Email Marketing for Beginners

So you’ve taken the plunge and decided email marketing is the right channel for you (good choice). We’re excited to help you uncover the power of email marketing for your business. If you’re unclear where to start, this article will help you take the next steps in terms of starting out with email marketing.

Start with your email subscriber list

If you don’t have an existing email list:

If you don’t have an email list yet, it’s time to start building your list. Think about all the owned marketing channels you have already to help you get started. The first thing you’ll need is a website. Your website is your hardest working team member as it’s always working to help you grow and get your message to the right people.

Start by adding a form to your website to encourage website visitors to subscribe to your email list. No need for developers here. If you use Mail Blaze. Creating your website form is super easy. You simply use the forms and pages menu under LISTS to customize your form. To learn more about form creation, please visit the creating your list support article and select FORMS AND PAGES from the side menu.

Once you’re happy with the changes you’ve made you’ll save your page and see the publishing page.

You’ll be able to easily copy the option you’d prefer to use for your form from this page and view your live form via the published URL which is hosted by Mail Blaze.

Remember it’s important to ensure you add ALL the form fields to capture the information you want to receive about your subscribers. For example, if it’s important for you to know the gender of your subscriber, please be sure to create a form field for gender that your subscriber can use to indicate this information on. If this info is not on your form, it will be hard to get the segment information later on.

If you already have an email marketing list:

If you already have an email marketing list - that’s great. All you’ll need to do is import your list and configure your form and you’re good to go.

Creating your Campaigns

Now for the fun part - creating your campaigns. Remember to develop your content around value you’d like to provide to your audience. Adding value through your content will help you create meaningful connections with your audience and also go a long way to increase subscriber engagement.

You can either plan out your content on a piece of paper or just build your campaign from a predefined template in our builder. Whatever you choose, focus on good quality content to keep your subscribers engaged.

Feeling a bit uninspired? Here are some content ideas to get you started: -Share product updates -A message from your CEO -Share other content you’ve created like videos or blog posts -Educate people about your industry -Introduce your team/business -Share a promotion

Testing:

Now that you’ve created a beautiful campaign, you’ll want to do extensive testing to ensure that your campaign works and looks exactly the way you want.

Did you know that emails look different in different email clients? Now you do. You’ll want to check your email in Gmail, Outlook, etc to see how your email renders in these environments. You’ll also want to make sure to look at the mobile versions of your email. You can send yourself (or anyone else in your team) a test email so they can help you test efficiently.

MAIL BLAZE TIPS:

Don’t forget to test all the links and buttons in your email to make sure they direct your subscriber to the intended place on your website or landing page. It’s never a great experience when you get subscribers to click on elements only to be directed to broken pages or non-existent pages. Ask someone else to check your campaign for any grammar or spelling errors. Often when you have spent quite some time on a campaign, you can easily miss typos or spelling errors. Having someone else proofread your content is a great easy way to check that everything is all good to go.

Send your campaign:

Now that you have dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s you can send your campaign. If you have lots of other things to do, you can even schedule your campaign to send on your preferred date and time.

Review your campaign performance:

Once your campaign has been sent you’ll want to review your campaign performance.

3 of the key metrics you should look at are:

Bounce rate:

There are multiple reasons why bounces can occur and there are two types of bounces, namely a hard bounce and a soft bounce. A hard bounce is a permanent bounce that is generally due to an invalid/non-existent email addresses, whereas a soft bounce could be due to an inbox being full or a temporary server error. If you see a high bounce rate it could be caused by using an old subscription list, where many of the email addresses in the list are no longer active.

Open Rate:

An open rate is a great measure to see how effective your subject lines have been, as well as your address field. Being able to capture people’s attention from the get-go is crucial to ensure you create a compelling campaign.

Click-Throughs:

Using links to drive visitors to your site is part of what will drive sales for your business (which is probably why you’re sending emails to start with). If you see that you have a low CTR, you may want to test alternative placements for your links and look at changing your copy to guide people towards clicking on the links.

If you’d like to learn more about reporting on your email marketing campaigns you can have a look at how to measure your campaigns.

Start getting familiar with your campaign metrics so you can keep building and enhancing the experience for your audience. Spending time looking at your results gives you the opportunity to improve.

Once you know how your campaigns are performing you’ll be perfectly positioned to start optimising.

Optimising

Optimising your content can be super simple and take many shapes, depending on the results you are seeing or the metric you are trying to improve. You could try some of these ideas: -Creating similar campaigns to ones that users engaged with before -Testing different subject lines to increase your open rates -Positioning links or buttons in different places in your email template -Changing the format of your call to action buttons (highlight them with different colours, change the shape, etc)

We hope you’ve found this article useful. If you’d like to speak to someone to find out more about email marketing and how it can help you achieve your goals - please reach out to our team. We can’t wait to help you get started.