A step-by-step beginner's guide on how to start email marketing?
Welcome to my step-by-step beginner’s guide on How to Start email marketing?
When you start doing research on making money online, most gurus suggest you to get started with email marketing,
But what they do is, they make it sound very difficult leading you to get discouraged.
In this guide, I have given a very easy and simple email marketing tutorial.
So without wasting time let’s get started.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a form of marketing in which you build the email list in your niche using various methods, and later pitch them your own products, offers, affiliate products, and many more things directly.
Importance and Relevance of Email Marketing.
High Conversion Rate
Even in 2022 email marketing is still relevant and has the best conversion rate compared to social media marketing.
In 2019 a proper research study was done on over 1 billion online shopping sessions, and it was found out that email marketing has about 2.3% of conversion rate which is very good compared to 1% of social media marketing.
Your safety as a Marketer
One more important thing to keep in mind is, all the contacts built-in your niche are going to be with you for a lifetime, whereas all the social media following you build can be gone overnight if the platform shuts down,
For instance, Facebook and Instagram were going down frequently in 2021, and many marketers were tensed and worried.
This makes email marketing more important for you in long run.
Building long term Personalized Relationship
Email Marketing is a little slow form of marketing as you need to build trust first.
People don’t like to buy from people who they don’t know or have any sort of prior relation.
The best thing about email marketing is, once you establish your authority and have earned their trust people will buy anything from you.
Even though email marketing is slow, the process to build good relationships with people is easy as they personally have filled the form and signed up for your mail list.
The most important thing to understand with email marketing is you can build good relations with good engaging contact,
But there is a catch here
This can only happen when your content and products are high quality.
How To Start Email Marketing
Choosing Email Provider
Email autoresponders are online email marketing software platforms that help you with the automation of your emails for marketing.
When getting started the very first step is to choose a suitable email marketing autoresponder.
These are the three email software that I have personally used and liked
Mail Chimp
This is one of the best email autoresponders if you are starting as a beginner.
It has paid and free plans, but the free plan is good enough for you to get started.
The user interface is easy to understand and has over 250+ integrations that you can use for free.
It also has a mobile app that you can use at any time.
The free plan MailChimp offers a limit of up to 2,000 subscribers and 10,000 sends per month, to get started this is more than enough for you.
Sender
This is also a good email autoresponder to get started with. The interface is easy to understand, which is very important when getting started.
This is also a freemium platform, where you get a free limited plan, and paid upgrades.
The free plan is enough to get started.
With Sender, you get 2500 subscribers and 15000 mail sends per month, which is low compared to Mailchimp, but still good for a beginner to get started.
ActiveCampaign
I personally use this autoresponder. This is an advanced paid email autoresponder and is very good in my opinion.
The tool has a huge list of features that can up your marketing game, like creating a depth sales funnel with a brilliant automation system.
If you are a beginner you can avoid this, but once you hit that intermediate level, you can opt for this autoresponder.
How to get people to signup for your email list?
Create Lead Magnet
What is a Lead Magnet?
A Lead Magnet is a freebie that you offer to people in your niche as an incentive to sign up for your email list.
Why do you need a Lead Magnet?
To answer this just ask one simple question, why should anyone sign up for your email list?
No one likes getting unnecessary bombardment of emails, so for anyone to go out of the way and signup for your list they need an incentive.
To create this incentive notion and provoke them to take action to signup for your email list you need to create a high-quality lead magnet.
Types of lead magnets that you can create
- Ebooks
- Webinars
- Video Courses
- Free tools like plugins, themes, digital products
- Access to exclusive communities like Facebook group
- Free resource guides
On-page content upgrade
What is On page content upgrade?
A content upgrade is a freebie that you offer to visitors of a specific post page that will help them with that specific post topic.
As they are already on your site reading about the topic, the chances of them signing up for the list become very high.
Example – for someone who is reading a post about How to lose weight at home?
You can create a content upgrade pdf of all the workouts with step by step guide that can be done at home and create a form for that page for them to get access to that workout pdf.
Email Subscription Forms
What is a Form in Email marketing?
The form is an opt-in box that you embed on your website pages where the visitor can fill in their information and subscribe to your list for various reasons like for newsletter, checklist, ebook, etc.
Where should you keep your forms on the website?
Being strategic with the placement of your form is very important. It might seem of little importance but it is not.
The strategic placement of the form helps you with a high subscription conversion rate.
- Home Page – When the visitor visits and see a strong offer right at the top of the page chances of them subscribing becomes high
- Popup Form – You can create popup forms on your home page or post page. The key thing is to set a timer like 30sec time of content scrolling because this would imply that the person is interested in your content and the chances of them subscribing becomes high.
- About Page – This might be one of the ignored pages to embed your form. Don’t do that, because if the person is interested in you, then he or she might be interested in any offer that you have for them.
- Side & Bottom of Page – These are good locations to embed the form because while engaging with your content if they like it, people might get interested in your offer and subscribe to your list
Single vs. Double Opt-in
Single Opt-in – In simple terms single opt-in is, when people sign up for your list they don’t have to confirm they want to receive emails from you, they are directly added to your list and start getting offers from you.
Single opt-in is good to increase your list fast, but the conversion rate is low with people who have signed with single opt-ins.
In my observation single opt-in is good for affiliate marketing business, but in the long run, this will not be as good as double opt-in.
The only benefit that I see with a single opt-in is increasing your list fast.
Double opt-in – As the name suggests, anyone who fills the form and subscribes has to confirm through a mail link that they want to receive emails in the future from you.
As this needs extra efforts the conversion rate is low compared to single opt-in, but the people who take this effort are actually interested in your content and the chances of them engaging with your emails in the future is very high.
To build a good engaging list for long-term business I would suggest going with the double opt-in method.
What is an Email marketing campaign and how to create one?
What is an email marketing campaign?
An email marketing campaign is delivering a set of emails designed for a specific goal like promotional, retention, acquisition, newsletter etc, for specific period of time.
How to create an email campaign?
Step 1 – Campaign Goal
When creating a campaign the first step is to define the goal of your campaign, like for what purpose you are going to be delivering the mails to your list.
Step 2 – Create a list and define the list
The second step is to create a list like for example Home Workout Checklist lead magnet.
Step 3 – Form
Create a form for the list and embed it on your desired page
Step 4 – Create and design your email
Now is the time you start writing and designing your first email.
Tips to create your first email
- Write a good subject line, like make it personalized by using their name or location. The subject line is very important as it is going to decide your email open rate.
- Add your logo and site name, to create brand awareness
- Use low-size images which are related to your email to increase engagement.
- Don’t write long paragraphs, use short paragraphs. This helps you with the engagement.
- Make sure your emails are responsive when loading, and are both desktop and mobile-friendly.
- Write your emails in easy English language.
- Keep your emails to the point, and don’t play around the bush.
- Keep the white space ratio to words high. This increases the engagement duration on your emails.
Step 5 – Automation
All the email auto-responders have an automation feature, rather all the email marketing tools are made for this feature. This is actually where you start your journey of email marketing.
Automation is where you create a sequence of emails for a specific number of days. The goal of this automation system is to give different approaches to the same goal and try to convince them to take action.
For example,
you can set email automation in your sales funnel for people who abandoned the cart just before the payment, with an email explaining to them the additional features, or creating a sense of urgency with price or anything that works well for you.
With automation, you just have to give some time at first to create an in-depth automation sequence considering various events, and this will give rewards for a long time.
Summary
So in this email marketing tutorial, I have covered all the topics that a beginner must know, like what is email marketing to choosing an email auto-responder to lead magnets to create your campaigns.
Now you are ready to get started with email marketing.
Just like SEO, email marketing is also a slow process but pays you a high dividend in the future.
To learn more start implementing fast this is how you will know what not to do and what you should actually do to be successful with email marketing.
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