Email Marketing Basics

1. Introduction: Effectively using email marketing is one of the most powerful strategies you can use for your business. Hi, my name is Steven. I'm a content creator and instructor here on skill share to now over 1200 students. I also have over five years experience in the digital online marketing space. Throughout my experience, I've grown to learn the importance of email marketing and how transformational that can really be for either your personal brand or your business. That's mine. They can this course here to show you the fundamentals of what you need to know with email marketing helped save you some time. And lastly, I'm going to pull back the curtain and show some secrets that you can use to be more effective when you're first getting started. So that way, you can skip the whole beginner phase and get right into being really effective with email marketing. 2. Why is it important?: What's the importance of email marketing, right? Why are we going to go through all these steps? Will the short of it is, email marketing can be extremely powerful tool in your tool belt to build the engagement with your audience. Get more people to join a Facebook group, or most importantly, to get more sales for your business. Especially as we move into the 21st century, where more and more of these brick and mortar stores are closing down and more consumers are spending their time on the internet, reading articles, doing their shopping, Having a good email marketing strategy in place with other parts of your business can be a really great way to give yourself a competitive edge over other businesses. When we're going through this course, I really want you to think about email marketing as one tool that you can use in a bigger, holistic picture of your business area brand. Because at the end of the day, we can have the best brand, we can have the best website. But if we don't have that exposure, if we're not able to effectively reach people, then none of it really matters. And so email marketing, simply put, is a really great way for us to effectively reach our customers or people who may be interested in us. 3. How to get emails : The first thing for us to do in this whole process is understand how to get email addresses from our customers or potential customers. Nobody is going to give us their email address for free, right? We have to give them something in return or an exchange for the email address. There's many different ways that you can get e-mail addresses from people. But to keep it simple, the two main ways you could do it. Our first offering a lead magnet. Some common examples of this would be an e-book, some type of PDF, some type of digital product that you give them in return for them giving you their email address. Another way you can get e-mail addresses from people is by creating custom quizzes. This is actually a really effective way to get leaves or email addresses. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren't talking about basically how this would look is you would create a quiz that's designed for either your customers or people that you're trying to reach and connect with. Let's use an example to make this a little bit clearer. Let's say, for example, say I am a fitness influencer and I have a fitness website. And the people who follow me on Instagram follow me because my fitness tips, and let's say I have a website where I sell different supplements and health-related stuff. Let's say I wanted to get more leads or email addresses from people who are interested in the fitness realm. So that way down the road, I can send them promotional emails hoping they buy my supplements that I sell on my website. Well then what I can do is build a quiz that's designed around health and fitness. There's different softwares out there that you can use to actually build these quizzes. A great example of this would be lead quizzes.com. And these are paid services, so you will have to spend some money for it. So then what I would do with this quiz is advertise it to my Instagram followers who are already interested in fitness. Or I can also run a Google or Facebook ads to this quiz, people would go through and serve five to seven questions that I've created about fitness. And then once it gets to the end of the quiz, that people they want to see the results that they got and the only way they can get the result of the quiz that I've created is for them to give me their email address. That's a creative way for you as a company to get their email address. And then in return, they get the result, the quiz that you designed for them. The reason why quizzes are extremely effective is because humans in general like to discover something about themselves as the reason why IQ quizzes, different personality quizzes are so popular because from a psychological standpoint, humans love discovering or learning something new about themselves. So if you can create a quiz about whatever your industry is that people go through the questions and your quizzes is going to help them discover something about themselves. They're going to be so much more likely to enter their email address because they want to get that self-discovery about themselves. Those are a couple of the main ways that you could start to try to get leads for email addresses, for your email list. 4. Email Marketing Software: After we collect some email addresses, those are going to be compiled into something called an e-mail list, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's just a list of all the email addresses that people have opted in for or people who have given us their email address. Their next thing we'll wanna do is store those email addresses in something that's called an email marketing software. There are a ton of different options on the market. This is where you're going to be storing your email addresses. This is where you're actually going to be sending the emails to your customers. And this is also going to be tracking the different data and analytics. So that way we know this email that we sent, is it effective? Should we change it? When it comes to email marketing system, you could think of it as basically the main system that you are going to use for email marketing in general, when it comes to choosing email marketing software out there, there are a ton of different options. A lot of it's going to depend on what your goals and your progress are to make things simple and to not overwhelm you. I would suggest starting out with male Chin. This is something I've personally had a life of great success with. It's really easy to use for beginners. This is software I personally started with years ago. Its really easy to use and understand. And I personally think it's a, it's a great place to start. 5. What is your goal?: So the next thing I would suggest before we go any further in this process is to take some time to yourself and really think through what is the goal of this email marketing campaign, right? Why is it that you want to do e-mail marketing in the first place? What goal do you want to accomplish? Do we want to get more sales? Do we want to get more people to join a Facebook group that we run? What is the specific goal that we want to accomplish? I think this is kind of like anything else in life, right? It's a lot easier for us to actually hit our goals if we first know the end result that we're looking for. And this is really important because this will then influence the decisions we make later on in the process. The types of emails that we draft, the amount of emails we send, the ratio of providing value versus asking them to do something. Keep that in the back your mind as we go throughout this course and really try to narrow down why it is that you want to get people's email addresses. Do you want to get more sales? If so, you want to 3x ten x y to get as specific as possible with your goals. That that'll help you later on throughout this process. 6. Email Sequence: So the next thing for us to understand with email marketing is something that's called an email sequence. So this is simply a series of emails that you're going to be sending to your customers before you write and send out that first email, you wanna take a step back and take a look from a higher level view of all the emails that you're going to be sending, what's going to be in them, how they're going to be interconnected. And by having that high level overview of when you're going to send the first email, the second, the third. And again, what is the purpose of these Ru, providing value, say in the first, second email and then in the third one you're asking for a sale or are you going send certain emails after they make a certain action on your website? Like they go to your website, but there's an abandoned cart. So they think about buying a product, they end up leaving. Are you then going to create an email sequence following up, asking them to then consider buying your product or reminding them that they exited out of your website. So there's a ton of different ways that you could go about and structure and email sequence. But it's just going to depend on the goal that you have at the time. And this goes back to the last lesson of having your end goal in mind. If your ultimate goal is to get more sales, that can help you better structure your sequence. Oregon, the series of emails that you're going to send. The main thing to keep in mind here is that you weren't going to have just one email sequence. In fact, you're probably many different email sequences throughout your larger email marketing strategy. But one thing I would actually suggest for you to do if you really want to take this seriously, is create, say a dummy email address out there and then go to all these different websites where they're asking for your email address, enter your email address in for these different lead magnets that they offer and sign up to a variety of different influencers and companies. Let a couple of weeks go by. And then what you're gonna notice as you're gonna get a ton of different emails from these different brands and influencers that you signed up for. And then pay attention to the emails that you get from these websites are companies down the road. The really cool thing you could do at that point, once you have all these emails, you can break those up into different inboxes based on the company that sent it to you. And then you can take a step back and better analyze, Okay, how many emails to this companies send me and also better identify best practices across everything as a whole. This is actually one way that I got really good at understanding email marketing is by this tactic, signing up for different emails, reverse engineer what they're doing. So you figure out what works. And in all honesty, you can learn a ton going about that way. 7. Subject Line: The next thing we need to be mindful of with email marketing is we need to use an effective email subject line. Let's take a step back for a second and think about this. If we're sending an email to a customer, we're not the only person who's sending them emails. We are essentially competing for their attention in their email inbox with all these other influencers, companies, brands, family, friends, all that. When we send that email, there's no guarantee that they're going to open it up. So it's going to be very important for us to make sure that we use in effective email subject line. So that way it's captivating enough for them to first open up our email. One type of email subject line you could use is the fear of missing out. And this plays upon a deeply held human psychology where basically enlarge part humans. They would much rather avoid missing out or avoid a painful experience than they would gaining something new or taking a risk to get some reward. So in general, humans, they don't want to miss out on something. And so here's some examples playing upon that concepts which could then help the person you're sending an email to open it up. Another type of category you can use is funny subject lines. These work really well in humans in general, love to laugh and smile and enjoy themselves, right? Here's some examples of funny subject lines that other companies have used. Those are just a couple of the types of categories. That's certainly not an all-inclusive list. You could also get more nuanced with it and figure out specific words that will work the best this whole topic, it can get really nuanced and really detailed, really fast. So again, I don't want to overwhelm you or go too much into the weeds of it. But the main point to recognize what this whole idea is that with the internet, we're so blessed that there's tons of information out there. There's companies out there who've already done the research, who already figured out what the best email subject lines are, depending upon what your product or services or what your community is around grade. So as you go along, always take into consideration the data and analytics from your previous campaign, from your previous email. And always test and try new things and try to always incrementally improve. We could spend all this time and energy writing the best email possible. But at the end of the day, none of that's going to matter if they don't open the email first. So having an awareness of the importance of a good email subject line is really important. 8. Key Performance Indicators (KPI): Now that we understand email marketing email sequence and we start to send out emails to be effective in this whole process, we need to use data and analytics to understand what's working and what's not working. And the way we're able to track our performance is through the use of something called KPIs, or key performance indicators. We're going to be able to actually track these KPIs through our email marketing software. There's a lot of different metrics that you can use to actually track this, but I'll cover some of the more common ones. One of the first KPIs is going to be something that's called your open rate. This is simply the number of people who opened the email that you sent it. To. Make things simple, let's say you have an email list of a 100 people. So you write together a really great email, send it out to those 100 people. Only 30 of them actually open it up. Well then that would give you a 30% open rate because 30 out of a 100 or 30% of people actually opened it up. So that's going to be really great information for you because that may be an indication that you can then work on the subject line. Maybe the subject line wasn't compelling enough to force them to click it, actually open it up. Another metric you should track is something called an unsubscribe rate. Whenever somebody gives you their email address, there's different laws around email marketing in general, and you have to be really careful about following the laws. So basically if a customer gives you their email address, but then if it changes their mind and decide they don't want to receive emails from you. Again, they can click that unsubscribe button, which removes themselves from your list, then you can't add them. Again. You can't send a more emails to them. So this unsubscribe metric is really important because let's say you put together a controversial type of email, sent it out to a 100 lists, and then afterwards you got ten people who unsubscribed, grow it right away. Whereas your normal metrics, nobody unsubscribes. Well then that may be a sign that the people on your list, they didn't appreciate that message, or at least those ten people didn't appreciate it. So then maybe you should not put together as much a controversial type of emails and error more on the side of caution. So that's another great KPI to keep in mind when analyzing the performance of the emails that you sent. So another thing you could track is something called click-through rate or CTR. Example of how this might look is let's say you send an email to your list of a 100 people. And then in the email, you have a link to your website where you're selling your supplements of a 100 people, let's say 50% open the email. So again, you have a 50% open rate. Then let's say up to 50 people who actually opened it. They go through the email and they click on the link, then directs them to the website for the submits, all the people who clicked on that link that would make up the click-through rate or the CTR. That can be really effective if you're trying to track how effective the actual wording into email was and how strong your call to action, basically just asking them to click this link was other great KPI to keep track of is something called a bounce rate. So this is going to be the percentage of emails that weren't successfully delivered. The number of actual emails that you have in your list doesn't really matter if they're not actually getting to real people who are reading that. Inevitably, there's going to be a percentage of email addresses that you get that aren't valid or you're not able to deliver your email successfully, you might get a balanced email. If somebody putting a typo and they were accidentally putting an email address, or let's say they use have that email address, but then they ended up closing it or it's no longer working. There's different factors that can go into an email address not being valid, being able to keep track of this metric is really important because you want to be able to maintain the integrity of your list. If you'd get a balanced e-mail, you're gonna wanna make sure you clean up your list and get this balanced email address removed from your list. Because otherwise if you leave it on there, that's going to be negatively skewing the data in the KPIs that you're using for other stuff. 9. Class Project: For the class project, what I want you to do is go ahead and complete the attached worksheet. This is really designed to help you start thinking about the next steps that you can take in your whole email marketing journey. Think through those different questions and put in some time to better understand what is your goal, what are you trying to accomplish out of this thing through and choose an appropriate email marketing software that you want to get started with. And then lastly, putting together an example email that you would send to your first lists of people. And once you're done with that, be sure to upload that to the course project. And I'm really looking forward to seeing what you're able to put together. 10. Final thoughts: That does take us to the end of the course here. I first want to thank you so much for your time and attention, and I hope you got some great information out of this. If you have any insights or additional questions, please don't hesitate to leave them in the discussion section below. Again, with this, we're only scratching the surface of what's really possible with email marketing. Again, there have been tons of really successful brands and companies where their entire business model husband built solely on email marketing. I'm really excited that you're interested in this topic because this is something that can be extremely powerful in really transformational for either your personal brand or your company. But again, with that being said, thanks so much for watching. I hope you got some great information out of this. I wish you the best of luck and take care.