A Guide to Email Marketing

It is important to use the platform of email marketing efficiently to increase returns for your business. Luckily, there are numerous marketing tools available to make the process more cost effective and simple while gaining the most amount of conversions.

For anyone who wants to start email marketing, follow these steps:

1. Choose an email marketing service.

When you start the email marketing process, you don’t have to do it all on your own. Providers such as MailChimp, offer everything from design templates to support staff to help you along the way. Every service provides different pricing plans so you can incorporate the service into a marketing budget of any size. If you do not have the time or resources available, a Digital Marketing Agency  such as PortKey Solutions are able to assist.

2. Assemble a database.

Email marketing will not work without an email database. If you are not asking customers or potential customers for their email address at EVERY opportunity, start doing so immediately.  The larger your database, the bigger the chances that customers will respond to your email and engage with your business. Make sure you have subscription options available and visible on your website.

You can also use product giveaways or other incentives on your contact us or about us pages to encourage the submission of email addresses.

3. Validation emails.

Emails come and go, and people tend to change them as frequently also – think changing jobs, forgetting passwords etc and you will get the idea. We live in an age where people are very guarded about giving out personal information and the same rings true for email addresses. Inevitably, many of your target audience will bounce back as undelivered. You can use services such as Email Checker to verify that the list belongs to actual human beings who can make use of your emails and stop the False ones from skewing your reporting data.

4. Email newsletter- YES.

Newsletters need to be clean and clutter free in order to draw your audience. Once you have a mailing list, it is time to move on and design your email.  Your audience needs to be engaged very quickly with catching headlines or compelling content. Pictures are important, however many successful email lists use not graphics at all. Always have a clear “Call to action”.

5. The call to action.

Ok, so now you have built up a database, you have deigned an awesomely catchy email and you need to encourage the reader to do something – as in have a Call to Action. You need to have one, otherwise it is like selling someone the most delicious desert and just telling them where to get it – bring it to them! Include links to your product and try different things, for example, a button instead of a text link can increase conversions by almost 30%.

6. Measure your results. Execute, review, adjust repeat.

Viewing your response metrics is the best way to increase results. You need to constantly optimise campaigns over a period of time in order to become more and more successful and increase your returns.

If you do not do this, you will just be crossing your fingers every time you send out an email and will have no idea how effective the time you have spent, your valuable time, has actually been.