One of the best ways to generate targeted traffic to your website, landing page, lead magnet page, etc, is by having and following an email marketing strategy. And it has many advantages which we’ll look at shortly.
As you may already know, successful online marketing greatly revolves round building relationships with your target audience and constantly nurturing that relationship for mutual benefits.
As it were, online shoppers hardly purchase products or services from strangers and/or websites they don’t trust. This is why as an online business owner, blogger, webmaster, merchant, etc, you must find a way to integrate email marketing system as part of your major digital marketing channels.
The question is, “Why do you have to start an email marketing campaign in the first place?”
First, let’s get down to the basics or fundamentals of email marketing so that you’ve a good handle of it.
What is Email Marketing?
Simply put, email marketing is a system of regularly sending informative, educative, entertaining, and marketing messages and content to a group of people otherwise known as your list of subscribers using software provided by an ESP (email service provider) such as GetResponse autoresponder.
From time to time, available statistics have adjudged email marketing as the leading and most cost effective digital marketing channel which any internet marketer can adopt in order to continuously attract targeted prospects and leads as well as getting more clients.
With foolproof email marketing system, you can achieve a number of business goals such as creating strong brand awareness, nurturing your leads, selling more of your digital products and services, getting more clients who know, like and trust you without breaking the bank.
As a matter of fact, an average email marketing ROI (return on investment) is around $36 for every $1 spent. This goes to explain why majority of successful online business owners focus more on list building than anything else.
As an email marketer, you’ve to sign up for reliable email marketing software in order to seamlessly pursue this goal to its logical conclusion. As an entrepreneur, it’s a good investment if you want to constantly reach out to your target audience and possibly improve sales and profits of your internet business.
The truth of the matter is that it takes up to 7 times to expose a specific product or service to a potential buyer before he may decides to make a purchase. What happens if there is no way or system for you to capture the email address of this hot lead for further and future communications?
This means you’ll continually lose majority of your potential buyers who are not ready and able to make a purchase, sign up for your email newsletter, click a link or take action which you wish on their first visit to your website or landing page.
To this end, it’s very important you pay close attention to this email marketing for beginners guide and start implementing immediately the ideas shared so that you can get visible results as soon as possible.
Benefits of Email Marketing
I guess you’ll not underrate email marketing when you understand the reason why i.e. what’s in it for you. So, let’s quickly go through some of the advantages of email marketing.
- It will help you to create and increase your brand awareness and identity in the marketplace.
- It will help you to get more targeted traffic to your blog, website, sales page or specific web pages.
- You’ll be able to get targeted prospects, leads and customers which will ultimately drive more sales and revenue.
- You’ll have the golden opportunity to nurture and retain your customers by continually engaging them with high-impact content.
- You’ll be able to gain customers insights through data analytics.
- Email marketing saves you time and efforts in performing repetitive tasks in your online business.
- It’s cost effective and affordable when you compare it to other digital marketing channels.
- Emails can easily be distributed to the recipients who have signed up for your email newsletter.
- You can personalize email marketing which increases open rate.
- High ROI of about $36 for every $1 spent.
- Ability to build trust and credibility with your potential buyers.
- Etc.
Although there are pros and cons of email marketing, the advantages outweighs the disadvantages. The main disadvantage is that it is a monthly subscription which can easily add up if you’re not productive and effective with your campaigns.
Now that you know the pros of email marketing, let’s discuss the tools and resources you need to set up any campaign of your choice.
Tools and Resources to Set Up a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
This is the right time to invest money, time and energy to create the infrastructure for your email marketing strategy. You cannot wing it at this level because your potential subscribers need to be convinced upfront that you’ve something valuable to offer them in exchange for their email addresses.
These online business tools to set up an email marketing campaign include:
- Domain name,
- Web hosting services,
- Email marketing software,
- Valuable lead magnet,
- Email messages for your autoresponder series, and
- Squeeze page with opt-in form.
Before you get started, you’ve to choose a niche market to focus on. Niche market selection will be informed based on your interest, passion, hobby or experience in a specific topic. An email marketer may choose personal finance while another may go for cyber security. It’s either you “follow your passion” or “follow the money.”
With that said, let me explain each of these online marketing tools and how to sign up for them.
Domain Name
A domain name is a unique address to identify your website or blog. For instance, HustleVim.com is a domain name that can be used for a blog website which will chronicle and discuss side hustle ideas. It costs about $10 (Ten Dollars) to register and/or renew a domain name per year.
There are lots of domain registrars on the World Wide Web where you can get cheap domain registration. But Namecheap.com is a good place to get a domain name for your internet business. Click here to go to Namecheap and register adomain name.
Web Hosting Services
If you buy a domain name, you absolutely need a reliable website hosting company to host your website domain. Although web hosting services companies usually offer domain name registration service as well, I like to separate my web host from my domain registrar.
Why I use Namecheap for domain name registration, I use HostGator.com to host majority of my blogs. HostGator also offer free domain name for first time customer if you follow this link to sign up for their website hosting services.
You can go for the Baby Plan which will allow you to host unlimited domain names on the same account. This is the best, reliable and cheap web hosting service I can recommend for you to start an online business right away.
Email Marketing Software
In order to make your email marketing automation easy and seamless, you’ve to get reliable ESP (email service provider) which will supply you with the platform to manage every email campaign you intend to embark on.
There are avalanche of ESPs out there but you can sign up with GetResponse email marketing software because they are cheap, reliable and beginner friendly. GetResponse.com has 30-day free trial which you can take advantage of to test the waters and get a good handle of how email marketing works.
Valuable Lead Magnet
Email marketing is all about the common saying that if you rub my back, I’ll rub yours too. For any lead or prospect to give you his email address for future communications which will obviously include promotional messages, you’ve to offer something valuable for free to download.
This could include free PDF ebook, video, infographic, podcast, audio, audio book, webinar, app, software, and so on. The idea is to ethically bribe your lead so that he can willingly exchange his email ID with the product or service you’re offering as a giveaway.
For instance, I may decide to write an ebook on how to start a side hustle business successfully and give it away for free to my blog readers. All I’ve to do is to set up an email newsletter using GetResponse autoresponder to manage my email marketing campaign. And voila, I’ll start building an email list of subscribers through promotion.
Series of Email Messages for Autoresponder Delivery
Having a lead magnet to give out to your subscribers is not just enough. You’ve to take further steps to create series of email content which you can upload into your autoresponder for a specific campaign at a defined frequency.
The first of these series will be the welcome email which is usually set as day zero (Day 0). This is to ensure that the email marketing software delivers the welcome email with link to download the lead magnet immediately it is sent to the new subscriber as he completes the sign up form.
Landing Page with Opt-in Form
Email service providers like GetResponse usually provide email marketing templates with sign up forms to set up your lead magnet page. Even if you don’t know how to code as a newbie, there are email marketing templates which you can choose from and integrate to your website.
Majority of ESPs now integrate their email marketing software with WordPress blog platform which makes it easier to set up at any level of your experience if you’re using self-hosted WordPress blog platform.
How to Become a Successful Email Marketer
To be frank with you, not all email marketers are successful on the internet. For you to become a successful email marketer you must take note of the following points.
- Set customer-focused goals and fervently pursue them with your email marketing campaigns.
- Demonstrate high level of expertise in your target niche topic or field. This means you’ve to study, learn and master your niche inside out.
- Be timely with valuable content. For instance, I signed up for about three email newsletters of some highly successful bloggers in the online marketing space. Lately, I’ve been receiving information from them regarding ChatGPT and AI writing tools because that is what is raging now. You must be in the vanguard of trending news in your industry as an email marketing guru.
- Build trust, credibility and bond with your target audience by sending high quality content and occasional promotional messages.
- Where possible and necessary, show income and social proofs or testimonials for whatever you’re promoting. You can do case study and send out to your subscribers.
- In order to not irk your subscribers, you’ve to make sure you segment your list as soon as you can after getting started with your email marketing campaign.
- Perform split or A/B testing of headlines, pre-header text, html versus plain text email, etc with your email messages.
Elements of a Good Landing Page
There are basic elements which you’ve to consider when designing your lead magnet page. Let’s look at some of the essential ones.
- Create eye-catching headline and sub headline.
- Make sure that your subscription form is designed and placed above the fold.
- Create valuable lead magnet.
- Make bullet points of features which can be translated to benefits for your subscribers.
- Integrate an image of the free incentive with alt-text on the sign-up page.
- Include social proof or real testimonial if available.
- Include privacy policy at the sign up box area or footer of the page clearly stating that you don’t rent or sell email contacts of your list members.
Steps to Start a Successful Email Marketing Campaigns
The following steps outline the best email marketing strategy you should consider for your campaign.
- Choose a niche market and topic to focus on.
- Build your website or create a blog.
- Create your lead magnet page where you can integrate the opt-in box.
- Create your lead magnet to give away for free.
- Sign up for email marketing platform so that you can access and create subscription form.
- Upload your free incentive and set up download page on your web server.
- Promote your landing page.
How to Promote Your Landing Page
In case you don’t know, nobody will find your website or landing page and sign up for your mailing list if you don’t go out there to promote it. Internet marketing can be so competitive to the extent of discouraging the faint-hearted from going further and becoming successful.
What you can do is to learn, hone and master each of these digital marketing methods one at a time.
- Blogging
- Guest posting
- Niche forum marketing and online communities
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- Free ebook distribution
- Paid advertising such as pay per click (PPC), banner adverts, etc
- Making use of email signature
- Publishing on social media
- Etc
In my second part of this guide on email marketing for beginners, I’ll delve into the specifics which you’ve to look out for such as email marketing mistakes to avoid, terminologies and glossary, email segmentation and personalization, just to mention a few.
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