email-getstarted

If you’re trying to figure out your digital marketing strategy, email may be the perfect place to start.

With so many ways to reach people, engaging with users on a personal level can feel like an overwhelming task. Social media may be the latest thing – Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and more – but if you have no clue what you’re doing, diving into social media might end in you spinning your marketing wheels to no avail. The best place to start might be an old-school email marketing campaign.

Email marketing is a classic way of engaging with users. Though deemed obsolete by some marketing experts, email has actually become even more significant in our new mobile-friendly age.

Ready to launch an email marketing campaign? Here’s how to get started: 

1. Build your list

There are plenty of ways to build your mailing list. One of the most common ways to capture an email is with a pop-up that appears shortly after a user accesses your site and has had a chance to look around. Pop-ups may make you cringe, but they’re effective.

The trick is to balance the forcefulness of your email address request so you don’t annoy the user and motivate them to leave the page. Capturing an email doesn’t have to feel like guerilla warfare. Make the email capture clever or offer the user an incentive (better yet, do both). The goal is to make the user happy about giving you their email!

 2. Build trust

Before you start actually sending out emails, take a second and ask the user’s permission.

This is called a “double opt-in” – asking the user for their email, then confirming in a followup email that they actually want to be included on your email list.

This type of consent not only keeps you out of the user’s spam box but also gives them a sense of security. Double checking with them to make sure they want to be included in your email campaign reassures users that you’re not out to scam them.

 3. Verify your list

When you verify your list, you’re ensuring that the emails on your list belong to real people or companies.

This is important because of potential bot attacks – where outsiders gain access to your user information and use it to gather emails to spam and take advantage of. Being a part of one of these scams can land your domain on a blacklist, meaning your ranking will take a major hit.

The other issue email validation helps you avoid is human error. Most of the time,users are typing their emails on their mobile phones. This leaves a huge window for typing errors – the result of which is wasting valuable resources sending campaigns out to emails that don’t actually exist.

You can validate emails in a number of ways, such as email validating software, but it’s important to protect your site from bots and guard your positive sender reputation.

4. Segment your audience

Once you know more about them, there are multiple ways to segment your audience. That means personalizing emails according to their geographic area, age, buying habits or income – things that will tell you a lot about a user’s personality and interests. When you have your groups segmented out, your email marketing campaigns around those groups will be more effective because of their personal touch.

5. Personalize

Now that you have your segmented groups, you can use that information about your customers to make relevant content that they’re eager to open – because it speaks to them as individuals. You want to make the user feel like the email was created just for them

For example, if you’ve segmented your groups by geography, focus your campaign around events happening in the user’s area like summer festivals or holiday markets. 

The goal is to make your readers look forward to receiving your emails because they’re filled with relevant, entertaining content.

6. Check in every now and then

Even if you’ve been regularly sending emails to your users without issues, your job is just beginning. Again, this is a relationship, and you need to keep your users excited about your content, making sure they know their opinion matters.

That’s why it’s important to check in with your users a couple of times a year to make sure they’re still happy with your emails. This can also help increase clicks on your emails and boost your sender score.

By including a brief survey or questionnaire, you’re offering the user an opportunity to voice their opinion. Then you can use this extra data to tweak your email marketing campaign, perhaps even re-segmenting your audience to make sure that your hard work makes the greatest impact.

If you follow these easy steps (and touch base with your audience on a regular basis to make sure your email marketing campaign is hitting the spot), you’re off to the races for marketing success. Good luck, and get sending!

Want to learn how you can apply these techniques to your own business? We’d love to help!

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