[UPDATED] Simple Guide to Email Marketing in 2022
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 6:43 am
Regardless of the industry you're in, email marketing has proven to be one of the most powerful forms of online acquisition.
Of course, this works in your favor if you are a digital marketer or run a digital agency.
According to a 2018 study by Smart Insights, email marketing was the most effective digital media channel, outperforming eight of the most popular methods.
Needless to say, email marketing is alive and well.
Image source: Smart Insights
Image source: Smart Ideas
Email marketing is an incredibly useful tool for building customer relationships, nurturing leads, and increasing your conversion rate.
It's also affordable and requires new zealand phone number library relatively little effort on your part once your campaign gets off the ground.
Darshan Somashekar, serial founder and CEO of solitaire gaming upstart, captures well why emails are so effective. He explains, “Emails allow us to knock on the customer’s door, provide additional value, and build a relationship with them. We increase the playability of our solitaire games by 14% just by sending an email.”
If you are ready to implement email marketing into your business growth strategy, read on to learn how you can design a beginner-friendly email marketing strategy that will bring positive results to your business.
Choosing Your Email Marketing Platform
Before you launch into an email marketing strategy, the first task is to choose the right email marketing platform for your business.
There are several factors to consider when making this decision. Let’s go over some of the things you’ll want to think about when choosing an email marketing platform:
Budget: Email marketing platforms range from completely free to premium prices. What you choose depends on what you're comfortable spending, but also what you need from the service. Free email marketing services are great if you have basic needs. As you expand your business, you may find that a paid option is more appropriate.
Scalability: I'm assuming your goal is to grow your business. If that's the case, make sure you choose an email marketing platform that has the capacity to support your business as it grows. That means checking how many subscribers each plan allows and how much it will cost to upgrade as your contact list grows.
Automation: Once your contact list grows to even a small size, you may find that managing certain tasks becomes tedious and unruly. A good email marketing service will provide you with useful automation that will make repetitive tasks much easier to accomplish.
How to choose
As you search for the right email marketing platform, you'll find that there is a huge selection of great options out there. A couple of options to start with are ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign.
Both services offer benefits to their users, but your choice comes down to what works best for your specific business.
If you're new to email marketing, ConvertKit is simpler and easier to use. ActiveCampaign is better suited for larger businesses that require extensive automation.
Check out my extensive comparison of ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign to learn more about these popular services.
Grow your email list
Regardless of how you intend to develop your email marketing strategy, the first step is always to build your contact list.
The best way to grow an email list is through a call to action. A call to action is a tool used to generate immediate audience engagement.
In this case, the “action” is signing up for your email list. There are several ways to do this, so let’s get right to it.
An often overlooked way to gain email subscribers is through social media. You may find that using Instagram to grow your contact list is surprisingly effective.
Instagram posts tend to get pretty high engagement rates, making it the perfect tool to invite more subscribers.
Encourage your followers to subscribe to your email list through contests, free online courses, and webinars.
Another tried and true method for growing your email list is through lead magnets. Lead magnets are resources that you offer to your audience in exchange for their contact information.
In many cases, creating lead magnets is quite time-consuming, but once you've created them, you can continue to offer them as long as you remain relevant.
Some examples of traditional lead magnets include eBooks, short video courses, webinars, and podcasts.
If you are not willing to put that much time and energy into a lead magnet.
Here are some ideas for quick lead magnets you can offer to your audience:
Exclusive PDF: Gather additional information that expands on the content you've published on your blog. Offer this PDF as an added bonus in exchange for an email signup. This is similar to creating an eBook, but with much shorter copy, which plays to your advantage. Improve accessibility by using a QR Code on your desktop site for visitors who want to sign up and access it via their mobile phones.
Resource Guide: Compile a list of your favorite products, services, books, apps, or tools that relate to your specific niche. This is a fairly low-energy lead magnet that has great potential to generate interest. Your audience can download this list for free once they sign up for your email list.
Gated Content : This may be the most manageable lead magnet to create because you're using content that already exists. Simply create exclusive content that can be unlocked by signing up for the email list.
Offer a discount: If you have paid products or content on your website, offering a discount is an easy way to grow your contact list.
Create effective emails
Once you have an email list to work with, the challenge is to keep your audience engaged. The most important thing to remember is reliable follow-up. If you promised your audience to update them when new content, products, or services are available, it's important that you keep that promise.
On the other hand, if you promised not to spam their inbox, don't send gratuitous emails. The goal is to keep your audience interested, but not annoyed by your emails.
Another important consideration is how you format your email . It's best to format the subject line so that it doesn't get cut off when it's displayed to the reader. In other words, keep it short and to the point.
In the body of the email, avoid overloading it with long paragraphs. My recommendation is to separate your writing line by line to achieve the best audience engagement.
Last but not least, be sure to include engaging images. Don't be afraid to get creative here. You can use photographs, artwork, and videos to make your emails much more interesting for readers.
A study by Quicksprout found that the images that get the most user engagement are hand-drawn images, animated images, and infographics.
Simply put, adding images to your emails will increase the success of your campaign.
Segment your audience
Part of what makes a successful email marketing campaign is segmenting your audience.
We know your audience is generally interested in what you have to offer, but can you break it down further than that?
The answer is yes. You can create much more personalized emails by dividing your audience into demographics such as:
Age
Marital status
Website activity and purchases.
Interests
In addition to demographic segmentation, you can also categorize your audience by the type of content they are most interested in viewing.
For example, you might offer daily email updates that interest some people, while others may only want to receive weekly updates.
Another example is separating the audience between those who have already purchased and those who have not.
The emails you send to these two groups can differ significantly depending on your goal. You may want to send a thank you email to readers who have recently purchased a product from your site.
Segmentation isn't too complicated, but it does take time and effort. If you spend some time creating effective segments, your email campaign will be much more efficient from the start.
Take advantage of automation
Automation may seem complicated, but it's actually quite simple and makes your job much easier.
Personally responding to an email list just isn't realistic as you start building deeper campaigns.
Email marketing automation is the solution to this problem.
An autoresponder is responsible for sending you scheduled emails to specific contacts based on your audience segments.
You can create a series of emails to send over a number of days, weeks, or even months. This keeps your brand in touch with your audience without much effort on your part.
This also plays in your favor when you decide to promote a new service or product. Because you've kept up with your email list, any promotional emails will be much more effective.
Of course, this works in your favor if you are a digital marketer or run a digital agency.
According to a 2018 study by Smart Insights, email marketing was the most effective digital media channel, outperforming eight of the most popular methods.
Needless to say, email marketing is alive and well.
Image source: Smart Insights
Image source: Smart Ideas
Email marketing is an incredibly useful tool for building customer relationships, nurturing leads, and increasing your conversion rate.
It's also affordable and requires new zealand phone number library relatively little effort on your part once your campaign gets off the ground.
Darshan Somashekar, serial founder and CEO of solitaire gaming upstart, captures well why emails are so effective. He explains, “Emails allow us to knock on the customer’s door, provide additional value, and build a relationship with them. We increase the playability of our solitaire games by 14% just by sending an email.”
If you are ready to implement email marketing into your business growth strategy, read on to learn how you can design a beginner-friendly email marketing strategy that will bring positive results to your business.
Choosing Your Email Marketing Platform
Before you launch into an email marketing strategy, the first task is to choose the right email marketing platform for your business.
There are several factors to consider when making this decision. Let’s go over some of the things you’ll want to think about when choosing an email marketing platform:
Budget: Email marketing platforms range from completely free to premium prices. What you choose depends on what you're comfortable spending, but also what you need from the service. Free email marketing services are great if you have basic needs. As you expand your business, you may find that a paid option is more appropriate.
Scalability: I'm assuming your goal is to grow your business. If that's the case, make sure you choose an email marketing platform that has the capacity to support your business as it grows. That means checking how many subscribers each plan allows and how much it will cost to upgrade as your contact list grows.
Automation: Once your contact list grows to even a small size, you may find that managing certain tasks becomes tedious and unruly. A good email marketing service will provide you with useful automation that will make repetitive tasks much easier to accomplish.
How to choose
As you search for the right email marketing platform, you'll find that there is a huge selection of great options out there. A couple of options to start with are ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign.
Both services offer benefits to their users, but your choice comes down to what works best for your specific business.
If you're new to email marketing, ConvertKit is simpler and easier to use. ActiveCampaign is better suited for larger businesses that require extensive automation.
Check out my extensive comparison of ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign to learn more about these popular services.
Grow your email list
Regardless of how you intend to develop your email marketing strategy, the first step is always to build your contact list.
The best way to grow an email list is through a call to action. A call to action is a tool used to generate immediate audience engagement.
In this case, the “action” is signing up for your email list. There are several ways to do this, so let’s get right to it.
An often overlooked way to gain email subscribers is through social media. You may find that using Instagram to grow your contact list is surprisingly effective.
Instagram posts tend to get pretty high engagement rates, making it the perfect tool to invite more subscribers.
Encourage your followers to subscribe to your email list through contests, free online courses, and webinars.
Another tried and true method for growing your email list is through lead magnets. Lead magnets are resources that you offer to your audience in exchange for their contact information.
In many cases, creating lead magnets is quite time-consuming, but once you've created them, you can continue to offer them as long as you remain relevant.
Some examples of traditional lead magnets include eBooks, short video courses, webinars, and podcasts.
If you are not willing to put that much time and energy into a lead magnet.
Here are some ideas for quick lead magnets you can offer to your audience:
Exclusive PDF: Gather additional information that expands on the content you've published on your blog. Offer this PDF as an added bonus in exchange for an email signup. This is similar to creating an eBook, but with much shorter copy, which plays to your advantage. Improve accessibility by using a QR Code on your desktop site for visitors who want to sign up and access it via their mobile phones.
Resource Guide: Compile a list of your favorite products, services, books, apps, or tools that relate to your specific niche. This is a fairly low-energy lead magnet that has great potential to generate interest. Your audience can download this list for free once they sign up for your email list.
Gated Content : This may be the most manageable lead magnet to create because you're using content that already exists. Simply create exclusive content that can be unlocked by signing up for the email list.
Offer a discount: If you have paid products or content on your website, offering a discount is an easy way to grow your contact list.
Create effective emails
Once you have an email list to work with, the challenge is to keep your audience engaged. The most important thing to remember is reliable follow-up. If you promised your audience to update them when new content, products, or services are available, it's important that you keep that promise.
On the other hand, if you promised not to spam their inbox, don't send gratuitous emails. The goal is to keep your audience interested, but not annoyed by your emails.
Another important consideration is how you format your email . It's best to format the subject line so that it doesn't get cut off when it's displayed to the reader. In other words, keep it short and to the point.
In the body of the email, avoid overloading it with long paragraphs. My recommendation is to separate your writing line by line to achieve the best audience engagement.
Last but not least, be sure to include engaging images. Don't be afraid to get creative here. You can use photographs, artwork, and videos to make your emails much more interesting for readers.
A study by Quicksprout found that the images that get the most user engagement are hand-drawn images, animated images, and infographics.
Simply put, adding images to your emails will increase the success of your campaign.
Segment your audience
Part of what makes a successful email marketing campaign is segmenting your audience.
We know your audience is generally interested in what you have to offer, but can you break it down further than that?
The answer is yes. You can create much more personalized emails by dividing your audience into demographics such as:
Age
Marital status
Website activity and purchases.
Interests
In addition to demographic segmentation, you can also categorize your audience by the type of content they are most interested in viewing.
For example, you might offer daily email updates that interest some people, while others may only want to receive weekly updates.
Another example is separating the audience between those who have already purchased and those who have not.
The emails you send to these two groups can differ significantly depending on your goal. You may want to send a thank you email to readers who have recently purchased a product from your site.
Segmentation isn't too complicated, but it does take time and effort. If you spend some time creating effective segments, your email campaign will be much more efficient from the start.
Take advantage of automation
Automation may seem complicated, but it's actually quite simple and makes your job much easier.
Personally responding to an email list just isn't realistic as you start building deeper campaigns.
Email marketing automation is the solution to this problem.
An autoresponder is responsible for sending you scheduled emails to specific contacts based on your audience segments.
You can create a series of emails to send over a number of days, weeks, or even months. This keeps your brand in touch with your audience without much effort on your part.
This also plays in your favor when you decide to promote a new service or product. Because you've kept up with your email list, any promotional emails will be much more effective.