How Do You Begin Email Marketing? (and why you should)

The first marketing email was sent in 1978. Yeah, it is that old.

Since then, its popularity has only seen an upward trend. Nowadays, customers receive dozens if not hundreds of emails from marketers each day, all competing for their attention.

Why use email marketing if the field is so saturated?

There are 4.6 billion email users on the planet, and 51% of people say that they prefer brands to contact them by email.

Whether you’re a large retailer or a small business owner, email marketing is an effective inbound marketing tool for your business.

But how to start email marketing? We have the answer.

We’ll cover how to start email marketing in-depth, from building a mailing list to optimizing your emails so that you can benefit from a successful email marketing campaign.

Why Use Email Marketing?

You may be tempted to dismiss email marketing in the age of social media, believing it to be ineffective.

Here’s something that might make a difference.

According to Litmus, every dollar invested in email marketing yields a $36 return on investment. It has the largest ROI of any marketing strategy, with a 3600 percent return on investment.

The value of email marketing has grown even more as a result of the pandemic, and it will continue to expand as the delta variation spreads in 2021.

Email marketing has several distinct advantages, in addition to a higher return on investment and a pandemic-proof solution.

It’s easy to measure: you can easily collect data on your email marketing campaigns and use that data to optimize your marketing strategy.
Inexpensive: With multiple free and cheap email marketing platforms, you can do digital marketing on a low budget.
Emails enable you to personalize content according to the target customer and double your click-through rates.
Agile and timely: Email marketing campaigns require shorter lead times than traditional print media, so you can get your exact message across instantly.
Build loyalty: You can share unique resources and helpful tips about your niche to nurture your relationship with your new subscribers and loyal customers.
Turn prospects into customers: With a successful email marketing campaign, you can keep the interest of users who have just completed the lead capture form and have just received their first email.

How To Start Email Marketing

Set your email marketing goals.
Get to know your audience.
Select an email marketing service provider.
Build your email list.
Choose an email marketing strategy.
Optimize your emails.
Evaluate your data.

Let’s break down each of these further.

1. Set Your Email Marketing Goals

Crafting an effective email marketing strategy starts with defining the desired outcome of your efforts.

You’ll likely have more than one goal, which means you’ll need several approaches to your email marketing.

For example, you might be starting email marketing to:

Drive product purchases
Build brand awareness
Nurture leads
Upsell products
Convert repeat customers

An email you design to get recipients to purchase a product for the first time will look different from the one you send to upsell a recent customer.

While both may include a call to action, an email retargeting a returning customer may feature personalized updates, information, or offers based on what they previously bought.

2. Get To Know Your Audience

As a targeted marketing strategy, email marketing is the most effective.

Consider the tracking service Tile as an example. Tile’s email is aimed towards millennial parents with younger school-aged children who frequently misplace their belongings.

It is persuasive because it demonstrates how it solves a real, specific problem that a segment of its customers is experiencing.

To begin email marketing, you’ll need to first create buyer personas to get a better understanding of your target demographic.

A buyer persona is a fictional figure created using information about your target audience’s preferences, wants, and behaviors. It should be fairly broad because you want to deal with a small number of buyer personas to make maintenance easier.

Gather demographic data about relevant customers and collect their interests, aspirations, and needs through interviews and surveys to create a buyer persona.

You’ll gain a better understanding of their reasons for buying your goods and their individual buyer journey as a result of this.

3. Select an Email Marketing Service Provider

Why use email marketing service providers?

In email marketing, you send hundreds to thousands of emails each week and collect data on each one. An email marketing service like Constant Contact can make it easy to manage this burden and start email marketing.

Unlike typical email service providers, email marketing software offer:

Email marketing automation
Marketing templates
Data collection

Here’s a list of email marketing service providers and their unique benefits to help you choose:

Constant Contact: Provides easy-to-use drag and drop email templates.
ConvertKit: Offers landing pages and forms to engage your audience.
GetResponse: Enhances your email marketing platform with autoresponders and sales funnels.
Mailchimp: Offers a free plan with powerful email marketing tools for small business owners.
Substack: Features paid newsletter subscriptions.
Drip: Enables small e-commerce businesses.
Campaign Monitor: Provides a simple and straightforward email marketing service.

4. Build Your Email List

You may always profit from a list-building plan in place whether you have 15 or 1,500 connections on your email list.

However, inactive subscribers should be removed on a regular basis to keep your bounce rate low and to ensure that your emails are delivered through spam filters and do not land up in the spam folder.

While there are a variety of strategies to develop your email list, one of the most popular is to provide a free worthwhile incentive known as a lead magnet. A registration form can help you grow an email list by allowing visitors to sign up for your newsletter.

The email newsletter registration page for Search Engine Journal is an excellent place to start if you’re new to email marketing. It allows consumers to opt-in and self-segment by choosing the type of material they want to see.

5. Choose an Email Marketing Strategy

One of the essential parts of learning how to start email marketing is understanding the kind of email you need to send to your email subscribers’ inboxes.

With different email marketing strategies catering to different goals, you need to use your primary goals decided in the first step to determine your email marketing strategy. It will then decide the types of emails you will be sending.

For example, if looking for:

Tactics to increase conversion rate, try:
- Offer/discount emails
- Upsell emails
- New product announcements
Strategies to improve engagement, check out:
- Newsletters
- Helpful content
- Welcome emails/kickback emails
- Re-engagement emails
Methods to increase traffic, send
- Newsletters
- Syndicated blog posts
- Content roundups

6. Optimize Your Emails

Now that you know how to get started with email marketing, it’s time to discover how to maximize your results.

The average marketing email is only 125 words long. You’ll need to use engaging, punchy language and send quality emails to your customers to attract your audience’s attention in such a short length of time.
Your buyer personas can help you optimize your emails.

Personalized email subject lines and body copy can make the difference between someone opening an email to act on it and someone closing it to delete it.

You may engage with your audience by delivering emails that resonate with their interests and desires by segmenting your email marketing lists.

7. Evaluate Your Data

The only way to know if your email marketing campaign is successful is to keep track of the data.

Essential metrics you should monitor are:

Open rate: The number of people opening your email
Clickthrough rate (CTR): The number of people clicking a link in your email
Unsubscribes: The number of people unsubscribing from your email

Using these three metrics, you can know if an email strategy is working as desired or if it needs changing.

You can also use A/B testing to see what you can improve in your emails. Use an A/B test to see which changes net you a higher open rate and a lower unsubscribe rate.

Final Thoughts

Getting started with email marketing is one of the finest strategies to build your business because of its high return on investment.

The first step in launching an email marketing campaign is to gain a detailed grasp of your target audience and objectives. With that out of the way, you can focus on growing your email list with tools like email marketing services and lead magnets.

Your open rate and click-through rate will improve with a professional domain and address. To engage with your customers using a genuine email account, check out Bluehost’s Microsoft 365.