Has your business entered the world of email marketing?
Email marketing is an older form of digital marketing, but that doesn’t mean it’s no longer worth the investment! Email provides a personalized way for brands to engage directly with customers. It can help your business build brand awareness and loyalty while converting prospects to customers. It also has one of the highest ROIs of all digital marketing methods.
Believe it or not, email marketing is now becoming even more important. Why now? Well, let’s take a look at that answer, and then we’ll tell you how to get started.
Why Is Email Marketing Becoming Even More Important?
As we’ve mentioned, email marketing already has its benefits. Now that the digital marketing industry is shifting closer toward a cookie-free future, email marketing is gaining an additional edge over other forms of digital marketing. Collecting data with permission through email marketing can help reduce your business’s reliance on cookies while allowing you to continue careful, effective targeting of your audience.
How to Get Started with Email Marketing
Hopefully you see why email marketing is such an excellent investment. Now, let’s look at the steps you’ll need to take to set up basic email marketing for your business.
Step 1: Educate Yourself
It’s important to be familiar with data privacy laws so that you can manage your customers’ information in a responsible way. You should also keep up with major changes impacting the email marketing world; after all, you want to reach your customers and not the spam folder, right?
Step 2: Choose Your Tools
If you’re starting small, you may be able to get away with using very simple tools, like Excel to maintain your database and Gmail or Outlook to send emails. As your email marketing becomes more advanced, it’ll be important to invest in a dedicated email marketing platform that can manage your list, send emails, look at analytics, and more.
Step 3: Build Your Database
You can put a simple form on your website to collect email addresses. Make sure you offer an incentive for people to give their email address to you! This could be a free download, a discount code, a giveaway, a promise of early access to a product or sale, a contest… the options are numerous.
Step 4: Segment Your List
Think about who you want to email. Do you want to start building a relationship with new prospects? Do you want to encourage former customers to come back to your business? You can segment your list by location, demographics, interactions with your business, or a number of other factors.
Step 5: Plan Your Calendar
Decide how many emails you’d like to send and how many days apart you’d like them to be. For example, you might want to do a one-time email for a 24-hour flash sale, or you could plan a more extensive campaign around a new product launch.
Step 6: Compose Your Emails
Now it’s time to get typing. Start by really thinking about your target audience and what they need or want; with that in mind, it’ll be much easier to write emails that work! Include a clear call to action in every email, and make sure your subject line makes people want to click.
Step 7: Press Send
Run a test email to check everything over one last time. Make sure to test out any links. Once you’re sure everything is ready, it’s time to send your email out to the world.
Following these seven steps, you can set up your first email campaign—and all your subsequent ones! As you get more comfortable with email marketing, you might want to add in some email workflows, which are series of automated emails that start when a potential customer performs a set action, like downloading an ebook from your website.
Get Started Today
If you’re not already using email marketing to promote your products or services to potential and existing customers, now is the time to start.
If you’d like help building your first email campaign, setting up email workflows, or anything in between, 2XM is here to help! Contact us for a FREE 60 minute consultation today.