Master the Basics of Email Marketing and Launch Winning Campaigns

Let’s take a look at the subject of email marketing. There are a few essential terms worth defining at the start. Once you understand the basics, you’ll be in a position to start your first email marketing campaign. Marketing specialists hold this type in the highest regards. Email is a quick way to find conversions and to boost your current sales channels.

Lead magnet

You need to have a way to entice people to give up their email address. The most common way is to use a “lead magnet.” This keepsake is a giveaway (or bribe) that relates to the company’s primary product line. For example, a company that sells mortgage loans could give away a free informational report on getting a great deal. Or they could provide an incentive on a specific product.

Once a subscriber opts in, the company knows they have a marketing asset. The person has an interest in their product. At this point, they’ll add the customer to an Autoresponder to send timed messages.

Autoresponder – A series of timed messages make up an Autoresponder. These messages go out when you schedule them. Using this tool in your email marketing as a convenient way to follow up with prospects and warm them up.

Newsletter

Newsletters contain information about your organization’s products and services. They are similar in format to the old school offline newsletters of decades past. They’re a solid way to keep in touch with customers. When you have a new product or service to announce, building it into your email marketing is easy. Links to specific landing pages help clients take action.

Maintaining is a decent amount of work, but it’s worth the effort. You’ll find yours is a reliable source of conversions, especially when you make announcements. You can build subscriptions online and off. Many organizations use incentives to get people to subscribe. If you have walk-in traffic, a banner could tell them to sign up. What matters most is that you continually attempt to induce people to receive further updates. If you don’t, you lose out the most powerful tactic available to digital marketers.

Email Service Provider (ESP)

This entity is the actual specialist provider that helps you send the email in your email marketing campaign. MailChimp, Aweber, GetResponse, Constant Contact and many others allow businesses to maintain email lists. They handle the heavy lifting that goes into successful deliverability. The software from ESPs is simple to use. You’ll be able to dig in and create beautiful autoresponders and newsletters that get results. The interface also handles all of the scheduling and marketing automation. Detailed reports are available that show every aspect of your email marketing campaigns.

Managing your email marketing campaigns at an ESP is straightforward. Take the steps necessary to quantify key marketing metrics. Take corrective action to improve deliverability, open rates, and click-throughs. Even tiny changes have enormous consequences. Track all your changes until you get a good feel for how things work. Managing your list is time-consuming, but it’s also the best source of sales you can find.

Triggers

You get to specify whatever email triggers you want. They are a series of automation rules that have marketing outcomes. You may set a particular trigger when a visitor visits a web page. Perhaps you’ll send them a link to a free, downloadable PDF. You may send a discount coupon to someone who abandons a cart.

The basic idea is that you automatically message someone based on their actions. Marketers find this feature to be compelling because it allows them to send an email when it has the most impact!

Sequences

These emails serve a different purpose. They are a series of emails sent in increments to subscribers. On day one the marketer will probably introduce herself and cover basics. On day three she may unveil an exclusive offer. On day seven she may offer a discount. Marketers construct the series in a way to increase sales every step of the way. There are various schools of thoughts on the best way to proceed, but it’s up to you. You know your clients better than anyone else. Structure your series in a way that gets people who are on the fence to opt in.

It takes a bit of effort to get an email marketing series right. You can follow existing suggestions, but you’ll still need to tweak it yourself. Like most things in marketing, it takes a lot of testing to gain reliable results.

Email List

At its core, your email list is merely a database of the email addresses you collect. You’ll need to maintain your list to keep it fresh and deliverable. Most ESPs suggest that you have your subscribers double opt-in. The reason they do this is to ensure the email is legit. Any list that has lots of bad addresses on it suffers from poor deliverability. If the people on your list aren’t responsive, you also have a problem. If your open rates are very low, most mail providers will automatically mark your messages as spam. If this happens too much, you’ll end up in the Bulk, Promotional, or Spam folders. That means your prospects will rarely see your messages!

Avoid all of this by pruning the people who don’t open after a certain number of mailings. They’re just not that into you so letting them go should be no problem! Lists with no hard or soft bounces that you clean often will have open rates higher than the industry average. Many marketers aren’t ruthless enough about cutting the uninterested. They think that more is better, even though the opposite is true in email marketing.

Email marketing is not as easy as most people think. If you decide on hiring a third party, there are many freelancers or digital marketing agencies that can do the work. The choice is yours and is simply a matter of what will get you the most bang for the buck. If you decide to do it yourself, start with the basics and work your way up. You’ll get the hang of sending winning email campaigns soon enough.