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Getting Started with Email Marketing

Feb 25, 2020 | Tips

The humble email marketing newsletter. It’s been given a bad rap over the years partly because of its misuse however it has still managed to stand the test of time.

Right now, it’s one of the best ways to communicate with people who want to see your products, services, and general content. While Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and any other platform are amazing, the fact is when you post to them you are at the mercy of a machine learning or as it’s more commonly known the machine algorithm. Remember Instagram went from a chronological feed to the algorithm driven feed as we have now!

If you’re interested in looking at the stats for email vs social media, then signup to our newsletter. We have a post coming out on that very soon. Ok let’s get into it.

Step One: Signup to an email service

We use Mailerlite here, but a lot of our customers are using MailChimp. There are plenty of them out there so it’s matter of doing a bit of research to see which is the one you like the best. I would highly recommend just sticking with the main ones as you get started.

Step Two: Figure out what your goals are

You first must think how this will fit into your larger content strategy. You can’t just send through the same content you post on Instagram and Facebook and bundle it up in a newsletter. Do you want it to generate leads or sales, send more traffic to your website or send people to your social media platforms?

Step Three: Get your content

With a clear goal in place, finding the right content becomes a lot easier. It’s also a good idea to produce a schedule so that you send your email at the same time and day each week, fortnight, or month.

Bonus Tip: Consistency is the key to email success

Don’t set yourself a schedule of sending out an email every week if you don’t have the content. And don’t leave it to the last minute. You want your newsletter finished well before the publishing date, so you have time to make changes and fix any errors.

Step Four: Design your template

Here we go, now we are getting into it. You want your email template to be easy to read, your CTAs to stand out and it to load fast. It should also carry on the styling of your current brand. Again, keep it consistent, don’t keep changing your template every email.

Step Five: Drop your content in

Remember to style these to fit your overall brand, optimise any images and make sure your CTAs are linking correctly. If you’ve written the document in Google Docs or Word, put your text into something like Notepad first where it will remove any styling elements that can cause you some headaches.

Double check your content, you can’t fix typos once it’s sent.

Step Six: Personsalise

Make sure your content doesn’t sound generic. While everyone knows you are sending out a batch email, taking the time to personalize it a little, can go a long way.

Step Seven: The subject line

This needs to grab their attention and get them to click it. It’s always good to include some actionable value to get your subscribers to want to open your email. Overtime and with the help of some A/B tests you’ll start to get the hang of it.

Step Eight: Are you legally compliant

There are two major laws you need to be worried about. CAN-SPAM and GDPR. Basically CAN-SPAM require that you have a footer in your email with your address and an effortless way to unsubscribe. GDPR was a law that passed in Europe in 2018 requiring that email marketers only send to those people who manually opted in to receive them. So, you can’t just automatically check the “opt-in” box whenever you collect email addresses for people who live in Europe.

Step Nine: Send

With all that out the way it’s time to send the email and wait. Don’t get caught up checking stats every hour. Leave it for a few days then come back, check the stats, analyse and start setting up your next email and make any changes.

You always need to be testing new ways to display your content and guide users towards your end goal so analyse the stats and make the relevant changes.