A Quick Guide to Email Marketing: For Beginners

The modern world is incorporated with a plethora of options especially in regards to communication. Several alternatives to traditional emailing have been invented such as "the instant messaging services" provided by social media websites; however, email is still a commonly used service utilized by billions all over the world predominantly for professional communication. With all the noise and traffic of social media in our lives, emails and inboxes have become a place of solitude for individuals. Before a business/company steps into that world of solitude of their prospective customer, it becomes imperative to respect their privacy. Spamming will always end your business up in the spam or trash folder. In order to craft a great email marketing campaign, a marketing manager needs to learn the various basics involved from the ground up. Email marketing is not just about sending out emails, it is much more than that. It involves getting up and looking at people's behavior and analyzing what type of emails make it to their inbox instead of ending up in the trash. Consider emails like a home to your prospective customer, hence you need to be careful while stepping into someone's house. You need to keep up your manners and then craft an email that not only gets their attention but also compels them to make use of your product or your service. Even the most professional marketing experts first need to craft a careful strategy that explains the customer the reason why their email address is needed. A lot of questions pop into the mind of an individual when he is asked to provide his email address, he is generally scared of all the spamming. In order to commence with a great marketing strategy, the following are a few steps that need to be followed.

Preliminary Stage

1. Choosing the service provider.

Before beginning the real drill, it is important to select your service provider that suits your budget. For instance, if you just want to send our newsletter you can always choose Sendgrid.

2. Get to know your goals.

It is imperative to have a clear understanding of your company's goals and ambitions. You might want to go for email marketing to transfer your leads into customers or to just give out information or updates about your products or services.

Stage I

The stage 1 as explained by email marketing gurus is to clearly craft your message and work hard to end up in the inbox of your prospective customers.

1. Crafting a clear message

Just writing " Sign up or provide your email for more updates" will not get you the email address of your target audience. You need to build a clear concise message such as "Sign up for a free newsletter every month" or "Sign up to read my blog post every Tuesday." No one has the time and interest in reading plethora of promotional emails with no substance to offer. You need to get your gear up and work towards crafting an emailing list with refined content in order to magnetize your prospective customers towards you.

2. Be whitelisted.

It is imperative to end up in the inbox of your customer because all your hard work will go to waste if your email is lying in the spam or promotional folder of your customer. In order to do that, you need to make sure your prospective customers have added your contact to their friend list. As the saying goes "present them an offer they cannot refuse". You need to come up with content that they actually want to read or offers that they are interested in.

Stage II

This stage involves being consistent; if you send one email per week you are signing yourself up for failure. It is important to keep a follow up on your customers. Don't just send them an email thrice every week. Instead try to tell them something new every other day. Your customers might be upset if they are expecting an email regarding a new product launch and you don't send them at that time. One reason why this might be upsetting for your customers is that when they find out about it from some other source, your company's time credibility might be challenged.

1. Know the right time to pitch.

An amazing example of great pitch timing is of Amazon. They send emails according to the purchase/buying behavior of their customers. It is important to keep a list for a major announcement or attractive offers rather than sending them without content. Staying loose regarding your email marketing can be a huge blunder. The right time to pitch in your email is when you have something to offer. A bad newsletter or an email is always filled with content that most people won't remember. Amazon does a great job at sending emails at the right time according to the buying behavior of its customer.

2. Making use of the autoresponder.

One of the biggest email marketing blunder involves sending out emails at random times. Initially, for an impressive marketing strategy, it is recommended that an individual utilizes autoresponder to send emails consistently at the same time for a few months.

3. Identify the right amount of emails.

If you have to ask yourself " is this too much?" then it is probably too much and you should abort the mission. Sending more than one email per day will always be monotonous for the receiver.

Stage III

This stage involves doing a thorough review of the actions or your overall strategy. Email marketing service providers such as unsubscribes and open rate provide analytics to analyze the performance of your marketing strategy.

1. Analysis and Evaluation

After running your data their analytics system, if the results suggest that the number of unsubscribers has increased then there is definitely something wrong with your strategy and you need to make some changes or re-built it from scratch.

In a nutshell, you can make your decision and craft your email marketing strategy to get more customers or to convert your leads into customers. To begin with the marketing a thorough market research is imperative and an analysis of results is another section that will require your attention as it will determine whether a change in plan is needed or not.