Despite being the oldest tool in the digital marketing toolbox, email marketing is still very effective today. Users respond to the email lists they subscribe to more than they engage with social media content. Emails are also more effective in driving further actions, including conversions and a more personal relationship.
You can use email marketing to build an audience for a wide range of businesses and online entities, including your own branded website. If you want to get started with utilizing email marketing to your advantage in web promotions, here are the things you need to know.
It Costs Nothing
You don’t have to make a huge investment just to get started with email marketing. If you are starting a mailing list for your new website, you can actually rely on free email marketing tools and services in the beginning. This allows you to jumpstart your efforts without having to spend any of your digital marketing budgets.
Free email marketing still means gaining access to the best tools and reliable platforms. You don’t have to switch to a premium service when you have more recipients on your list; you simply need to upgrade to a better plan and begin accommodating more users in the process. Even design tools are now available for free.
Design with Brand in Mind
Speaking of design tools, one of the things you want to get right from the beginning is your branding. Email marketing is as much a part of your brand as other marketing channels, so you want to ensure consistency with brand elements and characteristics when doing email marketing. The logo, color scheme, and overall layout of your emails need to be consistent.
Good branding implemented early in the email marketing campaign allows you to immediately build a relationship with the audience. Over time, it is the consistency that will keep them loyal and interested; that same consistency is what will keep your brand – your website – at the forefront of their mind.
Gain Traction Early
A lot of marketers find gaining traction is a lot harder to do with email marketing. You have to get people to subscribe to your list before you can start building a relationship with recipients. While doing so, you have to remain consistent, even when you only have two or three people on your list. This is something of a chicken-and-egg issue.
However, there are actually more ways to gain traction early in the game. You can utilize paid content and social ads to promote your new mailing list. You can also add an opt-in form on your website to drive more traffic to the list. Just make sure you are not being too pushy and annoying when trying to win the heart of your audience.
Start with Value Delivery
Similar to gaining traction early, you also want to make sure that you deliver real value to your audience as early as possible, even when there are only a few recipients on the list. Value is what keeps the audience interested and engaged. Instead of sending promotional emails, for example, you can add content about how to maximize the benefits of your website.
Summaries, headlines, interesting articles, and general announcements work too. As long as you know what the audience expects from the mailing list – as promised when you ask them to subscribe – you will have no trouble developing content for the newsletter. Sales-focused content like upselling and promotional offers should come later.
Something to Look Forward To
The title of this section says it all: give the audience something to look forward to. You don’t need to connect every newsletter you send, but you want parts of the newsletter to be a series that the audience can follow. This ties to your bigger content strategy that includes content for your website and other channels.
What you’re doing is creating a cliff-hanger at the end of every email. Combined with consistency, you can expect the audience to start waiting for your next email. Some might even ask where the next newsletter is if it’s late. Once you start seeing this, you know you have loyal recipients that are very happy with the value you deliver via email.
Automate
Building a mailing list is an exhaustive process, so you want to automate as many tasks as possible. Fortunately, the best email marketing tools come with automation functions and features that make handling larger mailing lists easy. Instead of cleaning the list manually, for instance, your email marketing tool can automatically remove bad email addresses and inactive recipients.
Automating early is the last piece of the puzzle. Combined with the other getting-started tips we covered in this article, you can easily set up a mailing list, start attracting subscribers with your valuable content, and begin gaining a stronger audience base that looks forward to your new content every time.
