Email Marketing for beginners

1. Introduction: Welcome to this class on e mail marketing for beginners, I'm going to be teaching you all the basics that you need to understand about e mail marketing. My name is Donna and I'm going to be your tutor on this. We're going to look at e mail marketing. What is it? The benefits, the legal considerations. Then we're going to explore some of the platforms that you could try out. We're going to look at the autonomy of a successful E mail, the design principles. Then we're going to briefly touch on what AB testing is because that's more of an advanced thing that you need to be aware of. Then some really useful tips on actually list building and then understanding your metrics. We're going to cover a wide range of things, but this is just basically preparing you just to figure out if you actually want to do it and basically what you can do with it. Let's get started. 2. What is email marketing: So what is e mail marketing? Good question. E mail marketing is a digital marketing strategy that leverages e mails to connect with the audiences. It is one of the most established and effective ways to reach potential existing customers. It has dipped over the few years, but it is actually rising massively lately due to the fact that social media came into the picture. And people started jumping on that thinking, build following and all of that and reach the audiences. But people are now seeing the value in emails. Emails you can make them personalized and they have offer so many benefits, which we will cover in the next part. There are a few things that you do need to understand about email marketing. Goal oriented, when it comes to e mails. You can do e mails on the amount all the time, but it's worthwhile having goals. For example, you want to drive traffic bills, awareness bills in customer loyalty. You are spending time with these. It's important to have an end goal. You don't want to just be sending something out with no buttons, no follow on, nothing, because then you're wasting that e mail. When it comes to e mails, you have to have permission. Very important. There's a lesson later on about legal considerations. This is really, really important. To be really effective, you need to make sure that you have the person's permission to send e mails. When you're building your e mails, you need to make sure that they've opted in to receive your e mails. Gdpr basically came into effect and basically said that people needed to do this, you need to make sure that they've opted in with e mails. The fantastic thing about them is that they're tailored communication. You can make them really personalized, really targeted, You can share different things in it, which makes them really effective way of marketing. What I will share is the different types of e mails. These three are the main types of E mails that you'll probably be working with. First of all, you'll have promotional e mails. These work really well in conjunction with a goal. For example, these e mails will advertise your products, your services, your special offers, all of that. You might have an e commerce business, promotional e mails is basically what you'll be sending out, which is fantastic anyway, because people love finding out about special deals. Then you've got like the news letter type. This is in form of the latest news, the Evans industry trends, things that's going on basically in your company, that type of thing. Then the last one is transactional e mails. These are triggered by reaction to something. It could be a welcome e mail after signing up to purchase, someone might download something. Basically, you could be providing the link and then there might be a follow on basically saying, how did you get on that type of thing, transactional or more linked to automated emails. A lot of people use them just to save time and basically just to generate more leads. But these are the three main types of e mails that you would be sending out. They all have different purposes, but they all have a specific goal in mind. Hopefully you've got a little bit more understanding of what E mail marketing is. We're going to move on to the benefits of e mail marketing. 3. The benefits of email marketing: Let's look at the benefits of e mail marketing. With e mail marketing, it offers a range of advantages for businesses of all sizes. It's not just here is if you've got big business, e mail is the way to go. It doesn't matter what size of business it is, e mails can be really effective for you. I'm just going to go through the main benefits that you marketing offers you. First of all, it's cost effective compared to like marketing channels like social media, those type of things. This is actually more affordable because when you join up to an email provider, that type of thing, often you'll see there'll be free plans. And then it will go up and up depending on how many subscribers, how many e mails you send out. But if you hunt around for the right one that fits your budget, then you can make this really cost effective. You don't need to go to the highest platform there is. You could start like a budget, one basically, or one that fits you. That's the really good thing about e mail marketing. As long as it has all the features that you want and it does everything that you need to do, that's the main thing you can do, targeted reach. I think this is amazing with the e mail marketing. If you get people signing up to different newsletters that are interested in this topic and this topic, you know you can send e mails up to those two different topics. That's the brilliant thing with e mails. When people subscribe to things, they'll go into different groups. This person wanted this and this person wanted this. And then when you create the e mail and assign a group, you're going to be sending that e mail to the group that's interested in it. That e mail is targeted, which is B, really effective. You can also create strong relationships. It's a great way to build those relationships. Add value offers you add your personality to them. Don't be afraid to add your personality. Don't make them very generic and really boring. If you know what I mean, you can add like something that happened to you know? This is what you found the story. If you want, you can create that relationship, which you wouldn't find in any other marketing channel. You can measure the results. I love analytics. I think they're really, really important. You can see how many people open your e mails, click the links, convert it to sales. You can learn a lot from measuring results, like for example, if people are consistently clicking on a link about a source or something, you now know, yeah, I'm going to include that next week or next month, that type of thing. You know what works and what doesn't. But it does take some time. Once you've got the e mail list, you are consistently doing it, that you can collate, say, a couple of months worth of data to figure out what, what didn't, and then you can basically develop your e mails from there. Scalability is fantastic. You can start with a small group and it can grow. It can grow and grow and grow however big you want it to be. It can just consistently keep growing. That's the great thing about e mail marketing. You can have more lists, that type of thing. You might need to help create the e mails. But the scalability of it is fantastic. It's also very timetabing. For example, you can automate many of the things that are on there. So, for example, if someone signs up to, say, a download that you've offered, you could do a welcome e mail. Or if they buy something, you could do an e mail that automatically sends it. Frees up so much time because once you've done it, that's it. All we've got to do is make sure that it's linked to the right thing and it does it for you. You don't need to keep going and I need to send someone a welcome Emails. Fantastic. And finally, it's a direct communication. E mail marketing allows you to communicate directly with your customers, with other channels. Like for example, I will bring up social care incisure with social, it's you're talking to everyone, sometimes with e mails, it's more targeted. These people signed up to hear from you, basically. They want to hear from you. They want to know what you have to offer, and that's the great thing. When they do get an e mail, they're not surprised. They're like, oh yeah. Oh, oh, what they're sharing. Now you're sharing news or updated promotions and it's great because it's relevant to them. E mails is really useful marketing tool because it is relevant to the audience. They signed up to find out more they are interested. You can segment it, and it's one of the most time saving things out there. The great thing is you could create templates as well that saves you time. You can use the previous format, the designs, and you could basically just update that each time. There are so many ways to save time with e mail marketing. We're going to move on to the next lesson, which is about legal considerations. 4. Legal considerations: Let's look at legal considerations. Don't worry, nothing scary here. It's just a few things that you need to be aware of. E mail marketing is just a fantastic tool. You can connect with potential and existing customers. But you need to be aware of some legal considerations that could land you in hot water. We're going to break them down. Consent is a massive one. You need to make sure that the person consent freely. They know what they're signing up to. They're informed and ambiguously. You can't rely on like pre tick boxes. You need them to actually click on it. You also need a way for them to subscribe on your e mails. You'll have an unsubscribe button at the bottom or somewhere, so that if they're overwhelmed with the emails that they have that option that is really important. Consent matters, anti spam laws. This basically means, I'm just going to summarize this for you. Basically, if they sign up for a newsletter, that's what they signed up for. You can't then turn around and use that list for the new to then start sending them something completely different that is seen as spam. It's like, you know, when you open an e mail, go wait a minute, I got an e mail about this promotion. I didn't sign up for that. Clearly, someone's taking your e mail and giving it to someone to send you something really random, instantly you go spam or unsubscribe. But it's frustrating for people and they won't trust you. It really, really matters that what they sign up to is basically what you're sending. Data privacy regulations, this is massive, this came into effect a few years ago. It's basically controlling personal data. It's just around the way of making sure that you collect the data in the right way and you store it. And if someone's subscribed, make sure that you have something in place to basically delete them. You're basically only supposed to hold onto e mails that are relevant, still consenting to your newsletter or anything like that. And that's basically what the regulation is about. It's basically controlling the personal data and making sure that it's protected as well. Like you might do a two step verification on mail chimp to make sure that no one else has access because you don't want anyone taking that information and using it for something else because then your list is basically compromised. Here's just a few tips that I just want you to be aware of. I will say this, Avoid buying e mail lists. It's illegal to send e mails that haven't consented. We talked about consent previously. They haven't consented. This e mail list that someone has just given you is irrelevant. Once you've sent it, you're basically breaking the law to be fair. Just basically spam people majority of time. Those e mail lists, you won't get much back from them. Try and build your list organically through opt in forms through your website, sign ups, downloads that type of thing. Build them organically. Trust me, they are better connections and relationships and things like that, and it will grow better. When it comes to your e mails, be really truthful. Don't mislead anyone really deceptive subject lines or from addresses. Make sure it's from you clearly identify as marketing. Don't put any false information. They're like, oh yeah, this product does this. You want to build trust with these people, that's what matters. You want people to stay on your list. You don't want people to start subscribing because you'll see those numbers drop when you basically say, this, does this, And people click and it doesn't do what you said it did, you've lost that. It's really important to be really truthful in e mails, your sources of information. Make sure they're, if you are going to share links and that type of thing in those e mails. So make sure that you've really checked out those sources. That wasn't as scary as I hoped. We're actually going to cover e mail marketing platforms. We're going to have a look at the types of the big ones basically out there. Just so that you can have a little bit of research time to have a look at them yourself. Let's move on to the next lesson. 5. Email marketing platforms: Let's have a look at e mail marketing platforms. There are plenty out there, but it all really depends on your budget and your business needs. I'm going to go through some of the most popular ones at the moment. There are plenty out there to choose from. It all depends on what you need, your pricing, and basically, if you need certain things for it to do, mail chimp is the number one choice at minute just for beginners. Mainly just because it offers a free plan. 500 contacts, 1,000 e mails per month. And it's really simple to use. This could be a starting point, but like I said, do your research. Then we've got other platforms. Constant contact, and get response. Constant contact is really user friendly, really easy loser templates, which is fantastic. It does offer a free trial so you can give it a go before you commit, but you just need to have a little play around, see if it suits your business. Response is really comprehensive. This is a couple steps up from mail chimp in that it offers automation. Mail chimp does that as well. But it's got a good M on there with some tools. It's really good for growing email list as well. If you do have an email list already, this could be one that you can integrate with. Then the last two I've thrown in, these are probably more higher end, you'll find gone in a bit of an order really convert. It is more for bloggers and creators, it's a little bit pricier, but it offers a lot more features than just e mail marketing. That's why people tend to go towards it. It's got landing pages and all sorts of things on the. So I have a little look, It might be what you're looking for depending on your business, If it does multiple things, it's worth trying to keep things simple. When you're growing a business, make sure like your E mail is coming from the same place, landing pages in the same place. It just saves your logging into multiple things all the time. Hubspot is a bit like the same, It's all in one. E mail marketing, CRM, social media management, the lot it does everything. That's why people tend to lean to that. Bigger businesses, I'd say more smaller ones because Hubspot is a little bit more pricier, but only because it offers everything. Spend some time. The other platforms I can think of is Mel. Light is another one. It offers a wide range of things. It is quite limited with features I found. But do your research. First of all, make a note of what it is that you want to do. If you want landing pages, you want E mail automation, you want to be able to do AB testing, which I will cover later on. Don't worry, have a think this is going to be something that you'll do probably at the end of the course, once we've gone through a bit more features in regards to e mail marketing. Just so that you know what you want. You can spend some time now if you want, just figuring out what does, what it's really important to do. The don't stick to the same one. You'll find that if you email list, you might outgrow the platform. That makes sense. Yeah. Do some research and we're on to the next lesson. 6. Anatomy of a successful email: Welcome to the anatomy of a successful e mail. A successful e mail is like a well crafted message in a bottle. It needs to be clear, attention grabbing, and it needs to deliver its content effectively. We're going to break down all the key elements to make a strong e mail. First of all, subject line, this is your hook, this is the first impressions someone gets. You open your e mail and it's the subject line that goes delete or oh, what is that? I'll open make it can keep it concise. Probably around 50 characters and intriguing. Don't just say what it's about. If you're doing something like a newsletter, take something like an article or something to basically draw that person into opening and going, oh, there's an article about this. Think about the contents that's in the e mail. Try and use strong verbs, questions, or something specific to what they're opening. Then you need to make sure the sending information is your name, something that they recognize. Most people will use a professional e mail with the full name and business details, all of that. When people open it, they open it because they recognize it. If you are just using some brand email from Gmail.com thing, they're going to go, Nope, not interested. Professional e mail really matters. Then start with a greeting, adds a little bit of a personal touch. Most e mail platforms will allow you just to add in the person's first name, that type of thing. You don't need to worry too much about this, but it's the starting point. You could start with search or to search, but keep it nice and positive. You're trying to personalize this information going, John, and then you're continuing your e mail it. Personalization really, really matters when it comes to e mail marketing. Then you're going to get to the body, the core message you need to keep it concise, scannable, people are too busy most of the time. Get to your point quickly. I would advise using short paragraphs, bullet points, and white space to break it up. Nobody wants to open an e mail and go a massive chunk of text in front of them and you're like, what is this? I mean, they want to be able to scan it. Most people will scan the first paragraph. If they aren't interested in it after that first paragraph, then they will likely come off of it straight away. You want to keep the consistency throughout the entire E mail. Very short paragraphs, bullet points, Yeah, throughout the whole thing. You want to use simple language as well, no jargon, technical terms, just avoid them. You want to keep it nice and natural when they're reading it, but do have a bit of a professional tone if you can throughout it as well. Even if the content is, don't throw slang into things or swearing or anything, just keep it how you would talk. But with a little bit of professionalism into it is a lot of trial and error you will find when it comes to e marketing, about getting that tone right. You might find that you could be really informal and shut away and you get really, really good results with people opening it. You might find some people don't like it. It's all about trial and error when you start to send out those e mails. So don't worry too much if the first few don't really do really well, you can learn from them. You also want to include a few other things. For example, a call to action. Tell the recipient what you want them to do next. Do you want them to schedule a meeting, visit a website, download something, visit your blog, What do you want them to do? You can include multiple links. By the way, throughout your blog, if you've got various sections about different things, it's important to add all those different links in. And then to sign off, use a bit of a professional closing. Sincerely, best regards and your name, and your title, and who you are, basically, some people add like a little picture of themselves as well. But it's nice to just sign it off. Don't just finish after a sentence about something, the link, and then that's it. Sign it off. It's quite nice. It's nice to say, oh, it feels like a bit like a letter, almost. Yeah. Make sure that you end e mail on that. The last thing I would say is to include an E mail signature. This can be replaced or mice with the sign off, if you know what I mean. You can always sign off with best regards in your name or you can use the signature. Basically what it is is like a block. And what we'll have is probably a picture of you and some information about who you are or your linked in account or things like that. You can include those types of things in it as your e mail signature. Some people tend to put this are the footer. It's really up to you where you want to put this. But it's always worth adding in extra links about you and your websites and all of that. If you can, you can sign off. Either way works. A few little bonus tips. Proofread proofreading is important. Like we said, first impressions really matter. You want to make sure that somebody opens your Malo, there's a spelling error, it just shows a bit professionalism. The fact that there isn't any, if it's consistently coming up throughout the e mail, they'll start scribing, they won't want to read the rest of your content. It's really important to read it. Get a friend to check it. Please send it, or basically send it the next day when you had a fresh set of eyes. Always always helps, especially if you haven't got a second person. But just come away from the screen, then come back and check. Make sure your e mail is formatted correctly for mobile devices. Most platforms I find do do this. They will give you an option to see how it looks on desktop and then phone. And you can tweak them, but make sure that it does work on a mobile phone. Because most people will open your e mail at work or moving about or something like that, they need to be able to read it quite easy. Finally, research the best time for the e mail to go out. Often you'll find that there are key times throughout the day to send an e mail. If you start sending out 05:00 on a Friday, no one's really going to reach. That's a bit of a rule because everyone just wants to get home their thought to read an e mail. It's not on the head. Spend a little time figuring out when is the best time to send you emails out. This is also trial and error. You might find that on a Wednesday afternoon is the key time. Then just make that a think regular thing each Wednesday, you know that email is going out. I hope you've enjoyed this and we're going to move on to the next lesson. 7. Design principles for effective emails: Let's look at the design principles for effective e mails. Crafting e mails that resonate with your audience requires strategic design. You can't just throw text onto something and go, yeah, there you go, there's e mail. There is some thought necessary for this. There are eight key principles that we're going to go through to help drive engagement. First of all, you need to think about designing with purpose. What is your goal? Do you want to inform, persuade, or convert? You need to be tailoring your e mail to achieve these outcomes. The layout would be very different if you were talking about informing someone. If you're trying to convert someone, there'll be additional call to actions, that type of thing. The design for all these types of things are very different. You need to think about what the purpose is. This will help shape the design of your e mail. Basically, mobile friendly is really, really important. Make sure that your e mail is able to be adapted to different types of screens, that type of thing. If you're designing something, for example the header and you've got a little bit of a logo on there. Does it convert well, when it's in a mobile. Does the layout shift really weird when you go from desktop to mobile? That type of thought when you're doing it, say if you sign up to say, mail chimp or something. You can design it in a desktop. But more often you can see what it looks like on your mobile. That's what you're checking. You're checking if your desktop version converts your mobile. Same for your mobile, does it convert to, the desktop is easy to read. Is the font size readable? Because this all impacts if somebody is going to click through Whitespace in e mail. Yeah, is actually a really good thing with e mails. You'll find that more white space is necessary with anything else. Design, usually white space is a bit of a no, no, but with e mails it adds an easier way to separate things. It makes things scannable. It's easier for people to adjust different information. Your call to actions stand out because there's more white space. It's really clear, the white space really matters in this. Have a think, when you're creating an E mail, you don't want to be doing massive chunks of color everywhere and loads of images and stuff. Think about making it a bit more clean cut. It's just easier for people to read and get a friend to check your e mail, which you've created it, and think, oh, is this easy to read? Because they might say the same, they might like, oh yeah, actually add a little bit of color, but not overwhelming, if you know what I mean. Colors really matter when it comes to designing an e mail. You do not want to have different colors, like a rainbow on your E mail. Try to stick to say, two or three colors. Most people tend to stick with the same top and bottom header and footer with the same color. It's up to, you can always do different cards for both. But try and stick to the same color palette each time you send an e mail. Keep the same template, the same colors, just to provide a bit of consistency. When the person gets the first e mail and then they get the second one, they'll go, oh yeah, I recognize this style of reading thing as this person. It will actually help brand Aw slightly as well when they see an email from you. And they open and go, oh yeah, I know this is immediately, they'll think about the colors. If you got a website, I would say try and stick to those colors. Because in with branding, it's really important to be consistent across everything. If your website is yellow and black, try and add that into your emails. Because if you start doing greens and oranges and stuff and then they go onto your website, they're like, what happened here? It's not consistent. It's the same with any marketing efforts. You tend to stick with the same colors throughout. That's why colors really matter. The next thing is visual hierarchy, this really matters. Guide your reader's eye throughout the e mail in very clear order. For example, when I say this, your headings will be the biggest. Then what we'll do is you'll have a second heading and then a paragraph. Your second heading basically breaks up your email. If you have a new topic and you've already done that first paragraph, then you do another heading. What it's doing is it's structuring email in a way that people go right? This is about this heading, is about this paragraph below this is this. And it helps people follow your e mail. Such hierarchy really matters if you start using Heading two for as everything like here, there and just it hurts your eyes and people just won't be able to follow. That's why hierarchy matters. People tend to stick to heading one, which is the main one. Heading two, your paragraph, and heading three. Sometimes sometimes if you've got a quote or something to pop in, that will be a different font, but it can break up all of those paragraphs as well. Have a think about the, the structure you want. Images. Everyone loves cats. This was the perfect image. Keep your images relevant to what you're talking about. Don't throw any old one on there. You want them high quality and compliment what you're talking about. Try not to use stock images if you can help it, it's really hard to tweak them or find something that's really relevant to what you're talking about. Because if you're using, for example, images of workplace and you throw it in and your e mail is quite informal and you've got this image that's very structured, very professional. It's clashes with what you're trying to accomplish. You want something a bit more lighthearted when you're choosing images, choose ones that are relevant to your content and your tone and what you're trying to basically share with people. For example, this picture of a cat, if I was doing a E mails might be a pet home or something. And I'm talking about cats and I've got lots of blog links. This could be quite relevant. It stands out. It's very clear. I know sometimes you can't avoid stock images, but but this is relevant, it matters. Have a look on stock sites. Canvas is really good, and there are plenty of free ones out there. Have a little look around. Optimizing your calls to actions is the next thing when it comes to designing an e mail. These need to be clear, concise, really strong visuals, really standing out. And you can use multiple throughout your e mail. For example, if you are trying to basically talk about a product that you want to share to people, you might include it near the top, but then they'll be loads of information and then another image, then you could do it again at the bottom. There is no problem adding multiple links in. Because sometimes people will stop halfway through an e mail and they'll be like, yeah, okay, I'm going to click on that immediately from the top link. But sometimes some people are interested in, want to get to the bottom and want to learn more. And then they'll click the link. And then you've made that process a little bit easier. I know there's a lot to think about. I'm down to my last point, don't worry. The last one is accessibility. When you are designing an e mail, you want to make sure that everyone can read it. You want to make sure that you've got clear fonts. If you're using images, add in O text. Basically what this is. If you click on an image in your e mail, you'll be able to add this in. What it is is when people read it and they have problems with looking at images or anything like that, it is the description of what the images is. Basically, if you've got an image of some cats for example, then you would type in some cats of such and such breed that they know that's what the images. Because sometimes people have problems with processing images. It makes it a bit more inclusive for them. Try not to use complex layouts, like if you look at it and you go, everything is a bit jumbled, it's not very clean cut. This is why we talk about white space a lot. It just helps people when they're skimming or they're struggling to read your e mail, that it's a little bit easier for them because you don't want to exclude people. Sometimes people have difficulty reading words or images, that type of thing, and this just helps massively when you're thinking about creating your first e mail. Think about these principles. Think about your images, your call actions, your hierarchy, your colors. When you look at something, you need to think, does it look really good in mobile? Does it look good in desktop? It's a lot to remember once you've got it nailed down to exactly the type of template that you want to create. Because most people create templates, keep that branding consistent, the layouts consistent, or play around with it. But the key things are just to remember all of the things that we've just looked at. Yeah, we're going to crack on to the next lesson about AB testing. 8. AB testing: In this lesson, we're going to look at AB testing. Ab testing is also known as split testing is a really common tactic in e mail marketing. It is used to optimize email campaigns for better results. It involves sending two or more variations of an E mail to different segments of your E mail list and then analyzing which is better. That is the whole point of AB testing. That's probably where it gets its name from. This is probably one of those things that unless you've got a good group in your marketing list, there's no point in doing it just now. For example, if you are sending out to SA about 100 people or 50 people, then yeah, that's a good enough number. The reason is, when you're testing, it's important that you have a bit of an equal split. And a bigger audience means better results and you get more insights. That's a good thing. There are three main benefits of AB testing. It helps increase your open rate because what you can do is you can test the subject lines. Subject lines are basically the first impressions of what your e mail is about. They really, really matter. You can test out different ones. You can then improve on your clicks. You'll click through rates, so you can test. You call to actions, your content, and see what drives traffic. You can try out different layers, which is really good idea. Some people would rather have a call action in the middle. You might find at the bottom, it's a bit too late. People aren't that interested. It's a really good concept. The final benefit is you get better engagement because AB testing helps you understand your audience's preferences. You might find that people don't want call to actions till the end. Or you might find that the layout of your content just doesn't work for some people. They want to hear about the latest article first, then they want to know about offer, next thing. That's what's really, really great about AB testing. Finally, this is basically how you do an AB test. First of all, you choose what to test, decide on the elements you want to compare. Then you create variations, develop two or three. Most of the time people just do two. Then you segment your list, divide your e mail list down the middle, so it's equal sizes because you want the best possible results. You don't want one group of 61 with 40, because then the test is pointless. Send the e mail out to those various lists and just analyze the results. Basically what will happen is you'll get a great understanding of which one really outperformed the other one. Sometimes it's really obvious, sometimes there's a fine line, sometimes you might just have to do a bit more testing, but that is AB testing. 9. Different strategies for list building: In this lesson, we're going to look at different strategies for list being. There are many, many strategies you can use to build your E mail list. And the best approach will depend on your specific goals and who your audience is. We're going to go through a few different methods to think about offering valuable incentives, also called lead magnet in marketing world. These are things that people will either participate, download, or be interested in enough to basically give you that e mail address and some of the details, the types of things that you could offer a ebooks. White papers or reports providing in depth information on topics relevant to them. You wouldn't write an ebook about something really out of the blue, you know, something that's nothing to do with the entry, you'll make it relevant to your audience. So for example, if you're in logistics, then you do an ebook, something to do about logistics, and that's how you get the right people signing up to your e mails. You can also create cheat sheets or templates. People love things that help save them time. It's a really good benefit that you can share like I can save you. Here's already ready made template for you to use. Fantastic people love it. Webinars or online courses are really good incentive. You could do master classes, free classes. And then it can lead on something else. But they really good idea. This is where a lot of people just sign up to find out a bit more about stuff and then that can lead to further leads. Discounts, coupons. Great idea, especially if you are a new commerce business. So you could say offer 15% off if you provide your e mail to sign up to our newsletter. A lot of people do this. By the way, you've probably seen it where you've gone onto a shop and they're like, oh well if you get 15% if you're a new customer, just give us your E mail. That's how they do it. These are things to think about. You can also make signing up really easy and attractive. We're coming away from incentives. This is basically thinking about the placement of your forms, embed them in your website, your blog, your landing page. Make sure it's pretty much everywhere, if you can. But strategically put in, really you don't want to overwhelm people, you don't want too many pop ups. As while I find can be a bit frustrating, make sure that it's clear and concise. You're using call to actions that tell people what to do next. Basically, download here, sign up. Now that type of language, you can actually look this up. Call to actions, have a little look at what the most common ones are. And they can help you also make it mobile friendly, the forms as well. People often forget this, especially if they're using platforms like Wicks or something. They often forget that on mobile it works really differently and the format might not be that easy to use. Think about that. This is the final thing that I just want to share with you. Make sure that you promote it across all of your channels. You might have a social media following. You might be brand new to e mail marketing and you want to move from social to e mail. Share the links and the sign up forms on your social media. It is a great way to start building it up slowly because as well as you'll be sharing content relevant to your audience as well, they might love to hear more about what you've got to offer. It's a really good idea just to simply add a link somewhere on every post. Or if you're in Scram, most people use link tree. You can add like a sign up form on there, include it on your E mail. Signatures include a sign up link on there and anything else like print materials, anything, just have a way for people to sign up to your news. Most people put like QR codes and things. People scan it using their phone and then it's a quick link and they go to your page and they sign up. You can even do it like an incentive as well. For example, if you are at an event or anything like that, you can do it where if you sign up, you can get this download, you can do QR codes or that type of thing. People can sign up to that thing, but you can include what about my news? That type of thing depends on what your goal is generally, but these are the best ways to get your e mail list growing, basically. 10. Understanding email marketing metrics: In our final lesson, we're going to look at E mail marketing metrics. I've mentioned this a few times actually throughout this course, so we're just going to look at what the terminology is and what it actually means when you see these metrics and not panicking, go oh, it's not good or bad. This will explain if it is or it isn't. The great thing I would say about metrics is you get to figure out what resonates with your audience and identify areas of improvement. That's the main purpose of metrics, is basically to see how well you're doing. If you're not, then this is where you go, right? I need to change things up, I need to do this and this is where you would change your strategy completely. Let's have a little look. Open rate is the first one. This shows the percentage of subscribers who actually opened your e mail. It's a basic indicator of how interested your subject line is and how engaged your list is overall. That's a really good metric to keep an eye on. You'll click through Rate. This metric dives deeper and it shows what percentage of people who opened your e mail clicked on a link within it. They've opened your e mail, thought that's interesting, opened it and okay, oh, I'll click on this call to action that you did. A higher click through rate suggests your e mail content is relevant and compelling. Basically, the goal of your e mail might be to get people to go to your blog. And if people are clicking on that and that's really high, that means you're doing the right thing. Click to open rate is a little bit different. This refines click through rate a bit further. It divides the number of clicks by the number of times e mail is opened, giving you more precise picture of how well your e mail resonates. You don't need to worry too much about this thing. This is just as it says a bit further down, metric. Basically, you're more concerned about the open rate, basically through from your subject line. The click through rate, are people clicking on your content. That's really important. And then we've got two other metrics that you need to be aware of. You've got your bounce rate. Bounce rate, you probably would have heard if you actually does some research on e mail marketing, but it really matters. This shows the percentage of E mails that couldn't be delivered, typically due to invalid E mails addresses, that type of thing. A high bounce rate can indicate a poor quality list. This is really important. If you start to get load to bounce rates back, all those E mails coming back to you, I'd start taking them off your list because you don't want your bounce rate being affected to be fair. If they are bouncing back or coming back is invalid or anything like that, then it's not a good lead. Basically, it's not really worth spending your time including in the AB testing or anything like that. Personalization, just for that, remove them from your list. If you find that happens. Unsubscribed is one of the one metric that you actually really need to pay attention to. Especially if you've got 100 people and all of a sudden 20 people drop off in a week after having one of your e mails. There is a problem. There could be a problem with your content, it could be a problem with your links. It might be the fact that your e mail is taking too long to load your images might be too big, that type of thing. If that happens, I would recommend basically looking at the e mail. Sending a test e mail to yourself again, and double checking what could be the reason behind it? Because you do not want to go from that 100 people down 20 down to 2080. And then the following week something happens again and it drops again. All the effort you've done to build up that list is, can be striked within about four or five weeks. You need to resolve the issues really quickly. Once you notice an issue, fix it immediately. It's really important because people read Emil. They want them to be trustworthy. They want them to do what they say they do. If they've got a button to download something and it doesn't download, then the trust is immediately gone. It's really important for that. Hopefully, this course has given you some really good insight into email marketing. Do your homework. There will be a project for you to do which revolves around everything that you've learnt. Take some time to do it because it will benefit you when you're thinking about designing E mails, the right platforms, looking at the metrics, working out, if you need to do AB testing, all of that.