Email marketing remains one of the elite channels for businesses to stay in touch with new and existing customers. Elite because it is a direct communication line to your customers and prospects and it allows you to keep them informed of the new products and services that you release. Setting up email marketing is an efficient way to reach your current customers as well as reach new leads and turn those leads into customers.

Now this requires work and that we have to generally set up a lot of their friends configurations in order to ensure that the whole process is streamlined. For instance if we are creating content on our website we want that content to automatically disseminate to our subscribers. So that we are not doing that manually.

Most marketing today gives us the option whereby we can configure a whole sequence that allows us to run our business in an efficient manner. Whereby we’re not constantly managing every single point however the system is managing the responses that come into it automatically.

And this goes for email marketing, social media marketing, and a host lead generation options. However in this article we are simply going to discuss email marketing done in the right way.

Determine goals for your email marketing campaigns

If you want your campaign to be successful, you need to think about what you’re trying to accomplish. This is important or else you’ll be wasting time and money. For instance, if you sell products in an eCommerce store, you might be trying to drive sales so, your emails might link to best sellers, welcome new members, promote new merchandise or reward loyal customers.

Understand your email marketing goals before you send your first e-mail, and build your messages and campaign around those goals. This comes back to an article in which we discussed objectives as the linchpin to any successful marketing campaign. Every action in a marketing effort should have an objective. The key challenge here is defining a business goal, and then tying an email marketing campaign to that business goal or series of objectives.

Choose an email marketing service

If you’re looking to build good email marketing campaigns, you can go about doing this in a few ways, but first, you need the right email marketing service provider like GetResponse, MailChimp, or Constant Contact. There are many more email marketing platforms however these are the most popular platforms with the most features. I personally use MailChimp because of what they offer to small business.

Compare them and see which one fits your objectives or you can just use the one I use which is MailChimp. Additionally, it’s worth comparing email marketing service providers to determine which one best fits your budget and can scale to support your growth when the time comes.

MailChimp offers a free plan for small and growing businesses that packs a lot of punch provides a lot of value and this is best to use when first starting out and then as you acquire more subscribers you can upgrade to a paid option or if you choose to consider another email marketing platform.

Build and segment your email lists

Segmentation Is about dividing your email list based on different criteria pertinent to your business. For instance, if you have an e-commerce website you can divide your email list into people who make a purchase and people who put something in the cart but did not make a purchase. Because you segmented your list in these two ways, now you can send out marketing campaigns targeted uniquely to those 2 lists.

Don’t forward the same email to everyone! It’s evident that very few companies take the time to do segmentation. While it takes time and strategy to manage and segment a targeted email-marketing list, it’s worth the investment, because it ensures that the message that you send out will be relevant to recipients.

Segmenting your list allows you send out highly targeted emails to people based on their demographic criteria or interests. If the email is relevant to them, they’re more likely to open the email; if they open the email, there’s a chance that they could convert.

Depending on the service you offer, you could segment your email according to location, demographics, firmographics, the amount spent, past purchases, time since last purchase, expressed interests and email engagement. In short, there are many ways to segment your email list.

Create and name your campaign

Creating and naming your campaign is not straightforward in an email-marketing platform. Depending on the provider, you’ll have a series of steps between this point and before sending the email. In this stage, you’ll need to choose your template, which is where your creative juices can start flowing.

At some point, you’ll create your email template where you put the information people see when they receive the email in their inbox. The subject line is one of the most important spaces in an email marketing campaign because it is the preview that the recipient sees before they open the email.

And so if the subject line is engaging and interesting then that increases the chance that they are going to click on the email. So we want to ensure that the subject line communicates a relevant message specific to the audience.

The next step is to get your email recipients to open the email and click on one of the links in your mail. You’re going to need a combination of effective visual and textual presentation. This is where it pays to understand what your customers value.

Enable autoresponders

Autoresponders are utilized in email marketing to build trust, nurture leads, convey useful information about services, products, or promotions and provide confirmation that data was received. Autoresponders can be set to send out emails at regular intervals like daily, weekly or triggered by specific actions.

Email autoresponders are the backbone of an email marketing plan because it is something that we can build and then automate the sequence so that an email sends out every day with a different message for a period of five days to a recipient for example.

Consequently it’s not a manual process of sending something every day, instead we spend the time to build a sequence of emails that automatically disseminate based on any number of factors.

Make sure that each autoresponders email has several links for more information; this is how you will determine how to keep marketing to them and gauge the interest of your audience.

Set up tracking

If you want to improve engagement and increase email conversions, utilize tracking and analytics and most major email marketing platforms will have the ability to include tracking platforms like Google analytics, or they might have their own basic tracking capabilities for you to base your decisions on.

Tracking and getting performance analytics is how you optimize your marketing assets and email campaigns based on what works for each segment. Tracking and analyzing your marketing helps you to understand what is happening and without it you are blind. It’s almost the same as driving a car with a blindfold.

You should be able to track metrics like Spam Complaint Rate, Bounce Rate, Unsubscribe Rate, Click-to-Open Rate, Click-through Rate and more, using Google Analytics and the email marketing service provider-tracker to understand what is happening with your campaigns.

Send your email

If you have an interest in implementing an email marketing campaign in your marketing mix then definitely consider this course and start from here. Now it’s time to send the email after you’ve created it. Before you blast an email with a grammatical error to your subscribers, send it to yourself and read through it several times or send it to a friend for review to ensure it’s perfect. Now you’re set to go.