It’s true, email marketing is still king, so everyone wants to create an email newsletter and get in on the action. However, with all of the competition flooding people’s inboxes, you need a few secrets up your sleeve to stand out from the crowd.
Fortunately, we prepared this easy, simple guide that gives you an exact roadmap on how to get started, all the way from the initial steps to launch, all the way to personalization techniques and strategies.
Get ready to unlock the full potential of your email marketing.
Who are you trying to help?
In the bestseller “Build a Story Brand” we learn that one of the biggest secrets to effective marketing is positioning yourself as the “guide” in your prospect’s journey. You’re there to help them achieve the resolution to their issues and solve their problems.
This is precisely why email is still the number one leading channel in all of marketing. Nothing comes close to being able to replicate this dynamic at scale. In fact, all other channels either have scale (and no personalization), or are simply un-scaleable, such as talking to people one-on-one.
The secret to achieving this isn’t just to build an email list. You also have to decide who you are talking to. What is their story, and how can you as a brand be part of the resolution to their challenges and guide them to a happy ending?
The process to achieve this kind of “understanding” of your audience comes in two layers. The first is to think ahead of time why you’re building a newsletter and who you are targeting. If you target everyone, you target no-one.
But even after you start your list, over time you want to segment your audience even further. If you need help with that, check out our guide on email list segmentation.
Set goals, but be humble
The major mistake people make in email marketing is to jump straight into it, without any goals of any kind. They’ve heard that email marketing is great for profits, so they just start doing “the email stuff”.
The issue with this is that since there is no plan or concrete goals, they just end up doing email marketing whenever they “feel like doing email marketing”. This brings about the biggest killer known to email lists, and that is inconsistency.
You basically guarantee that your subscribers will be annoyed with your ups and downs, where you either bombard them with attention, or go missing for months. It’s much better to start slow and be humble about how much email marketing you can do.
Of course, you can increase your volume and email marketing levels later on. But to start with, err on the side of pessimism when it comes to your plans about how much you can do.
Do things in the right order
Email marketing can be so exciting with all the endless fun opportunities it provides nowadays. However, this is a bit of a double-edged sword. If you don’t know how to prioritize, you’ll end up overwhelmed and never launch your newsletter.
If you’re an Emercury user (or subscriber), you’re in luck because we prioritize the most important stuff and make it front and center, both in our software and guides. Sure, we also offer all the hundreds of other things if you want to become more elaborate, but we make sure not to overwhelm you.
Now, when it comes to launching a newsletter, the basics involve a couple of simple steps.
– First create a welcome sequence: This is crucial to giving your newsletter a great head start, and should be the first thing that you do.
– Also, make sure to learn the basics of list hygiene: ironically enough too many people delay this until it’s too late. It’s best to start with this from day one.
– Start tracking your data from day one: Emercury makes this super simple with our effortless reporting functionality. No need to learn a separate skillset. You can, and should start watching your analytics from day one.
These three steps are the foundation for launching a successful newsletter and tackling them first ensures a smooth start. The rest of this guide dives into additional foundational elements you can incorporate over time to further refine your newsletter strategy.
Create engaging content
I often say that “engagement is the number one secret to all email marketing profits”, and it’s true. Almost everything that you study or work on in email marketing is another way of boosting your engagement with your audience.
And while there are many things that you can do to drive engagement, you have to start with the basics, and this is creating engaging content. Unless you have this piece, nothing else makes a difference.
You have to think of engaging content as the core, and everything else as a multiplier factor. Basically, if your content is a zero in terms of engagement value, how useful is anything else? Not at all, because you can’t multiply by zero.
Ok, then you might ask “so how do I create engaging content?”, and I have the simple answer for you once again. While it is useful to study the skill and art of email copywriting, I have some good news for you.
You can get great results from day 1 by simply committing to one thing, and it doesn’t require skill or study. If you do this one thing, you’re already halfway there. And that one thing is simply committing to delivering valuable content to your audience.
You have to actually demonstrate that you can solve problems for your subscribers. They have to see evidence that they get something out of opening your emails, beyond mere entertainment.
Which isn’t to say that you should be boring, but anything of value delivered in a boring way will beat an amazing writer who delivers fluff.
Understand the concept of relevance
You might have heard that the most important thing is to make sure that you’re sending relevant content. So you might wonder “which is it, should I focus on it being valuable, or should I focus on relevance, and besides, what is relevance?”
Well, relevant content is just a finer distinction when it comes to delivering said valuable content. The thing is that your subscribers are not all the same. Whilst your content might be valuable, it only becomes relevant to a subscriber when it is valuable to them, at that given point in time.
Kind of vague I know, so let me explain with an example. Let’s say that you run a fitness newsletter. You might send the best and most valuable weight-loss tips to a subscriber, but if they’re looking to put on muscle, it’s not relevant to them.
And it’s not just about whether you’re sending the right content to the right person, it’s also about sending it at the right time. You might be familiar with the concept of the “customer journey”. This is the idea that customers go through certain stages of discovery before they purchase.
This means that different things are valuable to them at different stages of the journey. So relevance is about sending the right content, to the right person, at the right time. And just how do you do that? Well, this is where segmentation and personalization come into play.
Personalize, one step at a time
The fact is that today personalization isn’t an option, it is a must if you’re doing email marketing of any kind. This is largely due to the fact that the large enterprises have accustomed the modern customer to personalization.
This is true to the point where if you’re failing to personalize your emails, they feel “off” to your recipients. To the point where they feel “spammy” to a subscriber. Even if they requested to subscribe to your list and get your emails.
The good news is that personalization can be easy and simple to get started with. You do not have to get super elaborate or advanced to start with.
Even if all you do is use merge tags to address people by name, this is a great step forward. And you want to start doing this from day one.
Remember relevance though
Utilizing merge tags is a great way to kill that sense of “I’m getting the same email everyone else is getting”, but if you want to truly make for relevant content, you want to genuinely send different content to different folks.
So how do you do that? Well, the first step is to start segmenting your list. That includes utilizing things like tags and custom fields to differentiate subscribers from one another. And then, treat individual subscribers differently based on this information.
To start with, it is ok to just have segmentation data based on just the source of the lead, for example what lead magnet got them into the list. The next easiest thing you can do is to also utilize their behavior during the welcome sequence to gather even more segmentation data.
How do you leverage this segmentation data though? Well, the easiest and most fun way is to leverage our smart personalization technology. It’s just as easy to utilize as merge tags, but it allows you to have entire parts of the email show different content based on who’s viewing it. Pretty neat, right?
Next, you can utilize our advanced segment builder to build up different profiles for the different types of subscriber, and then target them with different campaigns. And if you combine this with smart personalization, you get super powers.
That is to say, you can send a different campaign to different segments, but then, even within that same segment, with smart personalization different subscribers will have been presented with different content, as you choose.
Get A Strategic Partner On Your Side
There’s no need to go at this alone. While we do put out a lot of free content to help you, nothing beats a one-on-one conversation. In these articles we try to help clarify things as best as possible. However, every business is different, so we have to generalize.
If you want to understand better how to implement email marketing in your specific business, let’s have a chat. At the moment I am still able to do some free demos, so be sure to book one while I can still do these.
I would love to hear about your specific needs, challenges and any confusion you might have about email marketing strategies. And then, help you see how you can use Emercury to improve your bottom-line.
Alternatively, or in addition to booking a free demo, you can also grab a username for our forever-free-plan while we still have it. It’s probably the most generous email marketing automation plan on the planet. We include almost every feature in this plan, with very few restrictions.
Remember, you get to keep this plan for life, for free… Provided that you grab a username while registrations are still open. Note that we might decide to pull this way-too-generous offering at any point. So click that link to check if we still allow registrations.
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