Picking a Auto Responder
First step to email marketing is to use an autoresponder, a service that holds your contacts and sends mass email campaigns, because the last thing you want to do is mail merge from a from your email account and get busted for spammy activity.Mailchimp
Easiest way to get started for most small businesses is Mailchimp, which provides a free account for up to 500 subscribers and sends 1000 emails a month before you have to pay a thing! You don’t get a lot of bells and whistles like A/B testing, email automation sequences, or landing pages. That’s pretty much all you get, but is ok if you are just starting out just sending emails.MailerLite
If you are looking for a more sophisticated strategy, then MailerLite is going to be for you, especially if you are wanting to follow the strategy I’ll lay out later in this article. MailerLite gives you 12,000 monthly emails, email automations, pop up forms and 10 landing pages. MailerLite is the best email service provider that allows automation for free so that you can create drip campaigns and other automation.Other Options
Constant Contact is a popular email autoresponder that offers expanded contact limits and additional automation features like drip campaigns to engage your audience effectively. Brevo is another service that offers SMS marketing along with email to broaden your reach with your audience for more effective marketing. You can use specific software like Klaviyo That focuses primarily on e-commerce businesses to reach your audience better than other services on this list.Building a List
Now that you have a service to send emails, you will need to add contacts or build a list to execute your email strategy. Let’s take a look at how to build that contact list.Existing Customers
If you have been in business a while then you likely already have customers and customer emails to add to your autoresponder. You can use customer emails from onboarding documents or from customer contact information as you create a relationship.Lead Magnet
If you don’t have an email list or are just starting out then you will need to build a list. A lead magnet is a free value item like a guide, ebook or promotional code in exchange for an email. Once you deliver the lead magnet, the email can be added to your autoresponder contact list and execute strategies we will talk about in just a bit.Social Media Forms
You can monetize your social media followers with email marketing by creating a lead generation form. You can use lead generation forms when you bring in facebook group members or in conjunction with lead magnets. If you are starting your social media accounts, you will need to have these planned out so you don't miss out collecting emails and building your list.Strategy
Biggest hurdle when starting an email strategy: what exactly are you supposed to send to your email list? Let me share a basic email strategy with you.Welcome Sequence
First thing you want to set up is a welcome sequence or automated drip campaign. This sequence of about 5 emails can prime your new subscribers with information about your business, your solution, answer objections, and have testimonials to convert to sales. If you don't make the sales with this sequence you can trigger to move these subscribers to a general newsletter list.Newsletter
The newsletter is the general sequence and main content you will be creating for your subscribers. These newsletters can be short blogs or 5 minute videos that answer a specific question. That's it. No selling. You can set aside 30 minutes to film a couple videos a month or if you want a short blog post And only post one promotional email per month to sell a service or product.Social Media updates
You can set up social media updates to coincide with your newsletter, updates for your blog or educational videos that you make. You can use a service to post these updates through your email auto responder or use a social media scheduling service like HootSuite or Buffer. Make sure you set up these updates to post around the same time as your newsletter so subscribers can view your updates and it makes it seem like you're everywhere.Design
Designing your email, or a newsletter might be one of the more difficult things, especially if you're not creative when it comes to visuals. Luckily, there are some handy tools that you can use for inspiration and design, so let's take a look at those.Mail Charts
On the design side, there is an application called Mail Charts, which allows you to get simple emails from some of the biggest brands to find out how you can emulate and design your emails. You can get a free account to get inspiration or subscribe to a paid account to get campaigns and journeys that you can use for your email marketing.Good Email Copy
Design is only one aspect of the email marketing game. For your copy, there is an application service called Good Email Copy that will allow you to draw inspiration from actual emails and how they are written. This will allow you to draw inspiration and help with how to craft those great emails to get customers to purchase your product or service.Canva
If you want to use design tools that are more powerful than your autoresponder templates, then you may want to look into Canva.com. Canva is a graphic design tool that gives you dozens of editable templates to create any kind of graphic for social media and even email. A paid Canva account gives you access to thousands of email templates that you can edit and even help you schedule social media posts for your updates for a one stop shop to design graphics.Conclusion
Getting started with email can be really confusing but I do hope that this guide gives you a practical and simple way to set your own strategy. You need to make sure that not only do you create educational content to bring value to subscribers and keep them on the list but to pitch your products or services so they actually buy.Funded in part through a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. All opinions, conclusions, and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SBA.
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