Getting Started With Email Marketing.

Email marketing certainly isn’t a new idea, brands and companies have long known the value of a well crafted email campaign when it comes to engaging with new and returning customers. In fact, in 2019 email remains one of the top communication channels, with around 99% of users checking their inboxes on a daily basis. 

The beauty of having your company’s very own email marketing list is that once the work has been put into collecting email addresses then the resulting list is yours to keep, as long as consent is given. Every time a user submits their email address to your database you can think of the user as a warm lead; this basically means that you know the user is already interested in your product or service. This can be the key to unlocking a higher conversion rate and increasing your revenue. 

Additionally, email marketing tends to give a very acceptable ROI, especially when you consider that email campaigns can be relatively inexpensive to get off the ground – more so, even, than social media which can come with unexpected costs. While some brands do thrive on social channels like Facebook and Instagram, it’s important to remember that your company’s social media channels remain the property of the platform and they can be shut down with little to no warning. This is clearly an issue if you have invested a lot of time and money cultivating an online presence through social media.

Should something like this ever happen then email marketing can be your saviour. To get the most out of email, you will need to start including it in your marketing plans and strategy as soon as you possibly can. Starting out with email doesn’t need to be a daunting task, and there are options available at almost any price point imaginable. As with most things in life, careful planning can mean the difference between success or failure, so give your email campaigns the best possible start with our useful tips. 

1. The first thing you should do before dipping into email marketing is to come up with an achievable and realistic plan of action and establish your goals. Think about why you want to include email marketing – are you drawing attention to a product or service with a view to increasing sales? Are you looking to keep your audience up to date and encourage them to engage with your latest news, articles and content? Your goals will heavily inform how you approach email, so be sure to think carefully about them. 
2. Secondly you need to think about how you will go about collecting and storing users’ email addresses for your mailing list. Recent changes to GDPR in the EU mean that it’s no longer acceptable to ‘scrape’ your customers’ email data or simply transfer a mailing list from one company to another. There are many ways you can collect contact details though, including having a ‘sign up’ button prominently displayed on your site, or following up a customer’s purchase with an option to sign up. GDPR is a big deal in the EU at the moment and refers to consent and positive opt-ins for mailing lists, we’ll cover this in a bit more detail in a separate article. 
3. Think about how you would like to encourage users to sign up. Most people respond well to being offered something in return for their precious data. Some of the most popular ways to encourage users to sign up to your awesome new mailing list is to offer incentives. You might like to try offering customers a discount on their first purchase if they sign up to your newsletter, or if your business relies on awesome content you can always remind users they can stay up to date with your content and insights by signing up. You can also offer incentives within the email once they have signed up, for instance you could include exclusive offers and information, or give your subscribers early access to promotions or new products. 
4. Once you have formed a good idea of the kinds of things you want to include in your email campaigns then spend some time looking at your site critically. The aim is to make it easy for users to opt in and sign up, so you might want to include a header bar, a slider, a well thought out lightbox, or perhaps simply put a signup option at the bottom of your content. There’s no right or wrong way to do this, it depends entirely on your site and how your users navigate it. If you’re not sure what’s best for your site then we can help to plan and implement this with you. 
5. Once you have decided whether your campaigns will be centred around newsletters, promotions or announcements and how you’d like your users to sign up you can start planning the content of your campaign. This is the fun part – you get to put your message out to your subscribers and cultivate something really meaningful. There’s a huge amount of choice out there when it comes to creating your emails each with their own benefits, but some of the most popular are MailChimp, ActiveCampaign and Hubspot. Before committing to any email creation tool it’s best to make sure it has all the features you want and a budget that suits your business. We always recommend doing your research before forking out! 

Enlist the experts

You should now be well on your way to creating your first email marketing campaign and have a good idea of how everything will look and more importantly how it will all come together. If you need a little help getting your email campaign up and running with sign up functionality then do contact us and we can get the ball rolling.