Successful Email Marketing for Beginners

by Rahimah Sultan

Before the World Wide Web as we know it today, one piece of Internet history was AOL and its “You’ve got mail,” message.

That was our introduction to email.

Social media has replaced that with tweets, likes, and status updates. But we still love our email.

You could say that the inbox has become a place of solitude among the chaos. Here are some tips on successful email marketing for beginners.

People are overwhelmed with pitches and advertisements, and your messages look just like all the others. In order to be invited into their inbox you must take the following steps.

Phase I: Get permission

No email campaign was ever built without permission to start, so you need to begin building a list.

There are several ways you can do this. You can give away something for free or offer a newsletter or product updates.

You need a clear purpose for asking for an email address. A strong, clear, and concise call to action (CTA) is needed that states what will be received in exchange for the email address. Some of the things people want to know…

a) What will I get?
b) Will I be spammed?
c) How often will you email?
d) Will I get relevant offers or more junk?

Be specific in your CTA regarding what you’re offering. It could be a free how-to email series, a download such as an ebook or newsletter and product updates and releases.

Get Whitelisted

While almost all reputable email service providers work very hard to make sure that your emails are not blocked by major ISP’s, they can’t control whether or not your emails hit the inbox or the spam box. Although most will help you by providing a quality score to help you determine availability, getting whitelisted is the most effective way to ensure that your emails get delivered properly.

Essentially, getting whitelisted is equivalent to being marked as a friend, and the best way to achieve this is by being added to the recipient’s address book. The best way to do this is by providing instructions to do so at the top of each email, especially on the initial thank you and first follow-up email.

Phase II: Follow Up

Be consistent and do what you promise. If you say that you’ll be emailing once a week, don’t email daily. You’ll be setting yourself up for failure. The same applies if you tell someone it will be daily and you email once a week.

Almost all email service providers give you the option to create an autoresponder sequence, and you must take advantage of it.

You should send the initial follow-up email immediately as a way to introduce yourself and detail what you plan on doing with your new subscriber’s email address. It also needs to contain a link to the freebie you are offering. Then use your autoresponder to schedule your follow-up emails.

Each business has different needs, and there aren’t any hard and fast rules as to how often you can pitch or provide content, but remember that your email list is a permission asset and it’s best to be cautious in order to keep your subscribers.

Use an Autoresponder

Use an autoresponder to schedule content to be delivered on a consistent basis over the course of several days, weeks or even several months.

The benefit of that is when you do need to announce a new product or sale, you can count on the fact that you’ve already been in touch, having built a relationship over several weeks/months, and are much less likely to annoy your readers.

Be sure to schedule your autoresponder sequence on specific days so that you know when you can afford to send an email. Don’t send more than one per day.

Phase III: Analytics and Segmentation

You want to know the statistics of your campaigns. There are several, although three very important ones are open rate, click through rate (CTR), and unsubscribes.

If your open rate is low, it means that people have started to delete upon receipt, and you need to work harder on providing value and/or managing expectations.

If the CTR is low, you should focus on your copy.

If you have a high unsubscribe rate compared to optin-in rate, there’s a lot of work to do.

Determine when people are leaving. If it’s after a certain autoresponder email, then re-work it. If they’re leaving after marketing messages, then change the way you present offers. If they’re leaving early on in your funnel, then you need to fix your original call to action so that it’s in harmony with what you’re sending.

Email analytics will give you very specific clues as to what you’re doing wrong. Of course you must be paying attention.

Segmentation is splitting your email list into groups of subscribers that have something in common and emailing them separately from the rest of your list.

For successful email marketing you must first get permission to email people, follow up with them using your autoresponder, and use analytics to determine what you may need to change for more success.

For beginning marketers these successful email marketing for beginners tips will help you get started.

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