The Ultimate Guide To Email Marketing

Believe it or not, email has been around for over 40 years. For as long as it has been used to send messages to friends and family, it has also been used to generate interest or promote awareness of products and services. Email marketing is a cornerstone marketing channel for many businesses. These days, marketing channels can include SMS text messaging, video ads, social influence, direct response, direct mail, pop-ups, pop-unders, banner ads, and other forms of pay-per-click advertising. With all the options out there, some might feel that email marketing is outdated, or not as powerful as it once was. This may be true for some businesses, but certainly not true for all businesses. 

We are going to show you how you get started or even improve your current email marketing. If you ever have any questions along the way, feel free to reach out to us by email (see what we did there) chat or give us a call.

Before we discuss why you should use email marketing, let’s take a few minutes to understand how it works. Compared to other marketing channels, email marketing can be one of your lowest investments for advertising. 

What is Your Reason for Email Marketing? Do You Want To…

• Generate Leads
• Promote New Products
• Share Content
• Build Meaningful Relationships
• Generate Brand Awareness
• Keep in Touch With Prospects
• Announce Specials
• Update Clients & Prospects About COVID-19 Impacts

There are many ways and appropriate times to reach out to those who want to be on your email lists. This is not a complete list. Perhaps your company as other specific goals or reasons to make use of email marketing.

A Few Statistics About Email Marketing

A quick search on Google will net a wide number of results showing approximately 2.6 Billion email users in the world. That’s a lot of potential clients. According to a survey completed by Litmus in 2018, email marketing return on investment is 38:1 on average. Email marketing has high conversion rates than social media. In fact, over 80% of executives rely on email marketing to drive customer acquisition and retention. Personalized emails can deliver 6 times higher transactions than just blasted out generic emails. Interestingly over 70% of businesses fail to use them according to an Experian Marketing Study.

Another interesting bonus to email marketing is you own the marketing channel. As long as you stick to and adhere to compliance regulations, you can mail when and why you reach out to your own subscribers. This includes how often and what content!

Brainstorm, kick around ideas, and figure out your marketing strategy. You need to think like your prospects, and you need your emails to stand out from the other 100+ emails they receive every day. Here are 7 items you need to define in order to effectively plan your strategy.

1. Define Your Goals – Is there more than one goal? Specific answers will help you plan specific actions to meet Increase sales. You need to be realistic in your goals. If you are selling kitchen remodeling and only want to market to people living in a specific neighborhood, great. But you can’t expect more jobs than the market will bear.
2. Understand Your Audience – This requires some research and understanding. Selling electric blankets to people in South Florida isn’t going to get the same response as other parts of the country. Think pain points, and how to offer a solution.
3. Make it Easy – When a visitor is on your website you want to make sure it is easy for them to sign up for your newsletters, updates, or special offers. Don’t ask too many questions, to slow down their decision or change their mind.
4. Decide What to Send – This is typically called the type of campaign. Newsletters? Offers? Surveys? Blogs?
5. What’s Working – You need to pay attention to the results. How many emails are being delivered, returned, opened, and offers clicked on? You have to understand the reports, see if what you sent is reaching the goals you set out to accomplish. Finally, you need to make adjustments to increase your results.

Got it? Great! Now let’s talk about building this list of prospects that are you going to reach out.

 

Next, you need to add a place on your website for people to sign up. That’s it. Now just sit back and watch the signups roll in. Ok, so it’s not that easy. So once you add the signup area to your website how do you let people know? You have a few options that include loss leaders, lead magnets, and other enticing offers. Make sure its clear what they will receive, and even how often you plan to sent info to them. You might want to consider a form that has options they can opt-in for. Perhaps they want that monthly recipe but they also would like to receive current sales items. Here are a few suggestions, and buying an email list is NOT and option.

1.  Search Current Prospects – This might seem obvious, but take the time to go through your emails looking for prospects you recently interacted with. Perhaps you answered a question or directed them to an area on your website. Make sure to drop them an email and invite them to sign up. Give them a coupon or other incentive to do so.
2. Order Forms – Do you have an order form on your website or a “Contact Us” form? Perhaps it makes sense in your business to add an opt-in button they can click to receive future offers.
3. Exit Popups – Not everyone likes them, not everyone uses them, but they do work. As a person leaves your website a pop-up reminds them of an offer they are going to miss by leaving now.
4. Discount Spins – Sell a product or service that can be purchased online? Why not offer them a fun way to receive a discount. Better yet, make them sign up with an email to receive the discount code.
5. What Your Customer Wants – Every business is different, you should know your customers and their interests. Build an incentive that speaks to them. You’ll find your sign-ups will increase.

There are many options available. When Red 3 Media manages email campaigns for our clients, we will do the research and will test and test and test, always making adjustments to get the most out of your website sign ups.

There are a number of email marketing platforms on the market. Some platforms promote their low price (you get what you pay for!) Others promote more services and add-ons that may not be necessary as you get started. After years of trying out many platforms, we still love using Constant Contact. We love the ease of use along with the robust reporting that is not overly complicated. Even setting up an account is easy and doesn’t take long. We are a certified partner with Constant Contact so we can offer you some pretty sweet deals and support. Click on the button to sign up for a free trial, you don’t even need to use a credit card!

 

Once your account is active you can upload your list of contact that you have collected from your website. They will ask you a few questions to make sure you have permission to mail to the list. Never purchase an email marketing list. You can read more about why you should never purchase email marketing lists here. There are various tutorials, templates, and suggestions that will help you get your first email on its way. Constant Contact charges a monthly fee based on the number of verified contacts in your account. This means you only pay for what you need. There is no cost per send out and no limit on how often or how many emails. Email platforms like Constant Contact also manage opt-out requests, duplicates, and email permission for each person.

No matter what email platform you choose, make sure you understand what you are allowed to do. You will want to make sure your lists are clean and verified. This will keep you in compliance, and more importantly increase the effectiveness of your email marketing.

 

Email marketing is only successful if you take the time to build a good list. Using the suggestions above you can really make progress. Just remember this is not a, set it and forget it type of thing. You’ll want to take time to look over your website analytics as well. How many people are leaving your website without signing up? What page do they leave on? Are they even seeing our sign up the offer before they leave your site? The one thing that you won’t have to worry about is compliance if you decide to work with the Constant Contact platform. They handle all the heavy lifting. If someone request to be taken off your list, this is done for you. If someone wants to be added, they complete the form, submit it and their information is saved the correct list.

There are other ways that your list and your emails can be classified as spam. This would be bad as your conversion rates would plummet since they are not reaching the people. A very good resource for knowing what is avoid can be found in this article regarding Email Permission. Here are a few suggestions for creating an email that is not “spammy”:

• Make sure the email and any pages you want the person to go to are related. How so? If you are offering a 15% discount, make sure any links take the person to pages that refer specifically to the offer they were made. If the content doesn’t match up, they may back out and leave confused.
• Always choose double opt-in for your sign up forms. This simply means that after someone signs up, they then will need to confirm with an email. This makes sure the submission on your website was correct, and also shows you are serious about the safety of their contact information.
• As we mentioned before, keep the form simple. Don’t ask too many questions, or request too much info. You can usually get this info in later emails or interactions. Your goal is to get the person to sign up for your list so you can convince them to do business with you or engage with your website.
• Make certain to always test out the form. I used to always ask my grandmother to try out new marketing flows online. She knew enough to get around online, and she would always be able to let me know if she had any problems or questions along the way.

Once you plan, design and create your first email campaign, you’ll want to watch the statistics carefully. In particular there are 3 reports you should review:

1. How many emails were rejected? This will help you to keep your lists clean. Look over this report carefully. If you manually typed in any email addresses, make sure they are accurate. If an email was undeliverable, check the reason. If that address doesn’t exist, you’ll want to remove it from your list. This will save you money since you only pay constant contact on email addresses in your account.
2. How many people opened your emails. This number will help you to see if the subject line was strong enough for the person to open the email. 
3. What percentage of people that opened your emails, actually completed the call to action. This is your conversion rate. What the percentage is doesn’t really matter. It’s different for each company. If you are looking for 50 conversions or 1 conversion, the question is, did you reach your goal.

If you look at no other reports or numbers other then these 3, you will have a basic understanding of how your campaign is working. Once you are familiar with the basics you can try out other options and formats. Perhaps you can send out a survey. You can also start to add other features like automatic emails and drip campaigns. The key here is to understand your prospects and making changes to help improve your response rate.

 

Keeping track of the results of each email campaign is easy with Constant Contact. You can always go through previous campaigns to look for trends, what work, and what didn’t. You need to be creative when writing headlines and the content of your emails. The average person gets over 100 emails a day. While you want to grab the recipient’s attention, you also don’t want to be too funny and end up in spam. What makes you open an email and read beyond the subject line. We have several that we have used over the years, but they probably wouldn’t work for your business. Don’t over-promise and make sure that the body of the email or the offer expands on the subject. If the subject line and body are different, it may impact your results.

Use personalized email options. With Constant Contact, you can merge in fields that you have collected from each recipient. Name, Company, Title, and other information can be used to create personalized emails for each prospect. We know that this works based on the campaigns we manage. The content you write for your email need to be informative and a quick read. Getting overly detailed or technical can turn off some readers. Instead focus on problems they may be facing, ones common to their business, and offer a solution. If you can provide reliable and accurate information, you in turn will build trust. Remember people do business with those they trust.

 

Sure we could tell you how long we have been in business and who we have worked for over the years. What more important is what can we do for you? If you have more time than money, then follow the suggestions on this page and start building your email marketing channel. If you don’t have the time, and would rather focus on running your business, then reach out to us. Our pricing is very straightforward. Let’s have a conversation understanding your goals. Once we know what is needed to reach these goals, we will provide you with a flat monthly rate. If at any time we do not perform to your expectations, you can cancel our services. For over 20 years we have operated on this principle of never locking a client into any long term agreement.

Complete the form below and we’ll follow up with you in a few hours. We can talk by email, over the phone, or even with Zoom Video Conferencing if you would like. We are based here in the USA and all our experts on staff live here as well. And for the past few months, we have all been working from home, getting used to the “new normal” hereafter COVID-19. We hope this article helped out, and we look forward to working with you.