Email Marketing Getting Started Guide

Whether you’re nurturing leads, trying to win-back previous customers, or engaging with your most loyal followers, email marketing is the go-to marketing channel for customer engagement. But if you’re just getting started, you may be feeling overwhelmed. There’s a lot of work that goes into sending valuable, engaging, and high-converting email content.

Last Updated: January 17, 2020

Overview

This comprehensive guide will take you step-by-step through everything you need to know to get your email program up and running efficiently. Equipping yourself with best practices and tips will position you to run an efficient and effective email marketing program in the long run.

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How to Build Your Email Marketing List

Growing an email list full of engaged subscribers will be one of the most impactful components of your email program. Keep in mind, though, that the adage ‘more isn’t always better’ is especially true when it comes to your email list. A smaller list full of highly engaged recipients is far better than having a ginormous email list with only a few who actually open the email.

The most effective way to grow your email list is to provide clear, simple, and persuasive signup opportunities across your website (blog, thank you pages, etc.).

How to Create and Optimize Your Opt-In Form

There are a few ways to create an email signup form and, depending on what ESP you are using, it may be available for you right within your dashboard (hint: SendGrid Signup Forms can help you do this).

Once you’ve decided how to build your opt-in form, keep the following best practices in mind:

1. Don’t ask for too much information in the initial signup form. The goal is to obtain emails and the more fields one needs to fill out, the less likely they are to complete it. You can always ask further questions once you’ve established a relationship.
2. Provide an incentive for signing up. Providing a discount or free resource is a great way to persuade people to give their email.
3. Be crystal clear about sending frequency. Let people know what to expect when they submit their email.
4. Secure your signup forms. DDOS stands for distributed denial of service, and it typically involves one or multiple bad actors writing scripts to penetrate and overload logins and forms across the internet. Any sort of online form poses some risk of a DDOSed attack. You can avoid a potential Spamhaus blacklist listing by securing your forms to avoid this scenario.

Looking to dive in more on this concept? Read more tips to optimize your opt-in pages.

Buying Email Lists…Please No

As you are working on building your email list, you will likely come across the opportunity or solicitation from a third party to buy email lists.

Should you buy an email list?

The frank answer is no. Never should you never buy, rent, or share any sort of email list.

Sending emails to purchased contacts is risky business. You may fall prey to a spam trap and become blacklisted by the ISPs, and then you can’t even email the legitimate people on your list. But just as importantly, buying email lists will rarely help you achieve your email marketing goals. So although you may be tempted to beef up your contact list, doing so will only do more harm than good.

Growing Your Email List the Right Way With Lead Magnets

Instead of purchasing an email list, think about how to create and use lead magnets to organically grow your email list. Lead magnets are some sort of incentive that you provide to acquire a lead (i.e. email address).

Some examples of lead magnets include:

1. Best practice guides, white-papers, or case studies
2. Data-rich infographics
3. Videos
4. Downloadable PDF checklists
5. Other sales incentives or promotional discounts

You could promote your lead magnets across your website, social media channels, or with display advertising. When creating and promoting lead magnets try to keep them super-specific and easy to act on. The more friction involved in the process (such as lengthy form fills), the more likely you will lose your audience’s attention.

Segmenting Your Email List

After you’ve built your email list, think about how you can segment your email list to provide more personalized content and increase engagement. For example, you may want to create a segment of recipients who always open your email and consider sending them additional email campaigns with special offers or VIP experiences.

Some of the most efficient ways to segment your list include:

• Demographics: Can you group people by region, age, or gender?
• Customer Information: What service plan/level do they use, how much are they spending, and when did they join?
• Email Types: What types of email, transactional or marketing, are you sending?
• Engagement: Who is opening all of your emails, just some, or hardly any?
• Activity: How often are your recipients logging in, buying, or using your product or service?

TIP:

Manage email list segments to ensure they are up to date. 

How to Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Each email campaign offers a new opportunity to make iterations and improve. Adding in A/B testing, automation, and integrating multi-channel marketing into your larger strategy are ways to do just that. 

A/B Test Your Emails

Performing A/B testing allows you to see what type of content or messaging is resonating best with your audience. Testing variables will likely fall into either content, design, or timing variables.

Content elements to test:

• From address – Test your brand name vs. first name at XX ([email protected]).

 

• Subject lines – Test a short vs. long subject line, different themes, or even consider emojis (if it makes sense for your brand).

 

• Pre-header text – Test a funny vs. serious version and see if it has any effect on open rates

 

• Headlines – Test shorter vs. longer headlines or different tones to see what resonates best with your audience.

 

• Call to action (CTA) – Consider testing emails multiple links vs. one sole CTA, or try swapping out one sole CTA per email.

A/B testing design ideas:

• Template – If you have two versions of a newsletter template, try testing each version to see which one performs better overall

 

• Images – Try one large image vs. a few smaller images and see if it affects engagement or clicks.

 

• Plain text vs. HTML – Consider testing a plain text email or even an HTML email that has a “plain text look”

Timing elements to test:

• Time of day – Try sending emails in the morning, afternoon, and evening to see what works best for your program.

 

• Day of week – Depending on your industry and when your prospects are likely to engage, this could be either during the week or weekend

 

• Frequency – If you experience high engagement rates, you may want to test out sending more email (just keep a close eye and stop if your engagement starts to dip).

These ideas are just a starting point. As you start to send more email campaigns, you will likely come up with more testing ideas specific to your program.

Looking for additional ideas for what to A/B test? Read a post with email testing ideas from one of our in-house experts. And for a thorough Q&A to email testing read, Your Top Email AB Testing Questions Answered.

Send Your Email at Optimal Times

You may also be wondering when is the best time to send emails? The short answer is that it depends. Since no two email lists are the same, each will respond a bit differently to email campaign times.

Generally, if you send B2B emails, it’s probably better to send during working hours. But if you send e-commerce emails, your audience may be looking to do more online shopping during weekend hours. Testing will provide you with the best send time for your program.

Send Emails With the Appropriate Frequency

Email marketing frequency is going to vary among senders and industries. But one thing is for sure, overdoing it with email is a fast way to lose subscribers. Much like send time, there is no one right answer to how often you should be emailing your subscribers. Start conservatively and test sending frequency until you’ve found the sweet spot for your brand.

Learn more about how to avoid emailing too much.

Keep Users Engaged

Keeping users engaged with your emails will keep your delivery rates high, but also translate into higher converting emails and more value to your brand. At the very highest level, you need to ensure that you are always sending wanted, desired, and valuable email.

If you’re already doing that, the following strategies will help keep users engaged:

• Be consistent with the from name so you establish a consistent and expected relationship.

 

• Provide valuable content that readers can act on.

 

• Consider proving a preference center that allows recipients to tailor their experience and choose what emails they want to receive (coupons, newsletters, etc.). And don’t forget to honor those preferences. 

 

• A/B test your campaigns to a smaller portion of your email to see what resonates best with your recipients before sending to your entire list.

 

• Remove unengaged users from your list. Sometimes people sign up but never open your emails. If they go more than a month or so, it’s  time to cut them off so your delivery rates don’t suffer.

Add Email Automation to Your Email Marketing Program

Email marketing automation is the ability to send emails at a set time and cadence. The automations can be predetermined (also referred to as email drip campaigns) or they can be dynamic, based on recipient behavior.

Adding automation to your email marketing program is a great way to help you save time and send more relevant and personalized content to your users. If you’re just starting out, try a simple with a triggered campaign like a welcome email. It can be easy to get carried away with all the different types of workflows and possibilities. But if recipients find themselves on too many automated workflows, you risk losing them.

Learn about more email automation mistakes and how to avoid them. And for a deep dive into all things automation, check out our email marketing automation best practice guide.

Nurture Your Recipients and Provide Personalized Email Content

You don’t always have to send promotions to your email list. Nurture email campaigns allow you to keep in touch with your email recipients without coming off as pushy or demanding. For example, you may want to set up a nurture series for new customers with educational information and tips on product use.

If you consistently send valuable content, your subscribers will come to know and trust that you’re not just sending sales emails.

SMS and Text Marketing – communicating by SMS is a complementary way to engage with your users when sending messages that are more transactional in nature.

Social Media – Social media is an effective way to engage with your community and share news and events.

Display Advertising – Most advertising platforms allow you to create a lookalike audience based on your current email so you can advertise to people likely to be interested in your brand or service and sign up for your emails.

Combining email marketing with the following channels optimizes the customer experiences and reaches them where they want to be reached.

More Resources For Email Marketers

Creating beautiful, engaging, and high-converting emails require a lot of moving parts and constant iterations. The more experience you gain sending email marketing campaigns, the more efficient all the related tasks will be.

Be sure to check out our additional email marketing resources to keep you going as you perfect your email program.

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