Email marketing is considered one of the top ways for a business to reach out and connect with prospects, and existing customers.

And despite what you may have read, it’s not dead.

Email marketing is alive and well. But are you “doing” email right? And are you doing enough of it?

Depending on the goal you create, email marketing can be used to reach out to existing customers, or help educate prospects on how to better manage their business.

There’s a lot of little details that you need to consider, and it can be challenging at times.

In our experience, we’ve found many businesses struggle with how to start with email marketing. Whether it be selecting an email service provider, the type of content to send, or how to build an email list. All important factors and tricky to nail down.

But fear not. We’ve been exactly where you are right now. Back in our early days still working under our sister company, we were desperately trying to reach leads through email marketing and other efforts. Our pain is your gain, and our experience has given us wisdom into launching and managing email campaigns.

In this blog piece, we’re going to cover the basics of email marketing your small business needs to know.

What goes into an email marketing campaign?

Starting this crash course off, before you send any emails to your clients or prospects, you need to put some thought into what your goals are.

Email marketing involves a lot more than a sweet email template.

The bottom line: your email marketing campaigns should be part of an overall approach that educate your prospects and contacts.

Remember, you use email marketing as a way to engage with your clients and prospects. But, it also helps you move people through different stages of your sales pipeline.

Before they became customers, they were prospects in a specific segment of a buying stage. As a part of your company’s sales cycle, your email marketing should lead these prospects through the different Stages, starting off with the initial awareness stage, then moved to the consideration stage, and finally the decision making stage.

At some point you built trust and credibility with them, and moved them from a prospect into a buyer, then to a customer. You want to use all your company’s marketing efforts to build trust and credibility with your prospects, and turn them into loyal customers.

Email marketing can do that for you.

One of the best ways to help persuade prospects is through a well-crafted email marketing strategy. It’s the silent salesman and works to reach colder prospects and turn them into interested ones. That’s what drip campaigns accomplish.

A drip or nurture email campaign is like having your sales team write personalized emails to target your persona and audience, on a pre-scheduled basis. These types of emails are very effective at delivering specific information that you send out over and over to your prospective clients.

Where do you start with email marketing?

First off, before you get your fingers to work on writing email copy, you need to have a list of emails to send to.

Buying emails that you did not earn can have the following unintended consequences:

• It can pollute your entire contact database.
• Buying lists can equal high bounce rates in your email marketing campaigns.
• Higher than normal bounce rates get your business in trouble with your email provider.
• Buying lists can equate to low engagement.
• Buying lists are more often than an exercise in futility.

Before you go out and start buying email lists, take a moment to read this blog about the problems associated with list buying.

So what should you do instead?

Always collect emails organically. One of the best ways to get emails is from people signing up for your blog, or from downloading an e-book from your site. You can also encourage your emails subscribers to share your content with their friends and other businesses. This helps you have a opening into reaching a wider audience.

Create an unsubscribe email for each campaign.

For every email campaign you do, you should always send out an unsubscribe email.

It’s a safe practice to get in the habit of. This helps prevent you from being marked as spam by your email subscribers.

If you want to stay on your prospects good side, send them a simple email allowing to unsubscribe from that campaign.

Someone may have signed up for your blog, and you want to send them a new e-book or a series of emails to promote a webinar. The problem is they may not be interested in the webinar or the e-book, and will mark your emails as spam.

You can avoid this situation entirely by creating an unsubscribe email, and sending out before you send your email list any other content.

The benefit of this is of course, making your audience aware they can unsubscribe from this particular campaign and still receive other content they enjoy. It’s also beneficial for you and helping you not be marked as spam.

You won’t need to send an unsubscribe email for everything, but it’s always good to send one before sending a longer email series.

Metrics to watch.

To assess your email marketing performance, you must conduct ongoing trend analysis of several key metrics.

By doing this, you can compare each campaign’s performance against your own averages to know whether a campaign outperformed or underperformed your
internal goals.

Your email service provider should provide a detailed report on each campaign and on your ongoing email performance. But here’s some of the most valuable metrics to use when weighing the success of an email campaign.

• Bounce Rate.
• Delivery Rate.
• Click-Through-Rate.
• Email Sharing.
• Conversion Rate.
• Revenue Per Email.
• Open Rate.
• Unsubscribe Rate.

For more in-depth details about what those metrics mean, read more here.

Take all these metrics with a grain of salt. They are important to track, but don’t spiral into despair if you lose a few subscribers.

Growing your email marketing efforts is a long term effort. You shouldn’t expect to add 100s of new subscribers to your email every month.

Finding success with email marketing involves playing a long game. It will take time and hard with to grow and maintain your email list, but it’s worth it.

Download our guide on email marketing.

We want you to be the hero of your marketing, and the hero for your customers.

Fill out the form below to download our free guide to email marketing, where you’ll learn all about how your business can receive a return-on-investment on your email marketing efforts.