Expert Advice on Launching Your First Email Marketing Campaign

When utilized perfectly, email can be a very effective marketing channel. It’s affordable, and I believe that with the appropriate coaching, anyone can design effective campaigns, making it great for small business owners or solopreneurs. The best way to Buy SMTP Service from NitroMail.io.

Email allows you to communicate with your audience, nurture prospects honestly, and eventually convert them into consumers. You may also automate all your campaigns, so you won’t have to spend hours working on them daily, allowing you more time to focus on other aspects of your business.

With over ten years of marketing experience, I’ve created a forthright step-by-step approach to launching your first campaign.

Step 1: Make a list.

Of course, email is only helpful if you have a list of people who have permitted you to contact them. As a result, you’ll need to start thinking about making a list.

By permission, I mean they willingly provided you with their email address. However, simply asking customers to enter their email addresses is often insufficient to persuade them to do so – they want to know ‘what’s in it for me?’ so you must provide a value exchange (also known as a lead magnet) such as a discount code, free pdf download, eBook, or email series.

Also, inform them what kinds of things you’ll send them, such as how, as members, they’ll be the first to hear about new offers/ranges/releases.

Furthermore, emailing folks who have yet to request to be contacted is considerably less likely to result in a customer.

Step 2: Select an email service provider (ESP).

Simply put, an email marketing service provider (ESP) allows you to send email marketing campaigns to a list of prospects. Most ESPs also offer various associated services, such as developing and building your subscriber list, customizing your email templates, adding customization and dynamic content (material targeted to a specific audience), and reporting and analysis.

To get you started, here is a small list of ESPs you might want to look into:

Constant Communication

MailChimp

Campaign Management

When deciding which provider is best for you, consider how you intend to use email in your business and what features you will require.

You don’t want to overcomplicate things when you’re just starting, so we’ve put together a quick check-list of the essential items to look for:

Is there a variety of eye-catching templates available from the provider? Furthermore, most people open emails on mobile devices, so ensure that their templates are mobile-friendly, ensuring that your emails appear great no matter what platform they are viewed on.

The capacity to plan your marketing.

Simple tracking and reporting: You’ll want to keep track of your emails’ performance, so ensure your ESP has an easy-to-use reporting dashboard to quickly check your opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes.

Support: Regardless of how simple their platform is, you will sometimes require assistance. Check to see if your ESP has a support crew you can contact at any time of day or night.

Budget: Once you’ve narrowed down a few ESPs based on the elements above, you’ll want to look into their costs to ensure that the service works within your budget. Many companies will provide monthly subscriptions based on the number of people on your list.

Delivery: It’s no good to spend valuable time building campaigns only to discover that they never reach the customer’s inbox! Check that your preferred ESP has a delivery rate of at least 98%.

Step 3: Make an email!

This is the fascinating section where you may express yourself creatively. And don’t worry if you’re not creative; it’s optional for designing good advertisements!

Here are a few basic practices to ensure your email isn’t in the trash!

What is the goal? You must first assess the campaign’s objective(s) – what is the email attempting to accomplish? Also, be specific. Also, consider who you are speaking with. Keep your consumer in mind while creating your email, and make sure the material is benefit-driven – the reader will want to know what’s in it for them within seconds.

Copy:

Try to keep the copy brief and use bullet points to break it up.
Consider what you want the receiver to do – what action they should take.
Make it quite clear!

This brings us to…

Make the call to action stand out so that it is impossible to overlook. A colorful button with wording telling them precisely what to do (e.g., Get a quote / Register here / Get your free eBook) should suffice. Remember that you can utilize multiple buttons and that two to three buttons are preferred. However, you can always try this in the future.

The topic line should be noticed! So many people need to pay more attention to the subject line, which is essential because it quickly opens your email! Make it beneficial to the lead and not too long. It should make your receiver feel as though they’ll miss out if they don’t open the email to see what’s inside – they can’t help themselves; they have to open your email!

Images: Images may bring your email to life and give it a polished and professional vibe – but use them sparingly! Why? Although the email may look great with photos enabled, many email clients will not automatically allow images to, or they will not load if there is a poor internet connection. As a result, the consumer may see many blank boxes, losing your message. A good suggestion is to include “alt tag” descriptions to your photos so that if the images are not displayed, a text alternative will be provided to fill in the blank. For instance, if you’re showing a picture of a product, use the product name as the alt tag.

Ensure your logo is at the top of the email so the customer immediately recognizes who it is from, increasing the likelihood that they will want to know what you say.

Personalization: At the absolute least, include the recipient’s name in the email. You can also have it in the subject line (to check how it affects your open rates, send 50% with no representation in the subject line and 50% with the word to see which works better).

Footer: Always provide a genuine contact address after your emails, generally in a ‘footer’ section rather than in the main body of the email.

Unsubscribe: In every message you send, you must provide customers the option to opt out of receiving future communications from you – and you must also act on it. Becoming acquainted with your country’s data protection regulations is a good idea. In the United Kingdom, you must follow the Data Protection Act and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations for electronic communications such as email.

Proofreading is the tedious part! After finishing your email, review it several times to check for spelling, typos, and grammatical errors. It can also be beneficial to show it to someone else since they frequently notice things you overlooked.

SEND! When you’re finished, choose who you want to send it to (or send it to everyone on your list) and push send!

Step 4: Assess the success

Did anyone read your email after all that effort?

When analyzing your campaign, revisit the campaign’s initial objectives to establish which metrics you will use to measure performance. Of course, open rates and click-throughs (how many people clicked the call to action) are always significant, but you may also want to know what the customer did after they clicked through – the onward journey. For example, how many clicks resulted in successful downloads if given a free eBook download? How many transactions resulted from that email campaign if you were attempting to encourage them to buy anything? You get the idea.

And last but not least…

Step 5: Experiment and Learn

As you gain confidence and experience using email as a marketing tool, you can begin to experiment with different features such as subject lines, time of day, day of the week, offer kinds (i.e., a percentage off vs. a £ discount), email length (short vs. long prose), graphics, and so on. The list goes on and on! So even a minor improvement in open rates can significantly influence your efforts’ performance.

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