If you’re wondering how to do email marketing, you have come to the right place. Email marketing is a popular digital marketing strategy that uses emails to promote products and services. It is a great way to engage your audience and foster customer loyalty. In today’s digital landscape, with 31% of marketers using email marketing, you could be missing out on a large slice of that pie by not investing the time and resources into this digital marketing strategy. If that doesn’t indicate the importance of email marketing, then consider some of the many benefits, from targeted reach to high ROI and direct communication with your customers. In this guide, we’ll break down email marketing for beginners by going through how to build an email list, email marketing best practices, platforms, analytics, and more.
Building Your Email List
The first thing you’ll need to do when it comes to email marketing for beginners is to build your email marketing list. Ideally, you’ll want to build a large email marketing audience list to increase the number of people you send your emails to, which will in turn boost the ROI of each email.
There are various ways you can choose to do this; these include:
- Website forms: Whether you choose to include an email newsletter signup form in your website footer or have a pop-up message or include an optional tick box on your contact form, this is a great way to build your email marketing list organically.
- Blog content: By creating engaging and high-quality blog posts and resources, you could attract customers to your website and increase your chances of them signing up for your email newsletter.
- Content upgrades: Take it one step further and offer more helpful and downloadable resources by signing up exclusively for your email marketing list.
- Social media promotion: You can also promote your email newsletter on your social platforms where you have already grown and fostered a community. Plus, offer incentives to those for subscribing, such as a temporary discount codes, for example.
The importance of email marketing lists in collecting quality leads is significant. Otherwise, you could end up getting a high bounce rate and losing subscribers. Always try to keep your data clean by removing invalid emails and consider categorising subscribers so they are only getting emails they are interested in to avoid a high unsubscribe rate.
How to do Email Marketing – Best Practices
To ensure a successful email marketing strategy and campaign, the importance of email marketing basics is significant. From subject lines to visuals, text, and CTAs, here are some best practices for email marketing for beginners.
Email Content Best Practices
- Subject Lines: 🎯 GRAB THEIR ATTENTION! 🤯🔥✨Keep it relevant, and throwing in an emoji or two doesn’t hurt.
- Email body: Make your email concise, clear, and easy to read. Use images and visuals throughout to enhance engagement and always end with a strong CTA.
- Make it Personal: Personalise your emails by adding subscriber names and segment your audience list into specific areas to target messaging for specific customer interests.
Email Design and Formatting Best Practices
- Mobile optimisation: Ensure emails are responsive and display correctly on all device sizes.
- Accessibility: Make sure to use alt text for all images. Use a sufficient font size; the best font size for email marketing is between 14-16 pixels, and skip links for easy navigation.
- Branding: Maintain consistent branding across all emails to allow your customers to recognise your email and increase the chances of them opening it.
The Best Email Marketing Platforms and Tools
When it comes to choosing the right platform for email marketing for beginners, there are lots of choices out there. The best platform will ultimately depend on your business, your employees, and your customers. Here are some of the popular options.
- Mailchimp: A popular choice for beginners, Mailchimp offers user-friendly features, free plans, and excellent customer support.
- Constant Contact: Known for its ease of use and strong customer support, Constant Contact is a solid option for small businesses.
- HubSpot: A comprehensive marketing platform that includes email marketing features, along with CRM, sales tools, and more.
- ActiveCampaign: A powerful platform with advanced automation features, excellent segmentation capabilities, and robust reporting.
Most email marketing platforms allow you to get a free trial so you can get a better feel for what platform will work best for you and your business.
How to Track Email Marketing Performance
So, you have learnt how to build your email marketing list, create your email campaign, and send it to your audience. Now, the importance of email marketing analytics on improving click-through rates and ROI is significant. The key metrics of any email campaign consist of the following.
- Open rates
- Click-through rates (CTRs)
- Conversion rates
- Bounce rates
- Unsubscribe rates
It is important that you use this data to improve and identify areas for improvement in your future email marketing campaigns. You can even try A/B testing with different subject lines, CTAs, and send times to get a better understanding of how your audience prefers to engage with your emails. This will continue to improve your email marketing strategy.
Legal and Ethical Considerations
It is important to follow basic GDPR legislation which emphasises data protection and user consent.
To ensure compliance, you must adhere to key principles, including:
- Maintain a clean email list
- Obtain explicit consent before sending marketing emails
- Provide a clear and easily accessible unsubscribe option
- Honour user preferences (such as frequency and content)
By adhering to these regulations and prioritising transparency in your email practices, you can build strong relationships with your subscribers and maintain a positive sender reputation.
Key Takeaways on How to Do Email Marketing Successfully
Overall, the key takeaways on how to do email marketing successfully are to build an authentic and engaged audience list, create engaging and high-quality emails, and maintain a transparent and positive relationship with your subscribers and customers. Of course, as with all digital marketing, email marketing requires continuous optimisation to continue to grow and improve your strategy.
If you need help with your email marketing strategy, our team of expert digital marketers here at Ghost Design provides affordable and effective email marketing services for your business. Get in touch with our team today, and we can provide you with a free quote and advice. We also offer a range of digital marketing services, including social media marketing, if you would like a combined digital marketing strategy.
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