If you’re wondering how to do email marketing yourself, you’re not alone. Email marketing is one of the best ways to increase your business’s revenue and stay connected to your customers. And email users are expected to increase — right now, there are 3.9 billion daily email users, and this number is expected to climb to 4.3 billion by 2023. 

While email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies for businesses, not everyone has a marketing expert on their team. Luckily, today’s email marketing tools make it easy to set up an email campaign yourself. 

In this guide, we’ll go over the basics of email marketing so that you can feel confident in creating an email marketing campaign on your own. 

1.) Create your email marketing list

First things first, you need to figure out how to build your email marketing subscriber list. 

Common ways of building a subscriber list include: 

• Have an email list opt-in form on your website. Consider offering a coupon or promotion as an incentive to subscribe. 
• Use customer email data from a CRM.  
• Use gated content. Gated content is content that provides useful, helpful, and quality information in exchange for a person’s email address. Examples of gated content could be a tool your customers could use, a long-format ebook, or a white paper. 
• Offer demo requests or free consultations. If it makes sense for your business, consider offering a free demo or consultation on your website. By requiring an email address to book the demo or consultation, you can gather prospect information and add them to your email list. 

Before you add someone to your list, make sure that you have permission to email them. There are two kinds of permissions: implied and express. 

If you have an active, existing business relationship with someone and you have their email, you can add them to your email marketing list under implied permission. While they didn’t give you express permission to receive emails, it can be implied that they are open to emails from your business. For example, if they signed up for a free demo, purchased one of your products or services, or otherwise contacted your business about becoming a customer, you probably have implied permission. 

Express permission is when someone explicitly permits you to contact them. For example, if they filled out the email subscription form on your site or opted-in to business communications. 

2.) Design an email marketing template

While the messages on your emails will change from time to time, it’s important that all your emails stay on-brand, professional, and compliant with CAN-SPAM requirements. Creating a template to start from can save you time when creating emails for new marketing campaigns.

Make sure to include the following on your email template: 

Logo and Brand Colors

Having your logo and brand colors incorporated into your email template will make your emails look more professional and trustworthy. You want people to open your email and trust that it’s coming from your brand. 

Address and Opt-out link

It’s important to include your physical address as well as a clear opt-out link in your emails. These two things are required in accordance with the CAN-SPAM act. You can place these items at the bottom of your email template.

From there, many marketing tools, like Marketing 360®’s email builder, offer content and image blocks you can add to your email marketing template. So, adding a header to your email, additional text, images, and coupons just takes a couple of clicks. 

3.) Plan your email journeys

Now that you have your subscribers and your email template ready to go, it’s time to think about what email journeys to create. An email journey is a pre-made email sequence that people will receive after they take an action on your website. For example, when someone makes a purchase, fills out a demo request, or abandons a cart at checkout, you can add them to an email journey that sends them relevant information depending on what action they took.

Common email journeys include: 

Post-purchase email journeys:  A post-purchase email journey can contain information about their order and shipping, and then a follow-up email once the item is received. 

Request info/demo requests: If someone requests a demo or more information about your services, their email journey should contain information about the specific service they’re interested in. These emails could include more detailed information and examples of the service in action, links to relevant blogs, white papers, and articles about that specific service. 

Reminder emails: If your product is a service or consumable, reminder emails can help you re-engage customers when it’s time for another purchase. For example, an oil change business may create an email journey to remind customers when they need to come in for their next change. 

Abandoned carts: Abandoned cart emails re-engage prospects and encourage them to come back and check out. These emails usually list the items that were abandoned in the cart, and make it easy for the prospect to access their abandoned cart and check out.

Review request emails: It’s helpful to send customers a review request email after they’ve had time to try your product or after their service is completed. Reviews not only provide valuable feedback, but they can also help improve your online authority. 

These are just a few examples of email journeys to set up. An email marketing tool, like the Marketing 360® Nurture app, lets you easily create automated email journeys so you can send the right message at the right time. 

4.) Write compelling email content

The most effective marketing emails capture the reader’s attention and influence them to take a certain action. Here are some tips to create an email copy that works: 

Subject lines

The subject line of your email is arguably the most important line of text that you’ll write. It’s the first thing users see when they open their email account, and it will determine whether or not they click on your email. 

When you’re writing your subject line, consider these tips:

• Be succinct: Subject lines that are too long get cut-off can hurt your click-through-rate.
• Use humor: Stand out among a sea of emails by using humor wisely.
• Use numbers and lists: For example, Southwest Airlines frequently uses low fares in the subject line of their emails. For example, “$39 sale fares. This is your last call”.
• Be personal: Using the recipient’s name in the subject line can make the email more personal and encourage more clicks. 
• Use scarcity: If your stock is getting low or your sale ends soon, you can use scarcity to encourage readers to action. For example, “Only 24 more hours to get these deals” or “Low stock alert: time to buy”
• Create interest: People are naturally curious. By creating intrigue in your subject lines you can entice people to click. For example, a cosmetics company could use the line “The Secret Ingredient In Our Top-Selling Lotions”.

Make sure to keep your brand tone and your audience in mind when writing your subject lines, and always test to see which subject lines worked and which ones didn’t.

There are also some CAN-SPAM rules to keep in mind when writing subject lines: 

• Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
• Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.

Preview text

This is the unbold text that appears after the subject line. This text should increase intrigue and provide more details on what users can expect when they click into the email. 

Email body content

Your email body content should have a specific goal. For example: 

• Promoting a sale or limited-time specials.
• Providing information about a new product or service. 
• Communicating relevant information to the email viewer (shipping notifications, abandoned cart emails, information about demo/free consultation scheduling). 
• Sharing exciting company or product news.

Once someone clicks into your email, your body content should capture their attention and quickly communicate the goal of the email. Keep paragraphs short, and use headers and titles to provide important details up-front. Make the email easily-scannable and engaging. 

Most importantly, don’t spam your subscribers with emails. Only send emails that have a clear goal. If you send too many emails, you risk increasing the number of people who unsubscribe.

Try our DIY marketing software today

Marketing 360®’s email marketing tool makes it easy for businesses to take email marketing into their own hands. With easy list segmentation, modern pre-made email templates, and easy email automation, our tools let you reach the right audience at the right time. Learn more and see our plans and pricing. 

Originally published on 10/29/20