Email Marketing

 
                                            EMAIL MARKETING

Anyone that has tried email marketing, whether successfully or not, will admit that there is a lot more to it than just quickly writing a message and sending it out to your viewers. You need to learn how to build a healthy email list and continually send interesting and niche related emails that are clicked and read your viewer list.

Effective email marketing does take time but with some focused time, effort, and strategy, most can learn and apply the steps quickly.

In this article we'll be looking at email marketing for beginners, step by step, and will cover the following:

What is email marketing
How email marketing really works
When should I start email marketing
What do I need to get started
Broadcasts vs Drip Campaigns
List of service providers
Video - Setting Up Your First Campaign
Email marketing is creating free, interesting, and attractive offers for your readers who are willing to exchange their email addresses for that offer.
Our website visitors are coming from various search bar entries into Google, Bing, Yahoo, or other search engines as well as from any of the many social media sites.

How email marketing really works

The website visitor comes to our blog post and, when reading it they see the CTA (call to action) at the end of the post and subscribe by entering their email address and clicking the Submit button. This is done in exchange for a free gift which should be directly related to the blog or niche.

After the website visitor reads the post and subscribes by submitting their email address in exchange for a free gift, they will then see the "thank you for subscribing" page with a download link to the free offer. The reader is now on your list and is part of an email campaign.

The reader sees the confirmation email in their inbox, the 1st in any number of contacts and then click on the link. This is called "double opt-in email". The visitor then receives the 2nd email the next day after subscribing, and perhaps a 3rd on the fifth day after subscribing.

All of these are automatically sent on specific days or dates. An email service or "auto-responder" can be set up to hold and distribute the thank you page and other email notices. This is called a follow-up series, or a campaign and can be set to deliver on a daily basis or as needed.

An auto-responder is a computer program that automatically answers emails that are sent to it. Auto-responders can be very simple or complex and are often used as email marketing tools to immediately provide information to their potential customers and then follow-up with them at preset times and dates.

When should I start email marketing?

There are a few preconditions to beginning an email campaign:

First, time needs to be spent building up your website, brand, self, business, and product. It's really important to generate a lasting relationship and trust with your audience.
There also needs to be some traffic flow to your website opt-in page. This can come from social networks like Facebook, G+, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. Traffic can also come from the various forums that are niche related to yours, as your comments and post links back to your site. Another good source for traffic is article websites like EzineArticles, HubSpot, or street articles. You submit articles to these sites and their audiences read and click on your links.
And there needs to be an understanding of your audience behavior, what they like and don't like, or how long they are staying on your page or site. This can all be monitored with Google's Search Console Analytics.
Broadcast vs Drip Campaigns

With both of these marketing methods, the user subscribes by opt-in, clicks on a confirmation email, and is subscribed to your list. The difference between the two is that with a "Broadcast" you manually send out email notices to your list whenever you want to, whether it be twice a day, once every few days, or whenever you want to communicate. You can manually set up an alert email and send it out to all subscribers letting them know about an offer or product being promoted.

With a Drip Campaign, you automatically send out emails which are dripped out regularly using an auto-responder like Aweber, MailChimp, Getresponse, etc. When using a drip campaign you would pre-write about ten emails and set each one to be sent out on specific days or dates.

An example of a drip email campaign could be an item being promoted leading up to a holiday. Every day or two you might receive a nice email promoting a holiday sale, each one is an attempt to get you to click on a link. Then eventually you get the "last chance" mailing and that campaign is over until the next holiday sale.

With an email campaign, you are building up a trust for quality and consistency with your subscribers whom you want to keep for many years to come.

A Broadcast can be sent out each time you publish a new post or have a news flash that you want to share with your readers. You can write a fresh email and send it out through an auto-responder as often as you want to.

List of email service providers

An email or auto-responder service does have a cost whether you prepay each year at a discounted rate, or pay a monthly fee. There are some limited free options but most are paid services. There are more but here are a few to check out:

Aweber - The most popular - There is a 30-day free trial and after that, the cost is only $19 per month for up to 500 subscribers.
MailChimp - They have a free option. If you have 2000 or fewer subscribers, you can send up to 12,000 emails per month absolutely free. No expiring trial, contract, or credit card required.