Getting started with email marketing? Experts agree "the money is in the list." In this guide, we'll share the top 10 email marketing strategies for beginners in 2019.
Although it's over four decades old, email marketing is still the most effective channel for making money online today.
In this article, we will discuss the benefits of email marketing, show you how to prepare a proper email marketing strategy, and present you with 10 proven strategies to make your email marketing super successful... even if you're a complete beginner.
Are you ready to get started?
Good. Let’s begin!
Why Email Marketing Strategy is Important
At the risk of repeating ourselves, email marketing is alive and kicking. But it’s not just our opinion... it's a well-known fact recognized by many researchers and case studies.
Don't believe us? Check out these incredible email marketing statistics:
The number of email users worldwide is forecasted to rise to almost three billion in 2019.
More than 70% of users prefer email as their source of business communication.
Almost half of the consumers would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands on a weekly basis.
Email marketing has an average ROI of 3,800% because the typical return for every dollar invested is $38.
We could go on and on, but you get the point.
All these figures have a highly practical value, though. That is, email marketing gives individuals and organizations a plethora of incredible benefits.
Some of the biggest benefits of email marketing are these:
Low-Cost – Emailing is among the cheapest marketing channels because it’s easy to set up and available to almost everybody all over the world.
Widespread – Emails are popular around the globe and you can use them to address almost half of the world’s population.
Targeted – You can segment the audience and target subscriber groups based on their specific features and demands.
Relationship-Building – It’s one of the primary ways marketers strengthen their relationship with their followers.
Content Promotion – Emails are a great way to promote new blog posts, podcasts, and videos.
Powerful Analytics – You can keep an eye on the results of your marketing activities and upgrade as soon as you see the opportunity.
Increases Sales – With all the benefits we mentioned so far, it’s not surprising to learn that email marketing drives conversions and helps companies to grow revenue.
How to Design an Email Marketing Strategy (a Bird's Eye View)
A successful email marketing strategy consists of many different tactics and activities, but first you need to prepare a general outline. You need to understand the big picture.
Digital marketing analysts at EssayWritingLab describe creating an email marketing strategy as a four-step process:
Step 1: Define Your Audience
While the number of email users reaches billions, you definitely cannot cover all of them.
The goal is to narrow down your target group and prepare activities that directly resonate with the needs of your audience.
After all, it’s not the same whether you aim at 20-something IT professionals or middle-aged housewives.
Step 2: Set Goals
The next phase is to set goals and expectations.
What do you want to achieve with email marketing?
Can you determine measurable objectives in terms of deliverability, open and click-through rates?
Pay attention to these parameters because they will help you to measure the results eventually.
Step 3: Create Lead Magnets
Quite the opposite of spamming, lead magnets are highly valuable resources that you give away on your website for free in exchange for the visitor's email address.
Infographics, eBooks, case studies, templates, and tools represent frequently used solutions in this field, but you can also play with many other formats if you believe they would be useful for your audience.
The key word here is useful: you want to make your subscribers so delighted that they will look forward to receiving future emails from you.
Step 4: Grow Your Email List
The last step of the preparation stage is to grow your email list by allowing users to sign up effortlessly.
Create an easy, simple, persuasive email optin form because people don’t want to spend more than a couple seconds filling out your forms.
Top 10 Email Marketing Strategies for Beginners
Now that we have the basics out of the way, it is time to get down to the nitty gritty. Email marketing depends on so many details that it’s almost impossible to mention them all in one post only, but there are still some tactics that prove to be more significant than others.
We will show you here the 10 most important email marketing tricks that can drastically improve your email marketing strategy in the long-term.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at our top 10 picks...
1. Timing and Scheduling: When Is the Best Time to Send Marketing Emails?
Email marketing strategy demands extreme precision. There is nothing random about this channel of communication, which means you ought to make a calendar and schedule sent emails. Make it a periodical process, sending newsletters once a week or three times a month.
This rhythm is enough to keep subscribers interested in your content without pushing it too hard. In case you have a special announcement to make, you can improvise and send an unplanned email to let the audience know about your news.
Bear in mind, however, that you need to plan timing as well. Sunday morning is almost never a good option here, so you better concentrate on work days. A number of studies reveal that users rarely skip emails they receive between Tuesday and Thursday, but don’t run away from Mondays or Fridays either.
Sending emails early in the morning is usually the safest choice because a lot of people check inboxes as soon as they wake up. They do it before switching to more important daily tasks, so you should seize the moment and be the first to address prospects this way.
2. Audience Segmentation: Personalize Your Marketing Emails for Higher Engagement
We mentioned the value of audience segmentation before, but the topic deserves to be discussed more thoroughly. The way you divide subscribers into micro-segments will impact the overall success of the campaign because it allows you to customize content.
Namely, you don’t want to send the same kind of content to every subscriber. Instead, you need to analyze users according to their online behavior and lead magnets they follow. It will give you enough feedback to form different audience groups and create the corresponding content.
As the email marketing specialists at Essay Geeks put it:
“Subscribers come from all stages of the sales funnel, so you can’t treat them the same. On the contrary, you must provide first-time recipients with more general content, while subscribers at the end of the funnel want to read specific product-related information. Besides tailored content, you can address people by their names to make the messages more personal, and it should be enough to make a loyal follower.”
3. Want High Open Rates? How to Write Perfect Subject Lines
A subject line is the first thing users read when they see your message in the inbox. Needless to say, this element has to be perfect in order to grab the attention of your subscribers. But we don’t recommend you jump right on it, but rather wait until you have the entire copy completed. Doing so, you get a much more material to work with, making it easier to write an outstanding title.
Most marketers play it safely by creating short and informative subject lines. This is usually the best option, but you might as well consider a few other possibilities such as:
Evoke curiosity to grab the receiver’s attention immediately. Don’t write clickbait headlines, but a little bit of controversy or humor won’t do you any harm.
Highlight the benefit. For instance, a title like “How to email important people” is straightforward and reveals the benefit of reading your message.
Use numbers to win over data-driven customers. It will make you look professional and highly authoritative.
4. Write Compelling Copy Your Subscribers Love to Read
Now that you are sure of the quality of your subject lines, you must do the rest of the work and write an appealing email copy.
The basic rule is to keep it brief and concise, dividing the text into several smaller paragraphs.
Mark Larsen, a content creator at Scholar Advisor, tells us how he writes email marketing copy:
“I always use actionable terms and avoid passive voice. It is critical to highlight keywords in order to make sure that no one can miss the point of my message. I also tend to create a nice story that presents the problem and offers practical solutions.”
The ultimate goal of an email copy is to convince users that your content is worth checking out, so you need to sound convincing and trustworthy. Less is more in email marketing, which is why you have to pay attention to every single word you write.
5. Don't Be Afraid to Experiment with Multimedia Content
Multimedia content is another way to craft more amusing email campaigns. Marketers know that people process visual information much faster than simple text, so they use formats such as videos, images, illustrations, and GIFs. You can also play with audio files or any other multimedia model the audience considers interesting at a given moment.
However, you need to be careful here to avoid underperformance. First of all, don’t use too many images because it will distract subscribers and stop them from reading your message. Images should augment the content, but their purpose is never to replace it.
Secondly, you don’t want to embed a video in the email body because it will probably get blocked by spam filters. But even if it doesn’t happen, you don’t have control over body-embedded videos and can’t get viewer feedback. The simplest solution is to add a screenshot to your email and make it clickable. That way, a video is only one click away from your subscribers.
6. Get Results by Crafting a Standout Call to Action
Every email has the purpose to boost user engagement. This makes calls to action (CTA) extremely important because it’s your way to invite subscribers to take the desired action. In such circumstances, a CTA has to stand out from the rest of the content to ensure the highest level of visibility.
Use a lot of whitespaces to separate a CTA from other parts of your email. Try to find a color that contrasts with the background and place the CTA button where people can see it, regardless of the device type. Generally speaking, you should not add more than one CTA per email.
Having too many options can confuse the audience and prevent them from taking any action, so you definitely want to simplify the procedure and offer only one or two calls to action per email. That way, you can maximize the effectiveness of your email messages and drive more conversions in the long-term perspective.
7. Add a Sprinkle of Social Proof
Back in 1984, Dr. Robert B. Cialdini published a book entitled “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”. In his seminal marketing paper, the author discusses six principles of influence, including the so-called social proof.
Cialdini defined social proof as people doing what they observe other people doing.
In the meantime, social proof became one of the fundamental marketing techniques. What does it mean to you as an email marketer? Well, it means you can add social proof to boost professional authority and add to the credibility of your content.
For instance, you could insert a photo of a satisfied client with a brief comment about your products or services.
Or, you could include a screenshot from your social media channels.
8. Nurture Your Email Leads Over Time with Drip Campaigns
A drip campaign is a carefully planned set of emails sent automatically based on specific triggers. For instance, a new subscriber represents a trigger for a welcome email. But this is just the beginning as the chain consists of many other links. Drip campaigns convert prospects into leads, then turn leads into customers, and then turn consumers into loyal customers and brand advocates.
This is the easiest way to guide subscribers deeper through the sales funnel, sending one message after another in preplanned sequences. Besides that, drip campaigns have a number of additional benefits:
Educate subscribers about your industry
Giving users tailored opportunities to engage with content
Provide sales reps with extra feedback about the so-called warm leads
Reengage passive subscribers who haven’t taken any action for a long time
Boost cross-selling by encouraging followers to test other products or services
Offer incentives or giveaways to hesitating prospects
9. Choose the Right Email Marketing Platform
Marketers who administer large subscriber groups and launch high-level campaigns can’t do everything single-handedly. It takes a reliable email marketing platform to automate most of these processes, allowing you to eliminate manual work and concentrate on more important tasks.
The Internet is flooded with all sorts of email marketing providers, so it can be overwhelming to choose the best solution for your business.
But if you want to be sure of platform’s quality, we strongly recommend you try ConvertKit. It's our preferred email marketing platform for beginner to intermediate entrepreneurs and digital marketers.
10. Track Your Results (Don't Skip this Step!)
Testing and tracking results is the only way to ensure superior performance campaign after campaign. You must go back to the list of campaign goals and compare expectations with the results achieved. If you are not satisfied, you need to conduct the analysis to determine what went wrong.
A/B testing is another email intelligence model you need to embrace. Using this format of testing, you compare different versions of the same email marketing elements. For instance, you can compare different color schemes, subject lines, images, CTA buttons, and many other elements.
Doing so, you will gradually improve email campaigns and learn which feature performance better in any given situation. Of course, testing is not a one-time activity, but rather a continuous process, so make sure to do it regularly.
Conclusion
Email marketing is the tried and true way to make sales online. Now you have 10 proven ways to make your email marketing strategy successful as a complete beginner.
All you need to do to get started is work your way through the list above, starting with #1. It's a proven blueprint to start making money online with email marketing. Give it a try– you'll be so glad you did!
Susan Saurel is a full-time digital marketer and a part-time blog writer at BestEssays and UK BestEssays. Susan lives in Houston, Texas, but she spends most of her spare time traveling around the globe and meeting new people and cultures. As a passionate marketer, Susan is eager to share the professional experience with her readers.