Email Marketing : Step by Step Guide for Beginner’s

In a very short span of time, Email Marketing has become one of the major platforms in digital marketing. This is because of the Return on Investment spent on every dollar is said to be double the ROI of other digital marketing tactics according to the Direct Marketing Association.

What do you see inside your inbox in apart from your personal emails? All you see are promotions from large scale companies like Amazon, eBay and Google, and also from small scale companies. In fact, Email marketing can led to increased sales for your landscaping companies, any flower shop, or salon, or any consultancy services.

By sending emails, you are encouraging the customers to visit your website, engage with your products or services, and make purchases. This way you are maintaining a great way to stay connected with your customers.

Email marketing has emerged from simple one-way messages and auto-responders (also known as Email 1.0) to more modern and more sophisticated method of communication known as Email 2.0. This gives the benefit of pursuing the customers on the basis of their preferences and purchase history. We often call it as Targeted Emails. These emails yield better results.

With all the techniques available in Email marketing systems, there are a few things that is important about Email marketing to build strong and deeper relationships with your customers and grow business. Let’s checkout Email Marketing guide.

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Establish Your Goals for Email Marketing

Before you begin with your first Email marketing campaign, it is recommended to think about your goals and decide what exactly you want to achieve with email marketing. Plan your strategies according to your goals. Decide the type of campaigns you want to send, your target recipients, your email content, and success factors. The best way is to align your Email marketing goals with your company’s broad marketing goals and KPIs.

You can categorize your goals into the following categories:

1. To drive new signups for you brand
2. Generate new leads for sales of products
3. Get more attendees for your event
4. Get donations for any cause

Plan your goals and use Email marketing as a powerful weapon to reach your audience, and achieve a number of versatile objectives.

Build Your Email List

1. The next step is to build your email list whom you want to send the campaigns to, which depends upon the goals you want to establish.
2. Get a list of existing contacts in your chosen marketing tools. You can either upload an existing list from excel manually or connect your campaign monitor account to your external customer data lives like CRM and automatically synchronize them.
   Create a new list from the scratch if you want to tap new audience whose email addresses you may not be having.

Select The Campaign Type You Want To Send

Coming to the body of the email, what is it that makes your campaign amazing, or compels the audience to open the email and make conversion? There are a number of email marketing campaigns that you can send to your subscribers depending upon your goals.

Here are a few tips you can use to entice the audience to subscribe to your email list:

1. Make your content compelling
2. Offer discounts along with call-to-action
3. Offer free or upgraded shipping on your customer’s purchase
4. Send Email newsletters (a regularly distributed email campaign mainly about a specific topic). You can also offer various simple subscribing opportunities which are user-friendly for the audience to opt-in. You can send these letters on weekly or monthly basis having a content related to a particular theme: tips, stories & photographs.
5. Create Announcement campaigns, an email campaign sent to the subscribers announcing about your new products or services and their features. It is a perfect way to keep your audience engaged
6. Create Event invitation campaign to increase the awareness of your event and encourage the audience to attend the event.

1. Choose A Service For Your Email Campaign (Say MailChimp)

There are a plenty of services for email marketing, one of which is MailChimp. You can use MailChimp to create the template of your choice as per your campaign. It is one of the simplest email systems and has a user friendly interface which makes it great for the beginners. There are various predesigned templates set up in MailChimp. In fact, it includes the drag and drop facility which makes designing it even more simple.. All you have to do is customize it as per your need in terms of colors, images, content etc. You can even preview your template to see how it will look in the email body. Once you have prepared the template, save it for future access.

2. GMass

GMass is a powerful mail merge tool for Gmail. You can find this plug-in in your Chrome web store. It lets you create very basic mail merge style with Gmail. It makes the email look created for individual recipients personally.

How to use GMass?

1. First download the GMass chrome extension and visit your Gmail account. On clicking the compose button, if you find a GMass icon, it means your GMass extension has been installed and is ready to be used.
2. Next you need to activate GMass when you enter your Gmail account.
3. Now you need to create an excel sheet on your Google drive with email addresses of all the recipients along with their first and last names.
4. Once the sheet is created, you need to fetch it and a new draft mail window will be open. Here you can craft your email. Keep the places for first and the last name. It will automatically fetch the respective names corresponding to the email addresses.
5. Click the up-arrow button besides the GMass button. You can fetch the first and last name from here. You can also schedule your emails for sending them later.
6. Finally, you can click the GMass button right next to the Send button and individual emails will be created based on the parameters and mails will be sent.

Measure Results

You can also measure your campaign performance. There are places where you can track the success of your campaigns like Campaign Monitor and Google Analytics.

Some of the metrics that you can analyze include:

1. Number of unique opens
2. Number of bounces
3. Number of emails not opened
4. Open rate
5. Click-Through rate
6. Unsubscribe rate
7. Spam complaints
8. Shares

You will get a high-level overview of the behavior of your subscribers towards your campaigns and will also help you compare the success of one campaign to another.

There are a few tips that should be kept in mind while perform the Email Marketing campaign.

Maintain Consistency

Maintaining consistency is very important for a successful campaign. A direct mail sent regularly to the subscribers helps build trust. You can analyse your email marketing data and schedule your activities accordingly.

Explore the marketplace

Study your market. Find out the awareness level of your brand among the consumers. If you believe that your segment is rare, leading to limited awareness among the consumers, try nurturing them by sending emails. However, if your industry is competitive, then tell your readers how better and different is your brand from your competitors.

Use Right Quality & Quantity of Information

Send the right content and convey the message that’s just needed at the moment. Your email should be relevant. Improve the quality of your mail by using links to sales blog or add a “read more” link. You need to understand the current position of your consumers in terms of their budget and requirement. Ignoring these factors may cause your emails to backfire.

Schedule Your Time of Sending Emails

Determine the optimal timing of sending mails to your consumers with respect to your competitors. Follow the timing where you are being noticed along with your other marketing competitors.

Monitor Your Email Analytics

Always monitor the performance of your email marketing campaigns and determine the most successful one. Replicate the same approach for your other email campaigns. Analytics provide you in-depth performance of your campaigns. You get thorough details of what is working best and what is not.

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