The Complete Guide on How to Get Started With Email Marketing in 2023

Is Email Marketing as Good as They Say?

We know you have heard only good things about email marketing, but we still wanted to take a look at the stats just to kickstart your motivation.

The Number Of Email Users

As of recent surveys, the population of our planet is nearing 8 billion people! And out of these 8 billion people, there are 4 billion email users with verified and running accounts. To top that off, a whopping 99% of these users check their emails on a daily basis.

Consequently, the audience that can be targeted through email marketing is vast, more so than any other platform. That’s why your business can effectively reach global recognition with the use of effective email marketing alone.

Return on Investment

Email marketing is one of the easiest and most cost-effective marketing solutions that exists in 2023.

With every dollar spent on email marketing, you can expect to get an average return on investment of $40.

This makes email marketing the king of ROI, with charts that top every other marketing platform.

Growing Small Businesses

With 80% of all small businesses relying on email marketing for customer acquisition and growth, you know how big of a deal it is.

While social media adverts and SEO are also necessary, the key player in driving a brand’s growth is email marketing.

Is It Too Late to Get Into Email Marketing?

Absolutely not. 

While email as a form of communication might have been overtaken by more convenient platforms, it will remain the marketing monarch for many years to come.

With the projected increase to an astounding 376 billion emails sent daily by 2025, this marketing platform is nowhere near the end of its life.

The competition in this niche is at an all-time high, which can be off-putting for new business owners and potential marketers. But the key to victory in this market is personalization, which we will soon discuss in detail.

How to Get Started With Email Marketing?

Now that you know what email marketing is and why it’s so great, let’s learn how you can employ it for your business.

Define Your Goals

Before you spam your contact’s mailboxes, you have to do some homework. 

The first step to an effective email marketing campaign is to establish your immediate and long-term goals. Think about what you want to achieve with your emails, as every email you send will revolve around it.

To understand this better, let’s take a look at some examples. A company like UNICEF wouldn’t want to send promotional emails to its donor base. Instead, they would opt for educating them on their current campaigns and then ask for donations. Similarly, a company like CUBE that sells mountain e-bikes will benefit from newsletter-based emails as well as promotional drives for their new products.

When the long-term goals of your business are defined, the general tone of your emails has to change accordingly. This is to better convince your audience to take action. 

On the other hand, the immediate goals of your company can be ever-changing, depending on the circumstances. During the holiday season, sales of products and services revolving around festivities sky-rockets, and your marketing plan should cater to that. Or, for instance, with the pandemic hitting the world in 2020, the immediate goals of almost every brand were modified to cater to the shifting demographic.

Pick an Email Marketing Service Provider

The next is to pick the right email marketing platform. There are numerous great email marketing service providers on the internet, including MailChimp, Hubspot, and Constant Contact. These will allow you to streamline your entire marketing process through automation.

What is Automation?

With automation, you won’t have to manually create a contact list and send an email to each of your contacts individually. This process is handled by the service platform along with so much more.

What Else Can an Email Marketing Service Do for My Company?

Apart from automation, an Email Service Provider or an ESP can help you launch a campaign smoothly. You can adjust when the emails should automatically be sent out, which makes it extremely useful for situations where timing is important.

An ESP can provide you with email tracking features. These give you feedback on how many emails were opened, how many clicks your emails got, how many times an email was read, and so on. Email tracking and analytics are pivotal to improving your campaigns and marketing strategy.

And it doesn’t just end there. While every ESP provides unique benefits to its users, another feature most of them have in common is email templates. These can help you curate a professional-looking email right from the get-go. Once you get an understanding of which emails perform better, you can create even create custom emails for your mailing list.

Which ESP is Best For You?

Picking the right ESP is a crucial decision. Changing to a different ESP later down the road will only cause you problems.

The main factor to consider with ESP is its cost and scalability. To tackle these factors better, you need to predefine the goals of your business.

Get an ESP that can meet your requirements today, as well as in the future, once you scale your company. The best ESP for you would be the one that’s flexible and can do all this at a reasonable cost that your business can afford.

Build a Contact List

A contact list is your target audience. These are your most loyal customers that have purchased your services before and know about your business. For smaller startups, a contact list can begin with even your closest friends and family. But the important thing is that it should grow with time.

How to Grow an Email List?

By far the best method to expand your contact list is to ask anyone who visits your website for their email address. This should be done by providing an incentive for the visitor.

An incentive can be in the form of a discount if they sign up for your email list. It can also be a temptation for an exclusive newsletter or promotion offers in the future.

You can even use platforms like Hunter.io and LeadLeaper to track down the email addresses of people in companies that could be interested in the services you provide. This can be immensely beneficial for newer businesses to generate viable leads and develop an authentic relationship with your audience.

Segment the Audience.

If your contact list is already large enough, then you will need to divide it into smaller groups. This is part of the personalization that we discussed. In a large contact list, not every customer is the same, so we have to segment them according to their differences.

How to Segment your Audience?

The process of segmentation relies on any key difference that can allow you to personalize your email for a smaller group of customers. The categories can be as follows:

• Past purchases
• Email engagement
• Interests of the customer
• Location

Create your First Email

Your first email should be a welcome message. This is sent out to your entire contact list. It will introduce your company to your closest customers so make it warm and welcoming.

Once you grow your email list and segment your audience, the tone of your emails will change. To get your customers to follow the call-to-action or CTA in your emails, you’ll have to pick an engaging and captivating tone.

Not only that, but the design of your email should also be eye-catching and attractive. Because most people open their mailboxes on their phones, make sure your email is mobile-compatible.

Create different emails for each segment of your audience. Try to find what compels each of the segments, and use that to convince them to buy your service.

Testing Your Emails

Testing your emails is important. One of the simplest methods to do this is called A/B testing. This is done by creating multiple variations of the same emails, but only changing certain factors. For instance, you could test different subjects this way, and see which one gets more people to open the email.

You can use these results to create more engaging emails and increase how many people follow the CTA.

Email Tracking

To stay on top of your game, always keep email analytics in sight. You can get insights like open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rates, and many others which will communicate the effectiveness of your email campaign.

Always strive to improve these numbers. If your goal is to increase the subscriber count, then you should make sure the unsubscribe rates are kept low. Similarly, for product promotions, you need to get maximum click-through rates.