How To Get Started With Email Marketing

Email

Guide To Getting Started

Welcome to Starting Email Marketing! Your 1-stop shop for learning how to get started with email marketing. Email is the most efficient direct mail marketing channels and very important for both small and enterprise-level entities. Getting started is quick and easy!

 

Table Of Contents:

 

Why Your Business Needs Email Marketing

Emails Are Easy To Collect – There’s a good chance you’ve already got a list of email addresses of your current customers. That means you’ve already got the data necessary to get started with email marketing. It is also very simple to add signup forms to your website, social media and other web properties.

Email Marketing Is Easy – Email marketing has never been easier. Most email marketing platforms come with a visual editor. That makes it incredibly simple to build out your own campaigns. Save templates to make putting together newsletters a breeze.

Email Marketing Is Affordable – Email marketing is insanely affordable. Some plans start for under $10 per month. Most platforms offer marketers a free trial period, and some platforms even offer forever free plans, although they usually don’t contain all the features and are only for lists under a certain size.

Email Marketing Is Effective – Email marketing is an insanely effective marketing channel. This is especially true when marketers setup highly relevant drip campaigns with tons of personalized content.

Email Marketing Fits Into Cross-Channel – If you’re going for the cross-channel approach to marketing, email is essential. Not everyone checks their mail daily, always has reception or wifi, but just about everyone has an email address.

Email Marketing Is Highly Automated – With drip campaigns and other forms of Marketing Automation, you can now build highly automated campaigns. Not only do these campaigns constantly run in the background, but they generally have insanely high open and click-through rates. This is because the series are much more relevant than regular “email blasts”.

Checklist Of What’s Required:

  • Email Marketing Platform – First you’ll need an email marketing platform. This is for managing and launching the email marketing campaign. Further down on this page is a link to additional information on how to select the best platform for your company.
  • Recipients To Email To – You’ll also need your mailing list. If you’re able to export customer data from a CRM or POS, you’re ahead of the game. Otherwise, you’ll need to start opting-in email recipients. There’s many different tactics for doing this, ranging from web-based opt-in forms, social media opt-ins, CRM integration and much, much more.
  • Content / Visual Assets – Last, but not least, you’ll need all the visual assets and content to build out the newsletters. Most platforms make it easy to create your very own branded templates. That means once you’ve got your logo and other visual assets in place, you’ll just have to go through and change up the newsletter content every time you send.

 

How Much Does It Cost To Get Started?

It’s actually possible to get started with email marketing free of charge. There are certain providers that offer Forever Free plans. These plans are usually limited features and only for x-amount of recipients. If you’re a bootstrapped startup or non-profit, this is still great news!

All the other solutions offer very affordable starter plans. This ranges from around $10-$20 per month.  Most plans are tiered based on number of recipients, but there are email solution-providers who charge per number of emails sent. Keep in mind that some solutions have different pricing packages with different features and options.

Compare Email Marketing Prices Now!

 

Signing Up For An Email Marketing Solution

The registration process is pretty comparable for each email marketing platform. Pretty much every email marketing platform available offers a free trial. Some require you to provide credit card information upfront, while others don’t. When registering, you’ll have to provide all the business details and contact information for the company. Once the registration process is completed, and you’ve verified your email, you’ll be able to login to the platform and start working.
 

How To Pick The Right Email Marketing Platform

Choosing an email marketing platform is very important. You want to make sure you pick the right one, as switching from one platform to another is very time-consuming. You’ll have to learn how to use the new program, rebuild all your campaigns, swap out all the opt-in forms and re-import your lists.

I would highly suggest going for a platform that allows for a lot of personalization and automation features such as drip-campaigns. You can find platforms with all these features at the same price-points as the entry-level platforms. Even if you’re not using these features right away, it’s nice to have them available if you ever do decide to start using them.

The link below contains some additional tips for selecting the best email marketing solution for your company.

Tips For Choosing The Right Email Marketing Platform

 

Building Up The Email Marketing List

Now that you’ve got the email platform, it’s time to build up the marketing list. If you’ve already got customer data that you’re able to import, you’re ahead of the game. If not, opting-in recipients is very important! Luckily there’s tons of ways to do that.

Every single email marketing platform will generate an email signup form that you can add to your website or blog. This is the single best way to generate email leads. Many of the platforms will also integrate with Facebook and other social networks. There’s also other creative ways to opt-in recipients, such as QR codes, collecting emails at trade-shows and other events, syncing with CRMs and other systems and many more tactics.

The article linked-to below contains a lot more information on how to build up your email marketing list.

Tips For Opting-In Email Recipients

 

Building And Sending Email Campaigns

Now that you’ve got the recipients opted-in, it’s time to build the campaigns. All the leading email marketing solutions will have an easy to use visual email designer and campaign builder. Many of these feature drag-and-drop “widgets” that could either be text, image or a special widget that accomplishes a specific function; embedding YouTube videos or displaying social sharing icons, for example.

Although the process of building campaigns varies slightly from each platforms, each platform will walk you through the process of creating the campaign step-by-step. The various steps include creating the email message, selecting the recipients, selecting the from email address, title, ect. Scheduling the send and all other tasks involved with building and sending the campaign.

There’s also other type of campaigns besides regular email blasts. These campaigns include autoresponders, automated workflows, RSS-based emails and more. Many of these automated campaigns can be built to run in the background. This puts email marketing on autopilot and can drastically increase open and click rates when built correctly.

Different Types Of Email Marketing Campaigns

 

Integrating Email Marketing With Different Products

Various email marketing platforms can integrate into different products and services. This is done through API and many of the email marketing solutions make it as simple as clicking a few buttons to link the services. For those that don’t; if you’re don’t mind reading through some documentation and manually integrating, anything is still possible.

Syncing the email marketing platform to your CRM, POS, analytical suites and other platforms can greatly increase the effectiveness of the email marketing. You’ll be able to import new email addresses, other recipient information that can be used for segmentation or personalization and much more.

If product integration is something that is important to your company, be sure to make sure the email marketing platform can integrate with the products you’re using.
 

More Resources For Email Marketers

Blog – Our blog is full of all kinds of goodies. This ranges to information about the different companies, best practices, email marketing news, reviews and much more.

Webinars – Check out our webinar sections to see a wide selection of email marketing webinars. These range from product overviews and demonstrations