If you’re a marketer, it’s impossible that you’ve missed out on email marketing.
In fact, essentially all brands have made it a part of their marketing strategy, and are leveraging this marketing strategy as part of their everyday work.
Email marketing has existed for a long time, not long after internet first came around, and since then, it has been actively used by brands as a marketing tool, where today, it sees more marketers than ever using it.
Clearly, email marketing works, and the benefits are many. If email wouldn’t work, marketer’s wouldn’t use it. But they do.
But just knowing that email marketing works and is effective isn’t very helpful. In fact, it might just be more frustrating and stressful when you just don’t know where and how you’re going to start. As with everything, getting started with email marketing can at first feel overwhelming.
This is why we created this “Get started guide” for you, to help you get started the right way, and to help you start tackling email marketing from the right end.
In this article, we’re looking at how you can get started with email marketing.
1. Select an Email Marketing Software
With email marketing, you can, of course, manage everything manually, but this isn’t something to recommend.
Managing your email marketing completely manually is an extremely lengthy and time-consuming process and doing so when you don’t have to would just mean wasting a ton of valuable time. I mean, would you try to screw in screws in the wall by hand when you have a screwdriver right in front of you?
Even if you’re a beginner and don’t want to invest money in email marketing just yet, don’t worry. SendPulse offers a completely free plan that allows you to take advantage of the many helpful tools and features to create a successful email marketing campaign.
If you want to succeed with email marketing (which I know you do), you need to use an email marketing software, because in doing so, a ton of new opportunities for generating amazing results is opened up.
You’ll find no successful email marketer that isn’t using an email software service, and that’s because they’re so immensely helpful and effective. Not only will they help you save an immense amount of time, but they’ll also help you craft more refined, and high-quality emails that generate better results.
2. Build your Email List
It’s quite self-explanatory, but if you don’t have any emails to send your marketing emails to, there won’t be a lot to your email marketing campaign, right?
The foundation for working with email marketing and driving results from it is having people on your email list, and obviously, the more people you have on your list, the more success you’ll have.
Or, more correctly, the more relevant and targeted people you have on your email list, the more success you’ll have but the quantity also plays a role in this as well.
The first step to building your email subscriber list is to implement a subscription/signup form to your website where people can sign up for your newsletter.
If you have no coding or HTML expertise, creating a form can be difficult, but don’t worry, because using SendPulse, you can effortlessly design your subscription forms however you want them to look. You can include images, text, choose between different formats, and so on.
Furthermore, the SendPulse subscription form builder allows you to create as many fields as you want so you can collect as much or as little information about the people signing up as possible.
You can start using it for free today.
When you’ve created your signup form, you’ve now started your journey building your subscriber list. Now, you want to consistently update and optimize your form for a higher conversion rate. Within SendPulse, you can change the form in the builder and then have it automatically updated on your site which means you can change and update it on the go for better results.
3. Set up your Welcome Email
Okay, so now you’ve created your signup form and added it to your website, hopefully, you’ve started to get some newsletter subscribers.
Now, you need to welcome them to your email newsletter and to your brand as a whole. Maybe, these individuals are complete strangers to your brand who just stumbled across your website, or maybe they are long-time fans.
Either way, it is crucial that you welcome them.
And what is the best way to welcome them?
With a welcome email, of course!
Now, you’ll be shocked to hear that there are still people that are manually sending out welcome emails to their new subscribers because they don’t know the alternatives, but since you’re here, you can avoid doing that mistake.
Using SendPulse, you can set up automated emails that are automatically sent out when someone performs a specific action. The most common one is, as you can imagine, the welcome email.
If you don’t know where to start, you can even dig into the many welcome email templates that SendPulse offers and then work from there.
4. Practice your Email Writing Skills
Despite humans being visual creatures, the majority of marketing emails have text as the main content. Now, this does not mean you have to follow this trend, but it is with text that you’re going to conversate with your audience and build your relationship with them.
Accordingly, now that you’ve made email marketing a part of your marketing strategy, and you’re now going to send emails on the regular, you need to practice our email writing skills. The thing you want to focus on the most is writing persuasive messages that speak to your audience and gets them to take action. After all, the purpose of essentially all marketing emails is to get your audience to take action, and in order to convince people to do so, you need to be able to write convincing copy.
Fortunately, SendPulse’s email builder helps you get started setting up your email. While no program will manage your writing for you, SendPulse offers endless amounts of email templates that you can use to structure your email in a convincing matter. Furthermore, it also gives you the ability to implement more convincing elements into your emails, such as a call to action buttons or videos.
5. Preview, Send, Measure and Improve
Before you send out your email, it is crucial that you preview your emails before you send them out. Not doing so can lead to a huge fiasco.
And as your email list grows, this gets more and more important.
What if you send an email saying “90% off on everything” when you meant to say “9% off on everything”. It can lead to a lot of trouble for you. Especially if your email list consists of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The damage can be quite severe.
With SendPulse, you can easily send your emails to yourself before sending out to the masses to ensure there are no mistakes or error in your email. You can also send out the email to some of your team to have them check to find any mistakes that you might have missed. Furthermore, when using SendPulse’s drag and drop email editor, you can also preview your email whenever you’d like to see how different things might look for your recipients. The best part is that you are able to preview your email in multiple formats, so you ensure that your email looks flawless on all devices before sending it out.
When you’ve sent out your email, it is time to measure the results of your email marketing campaign. Fortunately, SendPulse allows you to effortlessly measure and evaluate the results of your campaign using the built-in analytics feature that gives you extensive and detailed information about your campaign. Based on the information you could extract, you need to take appropriate action for future campaigns.
- Did your campaign see a low open-rate? Are there things that lead to a lower or higher email open rate?
- Was your CTR high or low? What elements and things received the highest CTR?
- Which countries and locations are most engaged in your emails? Can you segment your subscribers for the future?
Measuring the results of your email marketing campaigns is generally quite tricky, but when you have SendPulse and measuring results is easier than ever, you’d be missing out on a huge opportunity if you wouldn’t leverage it.
You can get started with SendPulse for free today!
