What is Email Marketing, Types, Strategy, Campaign — A Complete Beginners Guide
Email Marketing Strategies, Types & Create Winning Campaigns: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners
Disclaimer: This blog post contains affiliate links.
Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing channels for businesses of all sizes. It allows you to directly connect and engage with your customers in a personal way. If done right, email marketing can dramatically increase sales, promote brand awareness, and build customer loyalty over time.
In this beginner’s guide, we will cover everything you need to know to get started with email marketing and grow your business.
We will explore what email marketing is, the different types, strategies for success, tools to use, and tips for creating engaging content. By the end, you will have a solid understanding of how to implement a successful email marketing campaign.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing involves using email as a channel to promote your business, products, services, or brand directly to your subscribers. You can send marketing communications like newsletters, promotional offers, educational content, and more to your contact list on a regular basis.
The goal is to engage, inform, and reward your subscribers so they continue to open and interact with your emails. This drives awareness of who you are and what you offer, builds trust, and ultimately leads to more sales over time.
Types of Email Marketing
There are a few main types of emails you can send as part of your email marketing strategy:
- Promotional/Discount Emails: Feature sales, discounts, or promotions to drive purchases.
- Newsletters: Share useful industry news, tips, and company updates on a regular schedule like weekly or monthly.
- Welcome Series: Send a series of 3–5 emails to new subscribers with onboarding content.
- Abandoned Cart Recovery: Entice subscribers who added items to their cart but didn’t complete the purchase.
- Anniversary Emails: Thank long-time subscribers for their continued loyalty and support on their “anniversary” with you.
The key is testing different content types to see what resonates best with your list. Over time you’ll discover the most engaging and highest-converting campaigns.
Email Marketing for Beginners
If you’re just starting out with email marketing, here are some steps to follow:
- Set Up An Autoresponder: Services like Mailchimp, Aweber, and Constant Contact allow you to collect leads and broadcast automated follow-up messages.
- Create A Sign-Up Form: Add this anywhere on your site like the homepage, product pages, or checkout to capture email subscribers.
- Launch A Welcome Series: Send a 5-part onboarding sequence with valuable introductory information.
- Develop An Email Template: Brand your message properly with logo, colors, and contact details consistently.
- Establish An Editorial Calendar: Plan your content in advance including topics, designers, and publishing schedule.
- Start With Monthly Newsletters: Focus on value-added content and then test sending frequency to see what works best.
- Promote Your Sign-Up Call-To-Action Visibly: Display it prominently so people are compelled to subscribe.
How does email marketing work
At a high level, here is the basic process of how email marketing works:
- Lead Capture: Visitors opt-in to your email list by providing their email address, usually via a signup form on your site.
- Lead Management: Leads are stored securely in your email marketing platform database until you are ready to contact them.
- Automated Sequences: Autoresponders can be set up to deliver a series of timed emails like a welcome series automatically.
- Lead Scoring: Platforms analyze subscriber behavior to determine engagement levels and assign scores/ratings for segmentation.
- Segmentation: Lists are segmented into subgroups based on profile attributes, behavior, and content preferences for better targeting.
- Campaign Creation: You design custom HTML emails with content, images, and calls to action specific to each campaign topic.
- Campaign Deployment: Emails are delivered to subscribers matching your designated segments on a set schedule and tracked.
- Analytics & Optimization: Post-campaign reporting reveals open/click rates allowing you to continuously improve future emails.
Having a solid understanding of this process is essential for successful implementation of email marketing for your business.
Email Marketing Tools
To run an effective email marketing program, you will need an email service provider (ESP) that handles the technical aspects of list management, automation, analytics, and MORE. Here are some top tools:
- Systeme.io: All-in-one marketing platform including email marketing, sales funnels, website builder, and more.
- Mailchimp: Free for up to 2,000 contacts, then offers paid plans. Very intuitive interface for non-tech beginners.
- Constant Contact: Offers paid plans. It is more robust than Mailchimp with website popups, and landing pages included.
- AWeber: Free trial, then offers paid plans. Great for advanced features like lead filtering and SMS messages.
- Benchmark Email: Offers paid plans. Best for more sophisticated, larger volume campaigns and segmentation.
Always research which tool best fits your needs based on budget, scale, and level of customization required. Most offer generous free trials to help you choose.
Email Marketing Strategy
Having a solid strategy in place is crucial for driving results from email campaigns. Here are a few top tips:
- Set clear objectives like lead generation, sales, or engagement. This guides content and helps measure success.
- Nail your subscriber persona by understanding interests, pain points, and goals so you can speak directly to them.
- Execute a content calendar that maps out topics, graphics offers over the next 3–6 months at minimum.
- Test different subject lines against your list to see what grabs the most attention before sending widely.
- Try segmenting your list based on engagement or profile data for more targeted messaging.
- Promote signups on your site, social media, and other content to continually grow your contacts.
- Analyze all campaign statistics and iterate based on the highest open/click areas to improve over time.
Email Marketing Campaigns
To build trust and convert subscribers into customers, you need to run a variety of helpful campaigns. Here are some to consider:
- Welcome Series: Used to introduce new contacts to your brand through a series of 3–5 auto-emails.
- Regular Newsletter: Share valuable info and latest deals for existing subscribers on a consistent schedule like monthly or quarterly.
- Lifestyle Campaign: Curate a branded collection of products or services around a certain theme or aspiration.
- Seasonal Promotion: Gear offers towards events like Black Friday, Christmas, and Mother’s Day for increased sales.
- Webinar Follow-Up: Promote an upcoming online event and then send recaps after it with the next steps.
- Cart Abandonment: Entice unfinished shoppers to convert purchases and take additional actions.
- Anniversary Email: Appreciate loyal long-time subscribers and promote a special offer for their continued business.
Proper Content Creation
The content and messaging in each email you craft are critical for getting subscribers to notice, read, and potentially engage with your email marketing campaigns. Here are some tips:
- Compose subject lines carefully as they are often subconsciously skimmed first.
- Lead with compelling, accurately described headlines that immediately hook readers.
- Include high-resolution graphics, charts, or images that are helpful to break up walls of text.
- Answer questions subscribers may have using an FAQ or common concerns format.
- End appeals orCTAs should directly encourage the next actions, like clicking a link to buy.
- Design well-branded templates that look polished but avoid appearing too “sales-y”.
- Use descriptive preheader text shown in email listings to further entice opening.
- Consider A/B testing subject lines and content variations for continuous improvement.
The right email messaging combined with an effective strategy and tools will help boost engagement with your brand and positively impact the bottom line for any business. So start implementing these best practices from the ground up today.
Conclusion
As you can see, email marketing provides a powerful platform for growing customer relationships and increasing revenue when done correctly. By leveraging tools, implementing the right strategy, and sending high-quality communications on a consistent cadence, you can look forward to stronger results over time.
Always be testing and optimizing based on insights to continuously refine email campaigns that achieve your business goals. Get started with these steps and before long you’ll be well on your way to boosting your business success through the strong channel of email.
Disclaimer: This blog post contains affiliate links.
