Email marketing is all about sending your actual or potential clients/customers emails that ultimately help you achieve your objectives. That may be increased sales, more awareness of and engagement with your cause, greater participation in activities... whatever it is that your organisation exists for.
Email marketing is generally you talking to many. Of course you could write a personal email, one at a time, to each of your contacts, customers, and visitors - but ain’t nobody got time for dat!
Enter email marketing tools and technologies. The really (really) good news is that it’s no longer rocket science to use them, to create personalised emails that are interesting AND useful to the recipient. In fact, it’s getting remarkably easy.
Here’s the 4 things you need to get going with email marketing;
1. An email marketing platform
This is the ‘engine’ of your email marketing. While you could manage things using spreadsheets and your own mailing lists, you are going to find it much much easier and more efficient to subscribe to an email marketing service (aka platform). It’s what they do, and so they tend to be good at it - saving you time, making things work, providing tools and resources to ease the process.
There are quite a few to choose from, and a new entrant comes along regularly. As always with this sort of thing, you are going to ultimately be more successful by doing a bit of research, trialling what you feel to be the top current contenders, and sticking with the one you like best. Chopping & changing to the latest & greatest may get you a better system, but you will lose swathes of productivity while you swap over and learn the new system. So the strong advice is to stick with what you have and milk it for all its worth.
Some of these email marketing platforms give you a free starting level, some give you free trials for a period, some you have to pay for from the get-go. They all aim to do the same thing - enable you to send emails to groups of email addresses, make sure they get delivered, handle any errors like invalid email account, and automate the process for unsubscribing. Most will provide templates (including your own branded ones) so you can achieve a consistent look and feel and include standard info like your website address, contact details, or whatever else you want every email to show.
Most will also step you through how to set things up and get started. They are making it genuinely easy. So, you have the platform. What next?
2. An audience
Of course, you need people to send your emails to. Now you simply can’t (and shouldn’t) go trawling for the email address of anyone and everyone you can find. In these days of privacy policies and legally-enforcable anti spam laws, you will need the permission of the recipient to send your emails. This permission can be explicit, for example by using a signup form on your website, or permission can be implicit, for example by someone purchasing a product/service from you.
Best advice is to make it clear to people that you will be emailing them in future, regardless of how they get added to your mailing list. Not only is this good practice from a legal perspective, it also makes sense in terms of what you are trying to achieve - sending unwanted emails, or even worse annoying emails, to your contacts may result in not just unsubscribes but reports as spam. THAT can get your email marketing platform to suspend or even close your account, without notice, and with a difficult recovery process. And really, are you going to be able to get that person to buy into what you want them to do by annoying them? No.
If you already have a list of contacts, you will be able to import them en masse into your email marketing platform. You will need to confirm that you have the OK from those contacts to do that, and it would be wise to make sure the contacts are from the last 1-2 years. Older than that and you risk significant numbers of expired/closed/invalid email addresses which again count against you as a black mark.
Make sure you take advantage of any opportunity to add people to your mailing list. A signup form scattered throughout your website, freebies and lead magnets where you provide something of value in return for their email address, paper forms at exhibitions and events, encouragement in your marketing emails to spread the word with a link to a signup form... do what you can to make it easy for people to join in.
By the way, most email marketing platforms will provide signup forms for you - no coding required. And many website form-builders integrate with email marketing platforms to directly send over the data (nothing for you to do, always a bonus!).
And now you have the technology and the audience, what next?
3. Your computer
Well, all you need to do is to actually write the marketing emails. And this is, thankfully, quite straightforward. Whichever platform you go with will have its own way, its own process, for creating a new marketing email (or sequence of emails) but they all aim to make it as easy as possible. You will need only your computer and internet access - it’s all done online, no software to download/install/maintain.
You can write a plain text email just like you would one-on-one. Or you can get fancy with layouts, background colours, headers/footers etc. But you may like to hear that in fact it’s the simpler emails that have more effect. They feel more ‘real’ and personal, and reduce the instant “they’re selling something” barriers people now put up for beautiful but salesy emails.
Which leads to the final thing you need for effective email marketing;
4. Your brain / an idea
This of course is the easy-to-say not-so-easy-to-do bit. It is the magical ingredient, and it is what will make your efforts successful or otherwise.
The key question is, what do you want to share with your audience? You’ll know from personal experience if someone sends you an email which basically says “BUY THIS”, you’ll switch off fast and look for that Unsubscribe link. So aim to provide information that is of use to the recipient.
A side note here - most email marketing platforms allow you to pull out sub-groups from your contact list, for example, people who purchased within the last 3 months, people who have a dog, people who are in a particular area. You’ll need to have collected and stored this data beforehand, but the principle is that you can create sub-groups that you KNOW the email will be relevant to, and ignore everyone else on your list. This makes it easy to personalise emails.
Bear in mind that you don’t need to be perfect. Whatever it is you do and offer, there are people who want to know about it and its place in the world. Look for stories associated with you and your offering. Use personal experiences or customer experiences. The more emails you send, the better you’ll get at it. You should aim to build a better relationship with our readers - it certainly doesn’t hurt to ask them what they want to hear from you.
A bit of brainstorming would be useful too. Jot down anything and everything that you can think of that could be put into an email. Then use that list to pull out and create email after email.
Here’s a thing - be sure that EVERY email has a point. You are, after all, marketing to your contacts for a reason. Are you establishing authority/expertise? Are you promoting a particular aspect of your product/service? Is there something new afoot? Are you changing how the product/service is seen or used?
In other words, keep in mind what results you want out of each email and be sure the email contributes to achieving them by including the links, information, or data required.
Above all make it easy for people. New product? Link straight to the product details in your website (NOT the home page).
Email marketing works
To finish off, know that email marketing is still very effective, in spite of decades of use and the massive spam problem everybody is familiar with. Why does it work? Because it comes to us at our convenience. And we like things that come to us at our convenience.
Emails that are useful or entertaining, that are relevant to our lives, that give us some sort of benefit, are going to be happily received.
See if you can create some of your own.
And by the way, if you’d like some help getting your email marketing put together and under way, get in touch. It’s something I think is a lot of fun AND can bring great rewards.
