regularly measure the email performance and its effectiveness. There are a few metrics that can help you determine the results including open rate, click-through rate (CTR), and unsubscribe rate.
Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools out there and businesses across industries and sizes can leverage its features and what it offers. Contact us now and ace your email marketing strategy!