Email marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to promote a business, particularly when that business is tied to a web site. It is natural for the user to transition from an email message onto the web site of the company which sent it to them, especially if you have taken care to match the design of your email to the look and feel of your site.

However, there can be a bit of a learning curve when it comes to email marketing, and most folks have difficulty thinking about where to get started. This article will provide you with some basic steps to help you get started, and give you some ideas about how to leverage any existing resources in expanding your efforts in this new medium.

1. Build up your mailing list

This is the big sticking point to getting started with email marketing. It’s not worth sending out messages if no one will see them, right? But how do you get a list of people to send to? This is where most people take a wrong turn and end up frustrated. Don’t bother buying an email list; it’s not worth the money you’ll pay and you’ll see few if any conversions. Worse, you may damage your ability to get emails delivered at all. Every time someone marks your message as spam, it is less likely to get delivered to everyone else. So you really don’t want to send your messages to anyone who doesn’t specifically want them.

So, you need to build up your own mailing list. Obviously, people will have to be interested in your products or services before they will be interested in receiving messages from you, so you must first have some kind of traffic to leverage into a mailing list. That can be web traffic or foot traffic. Existing customers make the best future customers, so if you have a brick & mortar business, keep a signup sheet right by the cash register or front desk. Train your staff to ask every single person who walks in to offer membership in your exclusive email list. Offer some incentives for doing so–discounts, the promise of special information or offer, anything that makes sense in your business model.

If your business is based around a web site, do the same thing. Make sure every visitor is exposed to an offer to join your mailing list, and give them a good reason to do so. If your web site is about information, then offer exclusive information not available to the general public. If you sell a product or service, offer discounts, special offers, or other incentives. Make the signup form prominent enough so that it cannot be missed and attractive enough that people can stand to look at it.

2. Create and send your messages

In an earlier post I gave a pretty detailed explanation of how to write for email marketing, so I won’t go into too much detail about copywriting technique here. But I will say this: write for your market, be clear and concise, and paint a picture for your reader. Subscribe to a few mailing lists for businesses you are interested in (especially your competitors) and pay attention to what you like or don’t like about them.

Then, write a few different versions of each message, switching up the writing style and approach. Use an email marketing solution to split test the various versions of your message against random samples of your mailing list. This way you will begin to learn what gets a response from your readers and what doesn’t. The things you learn about your market this way can not only inform your future emails, but the rest of your business as well.

It is easy to overthink the design of your email marketing messages. When you go to all the trouble of building a mailing list and writing strong, compelling content, you want to be sure that it is presented in an attractive format that gives your hard-won readers a positive impression of you and the things you have to offer.

The most important thing to remember when designing an email marketing template is to keep it very simple. Focus on readability first, and then add in small amounts of graphic flair to draw in and maintain your reader’s attention.

If you try to do too much in your layout, you are not only risking overwhelming your readers with too much visual distraction from your message. You also risk delivering them a message that will not display correctly in their email reader.

There is so much variance in the way that HTML will be displayed from one email reader to the next that it is extremely difficult for the average marketer to design a template that displays correctly for most recipients. A good alternative is to use one of our professionally designed email marketing templates, as these have been tested against every major email reader released in the last 10 years.

I have spoken with many users of our ActiveCampaign Email Marketing software who called in to ask for advice on how to best use CSS in their email templates. My advice? Don’t even think about it. The unfortunate truth is that there is a huge disparity between the way that even simple table cells are displayed in various email readers. You definitely want to avoid Flash and video in your email messages, and remember to include a plain text version of your message in addition to the templated HTML version.

Email marketing involves a unique form of copywriting that a lot of people, especially when just starting out, have difficulty planning and executing. There are many similarities with other forms of copywriting, but there are also some unique opportunities and pitfalls as well. In this article we will examine some of the elements of writing for email marketing and walk you through the basic steps of crafting your message.

As with writing for the web, there are a number of mechanical considerations that you must remain aware of. For example, just as web pages are listed on search engine result pages with brief “teasers” that describe the relevance of their content, email clients also display snippets of email messages. If the first line of your message is not compelling, it is therefore less likely that your message will ever be opened and read.

1. Target Your Audience

One of the most important aspects of any kind of marketing effort is to know your audience. Different types of messages and arguments will appeal to different age groups, ethnic groups, regions, etc. You’ll want to write much differently if your message is targeting businesspeople than you would if you were targeting housewives. Twenty-somethings respond differently to email marketing than fifty-somethings.

If you don’t know much about your market, then stop planning your email campaign and come back to it after you have conducted an appropriate level of market research. Without doing this you are just wasting time and money.

You also need to build up your email marketing list, which should always be highly qualified and doubly opted-in. Don’t bother buying email lists. The better qualified your email list, the more people will actually receive and read your message.

2. Determine Your Ideal Outcome

If you don’t know why you’re sending an email message, then you shouldn’t do it. There should always be a very clear and specific goal that your message is trying to achieve. Often your ideal outcome will be to have your recipients respond to your message by completing a purchase. But that is not always the case.

Many time people want to send out email campaigns to increase brand awareness. This requires a different approach than a direct-sales strategy. You may, for example, want to consider a viral email marketing strategy by offering incentives for your readers to forward your message on to their friends.

3. Establish A Connection

The way you do this is going to depend on the previous two factors. If you’re selling lifestyle and entertainment products to the 18-25 crowd, you may want to grab their attention with a fresh or amusing graphic. Businesspeople at the prime of their lives may want you to get right to the point and tell them what you have to offer before getting into too much detail, while an older or less time-crunched demographic may be more intrigued by a loaded question about the state of their life or business.

4. Tell Them Why They Want To Take Action

This is basic sales writing. Don’t tell them about what you have to offer them, tell them why they want it. Tell them how it makes their life better.

This can be tricky if you’re not writing direct sales copy. If you’re trying to get the message recipient to forward your message to a friend, for example, you can’t just sit on your hands and hope it happens, because it usually will not. Offer up the reward: “Imagine how hard your friends will laugh about this video.”

You want to be as specific as possible here, and offer up as many details and benefits as you can. Focus on the ways in which the individual reading your message will personally and directly enhance his or her existence by taking this action.

5. Inoculate Against Objections

As with every other type of copywriting, you want to introduce potential objections that your reader might have while they consider your proposition. By bringing up these arguments yourself, you are able to provide counter-arguments that assuage the doubts that your reader did not even yet know they had! If you do this effectively, the reader will not only want to comply with your request, but will want to get others to do the same.

6. Ask Them To Take Action

Once you have told them what a wonderful world it would be if they were to comply with your request, and systematically annihilated their doubts, that is the time to formally pose your request. If you want them to go to your web site and buy your product, say to them “Click on this link to go to our order page, then click on the button marked ‘Check Out’, enter your payment information, and Click ‘OK.’” If you want them to forward your message along, tell them so.

Because online marketing is one of the few industries experiencing growth and prosperity in the present economy, a growing number of entrepreneurs and online service providers are aiming to expand into providing email marketing services. This is an outstanding business opportunity, particularly for businesses who already offer internet- or marketing-related services to their clients. In this article we will briefly review the steps you need to take to succeed as an email marketing service provider.

Your business plan

The first step, of course, is to determine who your target market is and exactly what you will be offering them. There a full sections of library devoted to the topic of how to write a business plan, but the basic are simple:

• Market Analysis
  • Who will your customers be and what are their needs?
  • What is your competition like? What opportunitities exist and what barriers exist to realizing those opportunities? How do your particular strengths and weakness affect your chances of success?
• Product Development
  • In this case you know you intend to provide email marketing service. What does that include? Will you be building up your clients’ email lists for them? Writing advertising copy? Or will you simply be providing access to a web-based email marketing system that you will maintain?
  • You will also want to evaluate your costs, including man-hours, and develop a pricing scheme based on consideration of these figures, how much profit you need to justify your efforts, and what price you think your market will bear for the services you’re offering.
• Sales & Marketing
  • How do you intend to go about promoting your new service? Do you have an existing customer or subscriber base that you can leverage to get the service going?
  • Ordering & fulfillment logistics

Things You’ll Need

• Hardware
  • No matter what type of email marketing service you’ll be running, you will need to invest in a solid server & ISP or a hosting package that is capable of accommodating your projected usage volume.
• Software
  • You will need to buy bulk email marketing software with a sufficient number of user licenses to accommodate your projected initial needs (the order page is here).
• Wetware
  • You will need to effectively market your service. If you have an existing client base and are offering the service to them as a way to add value or expand upon your existing services, then you definitely have a huge advantage here. Otherwise, you will have trouble competing with major service providers like ConstantContact and AWeber unless you find a specific niche or untapped client base. As with any other type of business planning, this is where your ability to exercise some serious ingenuity comes in.

There are three basic types of email marketing services, representing three fundamental approaches to email marketing. This is why it is misleading to lump the different types of products and services together, and why it is so easy to become confused about what works and what doesn’t.

In this article we will break down all of the different types of email marketing service, explain the assumptions that they operate under, and look at the reasons why they are or are not effective.

1. Spamming

When a lot of people think about email marketing, they imagine getting in contact with an email marketing firm that maintains a massive “opt-in” list. They imagine that this firm has a secret ingredient that makes millions of people open to the idea of receiving marketing messages from anyone willing to pay.

This first type of email marketing service is what we refer to as “spam,” and it basically means you are hiring someone to send out junk mail to a random list of email addresses for you. The return on investment with this type of service is going to be extremely low, because the people who are receiving your marketing emails will generally wish that they were not receiving them.

2. Email Advertising

The next type, which we’ll call email advertising, is the much more legitimate and reliable cousin of spamming. This is generally done through real and reputable marketing firms, who will set up advertising contracts to place your marketing messages inside of emails sent by publishers to established mailing lists.

For example, say you subscribe to a magazine that sends you a weekly update by email. You may have noticed that there are advertisements in those emails just as there are advertisements in the magazine itself. This is an email advertisement.

Because the people receiving this type of message are generally doing so by choice, it is much more likely that your sales message will be seen and paid attention to. The effectiveness of your ads will probably be comparable to purchasing space in a printed publication (although may be less costly.) And, of course, the effectiveness will depend on the design of your ad, the value of your offer, and your placement within the email message.

3. Classic Opt-In Email Marketing

Generally when you hear discussions about reputable email marketing practices, it is this type of email marketing that is being referred to. A special, separate email list is maintain specifically and only for your business or marketing campaign, and individuals opt in to receive the messages that you intend for that list. Generally you will build your email list by offering some sort of incentive for signing up, be it information, special offers, or giveaways.

This form of email marketing is highly effective and is growing in popularity among traditional marketing experts, particularly because the troubled economy calls for marketing techniques that require little upfront investment. In fact, opt-in email marketing appears to be getting more effective.

In order to accomplish this type of email marketing, you will need to plan your email campaign, build your opt-in email list, and write effectively.

This is one of the most common questions that we hear from individuals who are new to email marketing: where can I buy an email marketing list and how much will it cost?

The common assumption is that the sequence of an email marketing campaign goes something like this:

1. Develop a pitch
2. Buy a supposedly “opt-in” mailing list (yeah right)
3. Send the pitch out to that list
4. Watch the sales roll in!

Every year thousands of companies follow this ill-conceived plan and fail miserably, because it simply is not an effective strategy. And then from that point on, they assume that email marketing simply doesn’t work, or at least doesn’t work for their product. But email marketing can be extraordinarily effective if you use a more sensible approach to planning your email campaigns.

The real question here should be: is there any point in buying an email marketing list? Personally, I wouldn’t purchase an email list at any cost. You can buy millions of email addresses from web scrapers and spam brokers, but it’ll end up costing you more than it makes you. If it makes you any money at all, which would surprise me.

I’ll ask you this question: when was the last time you received an unsolicited email that resulted in your doing business with that seller?

More likely, the fact that you received an unsolicited email made you less likely to ever deal with that company. The email tarnished their reputation. In your mind, and the minds of all the other millions of recipients of their spam, the company that sent you the unsolicited email is now on the same level as the Nigerian princes who keep offering you a percentage of their untold millions. So the only reason you should ever buy an email marketing list and send your own marketing information out to it is if you feel like spending money to damage your own reputation.

Instead, take the time to build up your own, fully qualified and unique email marketing list. You will find that people who have actually personally opted in to your own one-of-a-kind list will often be surprisingly responsive and engaged. Design an attractive email marketing subscription form, place it prominently on your web pages, and consider offering a compelling incentive for signing up. That’s how to succeed in email marketing.

One of the most alluring facets of social media marketing is the potential for sales and branding messages to “turn viral,” meaning that people start passing them on to friends just because they find it amusing, entertaining, or valuable. But in order for this to happen, you need to really have an idea of what people in your market segments are interested in. You also have to have some good ideas about how to get them to pass your message along.

Although many people have come to think of email-marketing as a one-to-many form of advertisement, there is actually tremendous potential for viral email marketing. Here are a few basic strategies you can use.

By the way: if you blog or tweet about this post, let us know and we’ll give you a coupon code for 10% off any of our self-hosted software products! 

Highlight your “Forward To Friend” links

Although a lot of email marketing campaigns include a link to “forward this message to a friend,” it usually sits quietly at the very bottom of the message, after all the content, all alone. Sometimes people click on it anyway.

More often, if they get the idea to forward the message, they’ll just click the “forward” button in their email client. This is somewhat less good for you as a marketer, because you have no way to measure what’s happening. It’s also not likely to happen very often, because forwarding to a friend is not often the first thing that pops into our heads when we receive marketing materials.

You can improve this natural process dramatically just by making your Forward to Friend link more prominent. Write a few convincing lines about why your friends want to receive this. You could provide a special offer just for friends of your subscribers, or even a special offer in return for forwarding to a friend.

Better still, you offer up a nugget of outstanding content–a tip, trick, example, or video that is relevant to your niche–immediately followed by a request to share this info with a friend by clicking here! This type of message will perform best if you make sure it’s small, simple, and attractive. You want it to be easy for anyone to pass along to someone else, and a full newsletter-style message is not going to provide that.

Provide substantial value

The word “value” here can mean any number of things. For example:

• Give something away for free
  • White papers, reports, and how-to guides are a classic giveaway. If you provide great, well-organized information, people will save it, pass it along, and spread the word for you. But you are going to have to do some reconnaissance and find out what information people in your market are looking for.
• As I mentioned already, sales, discounts, and product giveaways can be very alluring, especially in markets where you see a lot of potential buyers sitting on the fence. The discount or special offer, couple with the social proof of hearing about the offer from a friend, can put you at a substantial advantage with these customers.
• Make something fun or entertaining. Funny works. Go to your local comedy club and offer the funniest guy there a couple hundred bucks to make you an entertaining YouTube video that is punctuated with your call to action.

Make sure it’s easy to subscribe

If you’ve the time to craft a message that will be passed along, you want to make sure you can capitalize on your hard work. You can do this elegantly in the footer of the message, by including not only an unsubscribe link but a subscribe link as well. If you do this, you will of course want to enhance the visibility of the footer with attractive formatting, and provide additional reasons why someone would want to subscribe (or stay subscribed) to your mailing list.

For more great email marketing tips, be sure to subscribe to our blog feed!

Most modern email readers display a snippet of text from the beginning of each email as a teaser that helps users know whether it is something they want to open and read. You can see this small bit of text in Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Apple’s Mail.app client, and even the iPhone email application. This text is also what your reader will see if their email client has blocked all of your big pretty images. Some marketers refer to this text as the message preheader.

You probably already know how important a compelling title is for your email marketing campaign’s open/read rate. Good ad copy always begins with a interesting, informative headline. The headline’s job is to sell the sales copy, so that the sales copy will be able to sell the product. You can use the email snippet text to enhance the allure of your headline, to provide extra information, or to strongly direct attention to a call for action.

Email Teaser Text As A Second Headline

In traditional advertisement copywriting, the first line is one of the most important pieces of text in the entire ad, article, or sales letter. It is often seen as second only to the headline itself. The job of the first line is to convince the reader that they want to keep reading.

The email teaser can very effectively serve this function, because it gives the reader a window into the message you want them to read. You may not be able to predict how many words of teaser copy will be displayed in the reader’s email client, so try stack the beginning of your sentence with language that is vivid, exciting, and seductive. Introduce something out of the ordinary, provoke curiosity, or promise to answer a nagging question for your demographic. If you do your job well, your open/read count should see a strong increase.

Writing Informative Email Preheaders

Another tactic for utilizing the email preheader text is to pack it with important information that would have been too much for the title. This way you can formulate a punch, attention-getting headline for the title, and immediately back it up with a solid reason for opening and reading the message.

This one-two punch is great if your readers are heavy internet and email users, who will tend to quickly pre-screen their messages. You quickly grab their attention, and then offer a quick justification for why that attention was justified. Again, you have no way of knowing how much information will fit into the email browser’s preview snippet, so aim for compact and concrete nuggets of information. Numbers, percentages, promises.

Email Snippets As A Direct Call For Action

If you’re the type of marketer that likes to strike early and strike often, then you may feel attracted to the idea of using the snippet text in your email campaigns as a direct call to action. And your instincts may not be wrong. Many marketers report excellent results from this technique.

The very first line of the email is a great place to pitch an exclusive offer, a special discount, or even to request that the reader forward your email to a friend.

As Always, Split-Test Your Messages For Best Results

In many cases you’ll want to mix and match these techniques to make the most of your email campaign. And the only way you can ever really know which ad copy is the most effective in getting your desired results is to test multiple different versions against one another.

If you’re using our ActiveCampaign Email Marketing software, this is going to be a lot easier. All you have to do is write up multiple versions of your email preheader copy, tell the software what percentage of your list to use as a test sample, and let it choose the winning ad copy based on the actions of your readers.

We recently received a comment that exemplifies a lot of the fears that beginning email marketers have:

Hi,

If I do use software such as 1-2-All, isn’t my IP being shown to my ISP as sending out many, many emails. Won’t I therefore be shut down? I need to send out about 250 per day. I know that legally a spammer must attempt to hide his identity and (not or) be deceptive. I want to do neither, in fact my letterhead includes name, address, phone, email, etc. in every email. I am hardly a spammer. However, the ISP’s think that any email sent out from a hitherto unknown sender is spam. Perhaps socially yes, legally no. Regardless of the legal innocence of my actions, I need to get the word out. How do I do it?

Your response will be greatly appreciated.

Frank

Thank you for your excellent question, Frank. I hope this answer will clear things up for you.

You are correct that many ISPs will assume you are spamming if you start sending out a large volume of emails through your normal SMTP email server. It is generally not recommended, for example, to start sending large volume email advertisements through your Comcast, Time Warner, AOL, or similar email account, because doing so may jeopardize your ability to continue using the account normally for your own personal email. At the very least, you should check the terms of use before even considering using your primary email service for bulk email sending.

By default, ActiveCampaign Email Marketing software will send your messages directly from your web server. Depending on which web hosting company you use, this is often considered more acceptable use of your service. However, there will usually be limitations to the number of messages you can send. Many web hosts will limit you to 250, 500, or 1000 messages per day.

It is important to contact your web host prior to starting an email marketing campaign to find out what the limitations of your service are. You can easily configure our software to throttle its sending rate so that you do not exceed your account limits. The reason you need to do this first is because many servers will not report any error when failing to send messages beyond your quota, so it won’t be possible to go back and determine who did or did not receive your message.

Many web hosts also have additional packages available for purchase which will allow you to send a greater number of emails more quickly. If you are using a quality web host, then this will often be a very solid option for sending out your email campaigns.

As we enter into another holiday season, you’ll want to spend some time considering ways to fine-tune your email marketing campaigns. There are certainly unique opportunities for a variety of business sectors in this season. There are also some pitfalls that you should be mindful of if you want to maximize the effectiveness of your messages.

Everybody’s Doing It

The holiday season is the time of year when people are receiving the highest number of marketing and advertising messages. More than any other time, ineffective message are going to be lost in the crowd. To make your message stand out in the crowd, you’ll have to do two things:

1. Offer something very good
2. Be very specific about it

Just watch your own behavior as the holiday special offers come streaming into your inbox. Messages with generic or vague titles are likely the first to be deleted without being read. Whose got the patience? Try to use your title to encapsulate the full message in as few words as possible. Tell people exactly what you have for them, and the ones who want it will open and read.

The body of the email should be similarly punchy. How often do you ever spend more than 30 seconds reading a marketing email? You would have to be very, very interested in the information or offer you had received. You’re more likely to get a response from your readers if the email itself is short and to the point. If the email has done its job, your readers will follow your links to your more in-depth pages of product details, sales copy, etc.

Timing Is Everything

Before you send your messages, go back through your archives to see what time of day and day of the week your subscribers tend to open their messages the most frequently. While Sunday and Monday afternoon are the days when email marketing messages generally get opened the most, this can vary widely depending on what industry you are in and who your clients are. If you use our Email Marketing software, you can set your campaign to automatically send to each subscriber at the time of day that they initially subscribed to your list. This can be great if you have subscribers in many different time zones, because you can be assured that you’re sending during a time that they are awake and likely to be exposed to incoming messages.