Email Marketing is the process of marketing your target audience by sending emails to them. It’s being used by many businesses from different industries and it has been proved quite effective.
Why you should use Email Marketing
Having a list of emails of potential clients is one of the most powerful and cheapest ways to promote your business.
And once you collect emails into a list you can start sending emails of useful and promotional content to your contacts.
This is a powerful method, because people will always look through their emails at least once per day.
It's not like social media, where a post you make may or may not be seen by your followers.
How you can use Email Marketing
The 1st step into using email marketing to promote your business is to create an account in an email list software (a.k.a. email autoresponders).
It is also possible to create an email list manually into an excel sheet but using email software helps you waste way less time by automating the process of collecting and sending emails.
The 2nd step is to create online forms on your website.
These forms can be contact forms, quizzes, questionnaires, pop-up forms... basically any type of form that asks for the user's email address.
Below is an example of a pop-up form that asks the user's email address in exchange for a case study.
Notice also the very small text on the bottom of the form which should always be included so as you can be GDPR compliant.
A lead generation pop-up form
The 3rd step is to go to your email autoresponder and create a master list.
The 4th step is to connect the list you created in step 3 with your website’s forms that you created in step 2, so as the email addresses that people give you through these forms can be put together into a list.
Like in the image below, you can have a list of all the people who have expressed interest in your services (Master list).
And you can have a smaller list that only contains your clients.
2 Email lists in ActiveCampaign
Email autoresponder vs classic email service
So, if for example you want to inform every contact that has given you their email address about a new blog​ post that you wrote or about an event that you are organizing you can send that email to your Master list.
But if you want to tell something only to your clients (e.g. inform them that you moved into a new office) you can send that email to your Clients list.
In both cases the process is that you write the email, you select the appropriate list, you click send and the email goes to all these people instantly.
Besides that, each contact can’t see that you sent the same email to them and another 299 people.
If you wanted to do the same thing without using an email autoresponder, you would have two options (which both suck):
- You would either go to your Gmail (or Outlook etc.) and you would copy paste all the email addresses into the recipient field and every contact of yours would be able to see that you sent an email to them and another 299 people.
- Or in order to avoid that you would have to send the same email to 300 people one by one (good luck with that).
Manually sending an email to a large list of recipients
The only way to send an email to a lot of people at the same time fast and without including 300 people into your recipients field is by using an email autoresponder.
Which email autoresponder you should use
In regard to which email software you should pick, I would suggest ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is a very easy-to-use tool that helps you send newsletters and create powerful automations. It also offers the most advanced A/B testing features that you can find out there.
Now as far as linking your website to a service like ActiveCampaign, this can be done quite easily if your website is built with a website builder like WordPress, Wix etc. (you will find a YouTube video on how to do it for sure).
If, however your website is built with custom code then it will require some more work.
How to avoid landing in the Spam folder
In order to help your chances that your emails don’t land to your recipients’ Spam folder you can do 2 things:
- Select a good autoresponder email software. ActiveCampaign has a very good reputation on that matter.
- Clean up your list of contacts. If there is a large percentage of your contacts in your list who don’t open your emails, you shouldn’t keep emailing them. Mailing an 1% open rate list (i.e. 1 out of 100 contacts open your emails) over and over and over is the definition of spam. Just delete the contacts who haven’t opened an email for the last two months.
It is now or never
Email marketing is not a new marketing tool. It has been around for some time now, but it doesn’t look like it is going anywhere.
Even though there are other similar marketing techniques like messenger marketing that have appeared more recently, email marketing will stay relevant as long as people keep using email as a form of communication.
And it looks like email will be used for at least another 10 years from now. So, don’t worry about that and jump on the email marketing train ASAP!
Are you actually utilizing email marketing as part of your marketing strategy? Drop me a comment below. I would love to learn more.
Until next time.
