How to Leverage Email Marketing for Your Small Business

1. Welcome!: Hi everyone. My name is Louise and I've been working in digital marketing for Uber 12 years. I've worked as a marketing manager in various industries, everything from e-commerce to health care. I have a master's degree in digital marketing communications, and I currently help small businesses with their digital marketing through my freelance projects and courses, email marketing is an area of marketing that I feel quite passionate about. Feel like it often gets forgotten about, especially when you compare to or interesting forms. Marketing like social media, e.g. but email marketing can be really powerful and can yield really great results, especially for small businesses. I read recently that over 60% of small businesses utilize email marketing to help reach their customers. So learning how to leverage email marketing is really important and could really help your business to succeed. Many of my marketing roles over the years have focused quite specifically on email marketing. So what I wanted to do for this course is to share my e-mail marketing wisdom and some tips and tricks that I've picked up over the years to help you to succeed with this often understated channel. By the end of this class, you should have a good idea of how to use email marketing to reach your goals and also some practical tips to boost email marketing engagement. This class is ideal for beginners, students, freelancers, small business owners, or anybody that wants to learn more about the benefits of email marketing and the ways it can be used effectively. We'll start with an overview of email marketing and the benefits. Set your goals for email marketing. Building your subscriber lists, segmenting your audience, the different types of emails you can send. I'll go through some practical tips for you to boost engagement. And then we'll finish with some ways that you can analyze and optimize your e-mail marketing, the class project, you'll be summarizing what you've learned by sharing an example of an e-mail campaign that you like and that suits your audience and your particular goals. You don't need any specific tools to take this class, just an Internet connection and a computer. So I'm excited to get started. If this all sounds interesting to you, then I'll see you in class. 2. Class project: The project for this class, I would really love for you to summarize your own email marketing goals or goal for your business as well as your audience. I would like you to find an example of an e-mail campaign or template that you like that would suit your goals and your audience. It'd be great if you could explain why you chose it and how the email relates to your goal and your audience. If you have a way of creating an email yourself, then I would love for you to create your own e-mail. But if not, then you can find lots of examples. Email templates online. I have provided a worksheet in the project resources section for you to complete and to help with these tasks. I've also shared some resources of where you can find some great examples of marketing emails online. And we'll cover more about the tools that you need to create your own marketing campaigns. Later in this course, you can complete the tasks as you go along or at the end of the course, but please remember to share with the class. And if you do share, I'll be sure to give feedback as well. So to start download the project worksheet from the resources section, and I'll see you in the first lesson. 3. Email marketing overview: To kick things off, I wanted to spend a few minutes going over what email marketing is and what you will need to get started. Email marketing is a direct form of marketing, which is essentially just using email to communicate with your target audience, build relationships, and eventually sell products or services to that audience. I really loved this quote from Dave Chaffey on email marketing, which is the purpose of email marketing, is to build relationships, then convert. I really love that quote because it highlights the importance of using email to really build that relationship with your customer at which you can do through things like clever targeting and personalization, which we'll go through more later on in the course. Eventually, having that close relationship through email marketing will lead to increase loyalty and eventually conversions. In order to send marketing emails, you will need an email service provider or ESP. Esp is a company that makes it easier for you to send bulk e-mails by offering you a platform to save all of your subscribers and email templates all in one place. If you are a small business with minimal subscribers, then there are many of these out there that you can sign up free, although the free versions often have limitations on how many emails you can send and how many subscribers you can have. I would advise that you do your own research on this and select an ESP that works for you and your e-mail marketing goals and also suits your budget personally, I really like Mail Chimp. I use it for all of my personal projects and I find it easy to use and it's free if you have under 500 subscribers. But there are many other free ESPs out there. So I would definitely advise you to do a bit of research and select one that works for you or companies with thousands of subscribers. There are many different ESPs out there. Some of them can be quite extensive, but the one you select will depend upon your use case and goals. I think if you're a small business or you have a small email list and you're just getting started, then a free ESP like Mailchimp is ideal for getting started. And you can always upgrade to a paid subscription or change your ESP as your business grows. So what are the benefits of using an email service provider? Benefits of using an ESP include the ability to manage your subscribers all in one place. So an ESP will allow you to manage your bounced emails, your unsubscribes, e.g. they will be automatically removed from your list, keeping your lists compliance. You'll also be able to access reporting and stats. So you'll be able to see how many people have opened your emails, how many people have clicked on your emails? How many people have opened via mobile e.g. and what devices people have opened on, what email clients people have opened on. Some ESPs will allow you to send automated campaigns, although this will depend on what ESP you select and what package you're on as well. Esps will also allow you to do tests on your e-mails, enabling you to optimize your campaigns. You'll also be able to segment your list. There'll be deliverability tools and a lot more as well. Many ESPs, including MailChimp, will also have email template builders included as well. So the benefit of this is it will allow you to create your own email campaigns using drag-and-drop tools, which means that you can easily create your own campaigns without having the ability to code, which will save you a lot of time, especially if you're a small business owner, because you don't need to build your emails from scratch. A benefit as well is that most of these templates that you get in an ESP will be mobile, optimized and tested already. So you know that they'll look good and work across all devices. Once you've selected your ESP, then you'll need to think about your e-mail strategy. Who are you going to email? How often are you going to e-mail them? And what content are you going to include in your e-mails? We'll talk about this further in the upcoming lessons, but it's a really good idea to start planning this before you even send your first e-mail. You'll also need to be aware of the laws around email marketing, including GDPR, will go through this more later in the upcoming lessons as well, including ways that you can safely build your list. In the next lesson, we'll talk about the benefits of email marketing, in particular for small businesses. 4. Email marketing benefits: There are many benefits to using e-mail marketing, especially for small businesses. In this lesson, we'll run through some of the main ones. As we touched upon in the previous lesson, email marketing is popular with small businesses, with 64% of small businesses using e-mail marketing to reach their customers. And there is good reason for that. One of the main benefits using e-mail marketing if you're a small business, is that it's highly cost-effective. If you have a relatively small list and you're using a free ESP like Mailchimp, e.g. then the only cost really is your time in creating the e-mails and content. There's also a lot of research out there that shows that email marketing has a really good ROI or return on investment. And after paid and organic social media, e-mail marketing has the third highest ROI of any marketing media. E-mail marketing is also perfect for brand awareness and keeping your subscribers updated with what's going on in your business and with your brand. What are the benefits? Email marketing, that it's really easy to measure performance. So it's really easy to see what's working and what's not working based on where people click on the email or what content they engage with or don't engage with. So that you can make tweaks going forward and improve performance quite easily. Email marketing allows you to reach a highly engaged audience because your subscribers have signed up to your emails because they want to hear from you. Email marketing is also very personal and direct. It allows you to reach the personal inboxes of your subscribers whilst also giving you the opportunity to be highly targeted. Relevant, perhaps even more important if you're a small business, is that it can be relatively quick, easy to get started. You don't need a big team of people or any specialist knowledge. And the good thing is many ESPs these days, we'll have drag-and-drop template builders included so you don't need to know how to code in order to create email templates. And many offer you the opportunity to set up automated campaigns that run in the background, which overall will save you a lot of time. And we'll go into the types of emails a bit later on in the course. Emails are also more permanent than other forms of digital marketing. E.g. social media can easily be missed on a customer's social media feed. It moves very quickly, whereas with email, it will stay in your customer's inbox until they delete it, so it's more likely to be seen by your customers. Email marketing can also help you increase sales, increase your traffic to your website, or whatever your goals are. And we'll talk more about goal setting for email marketing in the next lesson. 5. Setting your email marketing goals: Before you hit send on your first e-mail campaign, you need to ask yourself, what do you want to achieve with your email marketing? It's definitely not a good idea to send email marketing for the sake of it, your e-mail marketing goals should be tied back to your wider business goals and target audience and be part of a wider marketing strategy. Every campaign that you should have a purpose and should be tied back to your wider business goals. If you're interested in learning more about developing a wider marketing strategy for your small business, then I do have another Skillshare course on this topic. So if you're interested in this area, feel free to take a look at that course. But with regards to email marketing specifically then have a think about what you would like to achieve for your business in the next six months, the next year, and how email marketing can be used to support that. I'll give you a couple of examples. Let's say that you run a small cake shop and you're planning on running an event over the school holidays to boost cake sales. And you decide to send out an email campaign to previous customers, promoting the events. If you have the capability, you might want to target your audience so that you're targeting families as it's a family themed event. And your goal for this campaign would be event registrations. You could then also support this campaign with other forms of marketing, such as organic social media posts, paid social media posts for local advertising. In your area or this situation, you might plan a series of emails over the course of six weeks or so, which would include reminder e-mails as well. And these e-mails would focus on the event itself and the dates, what people can expect from attending the event and why they should attend. Another example is that you may run an e-commerce website and notice that sales of a particular product or lower than where you would like them to be. So in this situation, you might plan a series of promotional e-mails to send to customers that have purchased that product before or may have viewed the product on the website or showing an interest in similar products in order to boost sales of that product. So your goal for that campaign would be sales of that particular product. Of course, there are many goals that an email campaign can have. Some of the most common goals include generating brand awareness, generating traffic to your website, or a piece of content on your website like a blog post a video, or an article, e.g. generating conversions, whatever that means to your business or whether that's sales or leads, generating downloads of an app or a tool or an e-book, e.g. generating brand loyalty and retention through regular updates and newsletters, generating event registrations, or just informing your subscriber base of a new product or service that your business may have. At this stage, my advice would be to not get overwhelmed as there are many types of goals that you can have for email marketing and many types of e-mails that you can send. But I would instead focus on your own business goals for the next six months or a year and make sure that your e-mail marketing is supporting those goals. I would then develop a content plan or a calendar and just plan out what emails you'll be sending when to meet which particular goals. I like to use a spreadsheet. So Google Sheets, e.g. just to plan out the next few months or emails in terms of what I'll be sending, the timings and the audience as well. And I've put an example of a email marketing content calendar that I've created for the cake shop example. In the project resources section, I will say at this stage that there's no right or wrong way to plan content or timings. It's usually a case of testing and finding out what works for your business and your industry. And it will very much vary by campaign as well. E.g. if you're promoting a specific event, then you'd probably want to send a series of emails over the course of several weeks. Whereas if you're sending a more general company newsletter, then you've probably send that less frequently. So maybe once a month to avoid annoying your subscribers and having them hit unsubscribe. But then equally, you don't want to stop communicating with your subscribers altogether. Because then there's a risk that they may forget that they've signed up. And when you eventually send an email, they may hit spam. It's all very much context-dependent depending on campaign. And also involves a lot of testing and tailoring over time. We'll cover some of the emails that you can send in an upcoming lesson. But if you're new to email marketing and you're just getting into it than a general newsletter. We'd probably be a really good place to start. In the next lesson, we'll talk about how to build your subscriber list. 6. Building your email list: Of course, in order to send marketing e-mails, you need a list to send to. My advice would be to build your email list organically using your other channels such as your social media or your website. This will take time. It will mean that your subscribers will be much more engaged and interested in your content. I would definitely avoid purchasing lists because not only can this be expensive, but if you market to consumers, and this will also be illegal because they're not given the chance to opt in to your e-mail marketing. We'll go into more detail around the laws around email marketing a bit later on. Issues with purchase lists include low engagement. Since the subscribers have not actively asked to be emailed your content, There's also a risk around your reputation and poor deliverability since these people are more likely to mark you as spam. And that can cause problems with future emails being delivered. And on top of that as well, some of these email addresses might not even be real people. I would just avoid purchasing e-mail lists and instead focus on growing your list organically with people that actually want to receive your emails. Quality over quantity is crucial when email marketing lists are concerned, there are many tactics that you can use to grow your e-mail list organically. And the tactics that you choose will depend very much on your business, your industry, and your goals as well. One of the main tactics that you can use is to add an opt-in form to your website. What you want to do is to create an engaging opt-in form that is integrated with your e-mail service provider. Ideally, many email service providers will allow you to do this like Mailchimp so that the form is integrated with your email list. And that basically avoid you having to manually transfer data from your website to your ESP. You want to avoid doing that if you can. Now, once you've added your opt-in form to your website, there are many tools and plug-ins out there depending on your website platform that can help you to maximize your opt-in forms, make them stand out more. So e.g. I. Have a blog on WordPress and I use a plugin called male Munch. And that basically allows me to have my opt-in sign-up bar at the top of my blog and also add it to the end of all of my blog posts and just make it stand out a bit more self-made it like a bright pink color. Since I added the male munch plugin to my blog, I have noticed a huge increase in email sign-ups. So tools like this can really help to make sure that the sign-up bar is visible and in as many places as possible in relation to this, just a few tips to help you make the most of your opt-in form and boost your subscribers. Firstly, I would try and make sure that the email sign-up form is visible on pages of your website. So whether that's in a bar at the top of your website, like on my blog, or maybe it's in the navigation of your site, will try and have it visible on all pages if possible. Another thing that you could try is having a form pop-up when a user visits the site, or maybe when they're about to leave the site or when they land on a certain page, as this can really help to boost subscribers. Although a word of caution with this, I would suggest testing this just to ensure that it doesn't affect conversion rates. If you're an e-commerce site, e.g. if you have a blog, if you have articles on your website, then it's worth considering adding an email sign-up form to the bottom of your articles because this can be a great way of capturing people that are reading your articles and they're engaged. I would also suggest having your sign-up form on your About page because this page is often where new or potential customers will go to find out more about your business or any landing pages that you use for any other advertising paid campaigns, e.g. social media is also a great place to have a link to your email sign-up form if you're working with an e-mail service provider like Mailchimp, then they will have integrations with Facebook to allow you to add your email sign-up form into Facebook directly on other social media sites like Instagram, e.g. then you can have a link in your bio with tools like link tree, which is what I use. And link tree basically allows you to link to lots of different places. Using one link, I would recommend having your email sign-up form as one of those links. If you have an online store, then including a newsletter option at checkout is a really great idea. Because these people are actively engaged and purchasing from you, you can also put a link to your email sign-up form in your email signature, or basically anywhere that you can think of, get it out there as much as you can and test different options as well. So you've got your opt-in form and your promoting it in as many places as possible. What else can you do to encourage people to sign up? One thing that you can do is offer free content in exchange for an email address. Think about what content you could offer as part of your business, depending on what business, you have, things like access to a free webinar, access to an e-book, access to some downloadable content. If we go back to the cake example earlier on in the course, maybe offering people access to some free cake recipes if you can tie it into your business or better, but just offer something. A reason why a potential subscriber should give you that e-mail address. If you have an offline business or you go to Vince, then consider collecting e-mail addresses in person. So if you have a store e.g. then you can collect email addresses at the checkout. Or if you have a cafe or a restaurant, you could use QR codes on the menus and asked people to scan, to sign up to your email list. You could consider running a competition or a giveaway on your social media to try and increase e-mail sign-ups. You could also consider partnering with an influencer or another company with the same audience as you try and widen your reach, you could consider using an incentive to encourage people to sign up, e.g. sign up and get 10% off or sign up and get a free gift. If you're interested in exploring more around setting up contests on new law social media pages to help to grow your e-mail list. Then there are tools and platforms out there that can help you with this one that I've used before is called woo box. And there are loads of others out there as well. But essentially they help you to set up and run your contests on social media. They provide you with templates, they provide you with landing pages that you can use. Now seems like a good time to touch upon the legal part of email marketing. Email marketing is commission-based, which means that you must not send any email marketing to any subscribers that have not explicitly opted in to receive those emails. And that's makes sure that you're compliant under GDPR, which is the General Data Protection Regulation. But essentially to be compliant under GDPR, you must always be clear and upfront about what people are signing up to, what they can expect to receive and how often you must give them a clear way to update their preferences and, or unsubscribe. And you must also include an unsubscribe link in every email. If you're using an email service provider, then this will be provided as standard, is a limited exception around your already existing customers, which is often called soft Tim, According to the ICO, soft opt-in is sometimes used to describe the rule about existing customers. And the idea is that if an individual has bought something from you recently, given you their details, and did not opt out of marketing messages. They are probably happy to receive marketing from you about similar products or services. Even if they haven't specifically consented, however, you must have given them a clear chance to opt out when you first collected their details and every message you send. There are also completely different rules around marketing to businesses. And I would definitely advise before you start sending out your e-mail marketing to familiarize yourself around the laws around email marketing to avoid getting into any issues. The best site for you to look at would be the ICOs websites. Finally, on this topic, It's a good idea to keep your e-mail list clean and up-to-date to make sure that the e-mail addresses are still correct and that the people on your list still want to hear from you. One way that you could do this is to keep an eye on deliverability over time and say after six months or so, remove the people that aren't engaging anymore. Or you could send them an e-mail asking them if they still want to be on the list. And if they don't respond, then you could remove them from your list. Having emails on your email list that are not engaging, that are old, that are incorrect can really affect your list health and deliverability over time. If you have a large list than this can obviously end up costing you more to send as well. So it's really important to keep everything as up-to-date as you can. In the next video, we'll be talking about segmentation of your audience. 7. Segmenting your audience: In order to make sure that your emails are relevant to your audience, it's really important to segment your campaigns where you can. If you're sending a general newsletter, then you may choose to not segment, but if you have a specific email campaign with a specific goal, then segmentation can really help to boost engagement and response rates. It's important to note though with segmentation, you do need a sizeable lists to start with. If you're just starting out, you may not have enough subscribers to segment straight away. First of all, what is segmentation? I would describe email segmentation as grouping your subscribers into various parts that have similar characteristics in order to send them more targeted messages that are gonna be more relevant to them. Reason why segmented emails performed so well is that segmented e-mails are more relevant to the receiver, more personalized, which means they're more likely to be opened and clicked and engaged with and less likely to result in the receiver on subscribing from that email. With email marketing, it's so important to send the right message to the right people. E.g. let's say you have a business based in Devon and you want to use e-mail marketing to promote an event that's going to be based in Devon. And you have subscribers that are all over the UK. You may want to segment your audience to focus just on the subscribers that live, Devin and the surrounding areas. They'd probably be little point in sending that e-mail to people that live in Scotland because they're gonna be thinking this isn't relevant for me and they're more likely to unsubscribe. In this case, failing to segment your e-mail marketing message may not only result in a waste of your time in crafting the campaign, but also would have the potential to annoy your subscribers as well. Some of the most common ways that you can segment your e-mail campaigns include demographics. So you can segment your e-mail campaign based on age or gender. You can segment based on products or services purchased or events attended in the past. You can segment based on product category bought a customer's location. If you are in business to business and you can segment based on company type or industry or job title, e.g. you could also segment based on a customer's buying activity or frequency, what content they're interested in, how engaged they are, and if there are new customer, if they're a frequent customer or if they're a subscriber, you may choose to send them different types of messages. Most e-mail service providers will have built in segmentation tools. They all vary slightly, but they all do a similar thing in that they allow you to easily build segments out of your email data. However, in order to build your segments, you actually need the data in there to start with, though, you'll need in your ESP access to data that you want to be able to segment your e-mail campaigns on, e.g. if you want to target customers by geography where they live in the UK, then you need to have access to that data in your e-mail service provider. Therefore, it's really important to think about from the start what data or information you will need from your customers in order to segment further down the line. So this could be information that you collect when customers sign up to your newsletter or when they make a purchase from you. But the more data you collect will help you in the future in terms of segmentation and creating more relevant messages for your subscribers, is it important for you to know a customer's gender or location? Is it important for you to know their date of birth? Because then you could potentially send them a happy birthday email, e.g. one thing that you need to think about from the start and then build into your email sign-up forms. Just a word of warning though you don't want to ask for too much information right at the start because I'm really long sign-up form will potentially put people off from signing up for your emails. So I would suggest only asking for the essential information to start with or the information that you plan to use. And then you can build up a customer's profile later. So e.g. you could send them an automated follow-up e-mail once they've signed up to ask for additional information, which could also be incentivized to increase response rates. The main message here is that it's important to start thinking long-term, straight away, your long-term goals. What do you want to start collecting now that will help you in the future because it's much easier to start at the beginning than it is to go back in five years time and backfill data depending on your website platform, and your e-mail service provider as well. Then if you have an e-commerce website, e.g. then you may be able to use customers behavioral data. So what they've purchased on the site, what products they've looked at, things like that to help create tailored personalized campaigns. And the data from your website should be able to be integrated with your e-mail service provider. But if you're just starting out and you only have a small list at the moment, then I would start small, start thinking about building your list organically and what data you might need in the future when you plan to start segmenting your campaigns and creating more targeted messages, what will you need? And start collecting that basically as soon as you can. In the next lesson, we'll go through the different types of e-mails that you can send. 8. PART 1 - Types of email you can send: There are many different types of marketing e-mails that you can send and the types of email that you choose should always be tied back to your business goals. In this lesson, I'll run through some common types of e-mail that you can send. When thinking about types of emails, always think back to what you want to achieve with that campaign. You can look at competitive emails and see what type of emails they're sending. I also really liked the website, really good emails.com. They have loads of examples of email campaigns by industry and email type. And that can be a really good place to start if you're struggling with inspiration or you just need some ideas on content. Let's get into the different email tight spheres email type that you can send is the generic company. Newsletter. Newsletters are not always about sales. It's about driving engagement with your brand, brand awareness and encouraging customer retention. Subscribers won't want to be bombarded with sales messages all the time, which can over time devalue your brand and come across as a bit spammy newsletters with useful and relevant content can help keep your subscribers engaged with your brand so that when they are ready to buy, they know where you are and your brand is top of mind content you could include in a newsletter, could be company updates, links to blog posts or articles, product tips and tricks related to your industry. News, quizzes, video content, competitions, and social media updates. If you are new to email marketing, their newsletters can be a really great place to start. One of my favorite newsletters that I receive is from Parker on after you've not heard of park room, they basically hold free weekly five K events all over the world. I think their newsletters are great because they contain a great mix of content that's really engaging. E.g. in this one, they have a mix of stories from the community which makes the e-mail very personal. They have content about health and training, advice, recipes, and inspiring stories. And they do have a shop and will sometimes feature links to this in their newsletters. But in this particular one, it's not the main features. So in this example, the promotional content is actually right at the end of the e-mail. Of course, they do send emails that are more promotional in nature. For these types of newsletter emails help to keep people interested and engaged with the brand in-between these promotional messages and other thing that I really like about the Parker and newsletters is that even though it's a generic newsletter that's probably sent to their whole database. They do add little touches of personalization. So the subject is personalized with my name. And then at the end of the email they have a personalized block which has my personal stats in so how many park ones I've done, which I really think is a nice touch and just makes that generic email a little bit more personal. The benefit to including personalisation like this is an increase in engagement as well. So having the name in the subject line will boost open rates and having the personalized block should help to increase clicks and engagement with the e-mail. Next, we're going to talk about automated campaigns. Automated campaigns often have much higher response rates than other types of campaigns. This is because that they are based on the customer's behavior, so they are more relevant to the customer at that point in time, automated campaigns can be very powerful and can bring in extra revenue. And once they're set up, they can be running in the background, which saves a lot of time and gives you more time to focus on running your business. Some examples of automated campaigns include re-engagement campaigns. These campaigns can be sent to customers that haven't bought from you for a while or haven't engaged with your content for awhile as an attempt to reengage them or bring them back to your sites. This can be a single e-mail or a series of emails and can be set up to automatically run after a set amount of time. Here's a nice example of a re-engagement campaign from Duolingo, but subject is we miss you and the call to action is back on track. So this is aimed at people that obviously haven't been on their site for awhile. And they're trying to re-engage them and get them back learning languages with them. This email is probably set up to send automatically after a user hasn't logged in for a set amount of time. But the content that you can use in your re-engagement campaigns include special office to encourage the customer to come back. You could also include a survey to find out why they've lapsed. And you can actually ask them directly, do you want to receive emails anymore? It's subscribers don't respond as a result of the re-engagement campaigns, then you can make decision on whether to remove them from your list. Obviously, you don't want a list full of subscribers that are active as this can damage to the health of your list. These e-mails are really good to schedule in and keep your list healthy and engaged. At what point you would send a reactivation email will vary massively by industry and by product or service. It's something that would need testing and then. 9. PART 2 - Types of email you can send: The next email type and you can send our event invites. Now, these are similar to sales and promotional e-mails because you're trying to get someone to sign up to an event rather than purchase a product. So as with sales and promotional e-mails, and you don't want to be sending too many of these in a row. And it's always a good idea to mix up the content and mix up the type of emails. So send a newsletter in-between, e.g. remember to also suppress people that have already signed up to your event. And so you're not going to annoy them by keep inviting them when they've already signed up. And in addition to this, once they've signed up, you'll be wanting to send them different contents, things like what they can expect at the event, directions to the event and how to get there when it's going to be equally after the event, then you'd be wanting to e-mail those that attended with maybe a survey to get their feedback or any highlights of the event or any on-demand footage. If there is any, the next type female that you can send our transactional e-mails, these aren't classed as marketing e-mails, but instead relate to a customer transaction, e.g. order confirmation, account confirmation, password reset, or shipping confirmation. Remember, you can't put marketing messages on these emails unless a customer is opted in for marketing. Although it's really important that you check these emails and make sure that they look good, that they're on brand, and that they fit the style of all of your other marketing e-mails. These post-sale transactional e-mails often have the highest open rate out of any emails that you send. So it's really important that they look good, that on-brand, that you can utilize any opportunities that you can for cross-selling with the subscribers that are opted in. I'll share a couple of examples of transactional e-mails. The first one is from Pandora. I recently purchased something from Pandora, and this is the email that I received. You can see that this transactional email is branded in their colors with their logo and it's personalized as well. Now a common mistake is that businesses often forget about these transactional e-mails. Sometimes they're sent from a different system, and then there can be a real disconnect between the marketing e-mails and the transactional e-mails, it's definitely worth spending time making sure these good and that they are on brand. If people are not opted into marketing e-mails and these are the only e-mails that they will receive. So you can add things like FAQs, social media links, and if they are opted into marketing its prime real estate on these emails to feature some recommended products that may complement their purchase. At an example here from Etsy, you can see that again, it's branded. It has information about the shop that's been purchased from, how the customer can get help as well as cross-selling more promotional products. So this is a really, really good example of a well utilized transactional email. The next email type that you can send are triggered emails. Triggered emails are similar to automated e-mail, but they are instead triggered by an action. So e.g. when somebody leaves a item in the basket or when somebody signs up for a newsletter, or when somebody abandons a form. These are similar to automated emails in the sense that they have really good engagement rates because they're highly relevant to the subscriber. At that particular point in time, I would suggest including a couple of triggered emails in your e-mail strategy as they can really help to boost engagement and revenue. And once they're set up, then they can run in the background. Although I would make sure to check links and content in them periodically and not just forget about them. I'll run through some of the examples of some of the most common triggered emails. This example is the welcome e-mail. The welcome e-mail is one of the best performing triggered emails that you can possibly send. And this is because you're emailing a customer or a subscriber when they're at their most engaged with your brand, you can use welcome emails to welcome subscribers when they first sign up to your email list or to thank a customer for their first purchase. These e-mails are perfect for building your brand. So you could include content like customer reviews, any awards that you've won, invite customers or subscribers to follow you on social media. Or you could even offer a discount for subscribers to encourage them to make their first purchase. Or you could ask customers for more details, so more preferences so that they can build our profile. This is an example from Brooks Running. So in this email they say, Let's get to know each other. And they ask the customer a series of questions about where they want, whether they're male or female. Do they prefer roads, trail, the gym or walking? And this will obviously help them in the future to tailor that emails and be more personalized to the customer. So this is a really useful campaign to send. Try and get more information on your customers because obviously it will help you improve your relevancy and then in turn improve your engagement over time. Another type of triggered email is the post-purchase e-mail after a customer has purchased. This is an ideal time to send an email to ask for feedback what the post-purchase e-mails you could send include following up with some tips on how to get the most out of their new product. E.g. if you sell laptops, you could send a series of emails given tips and advice on how to get the most out of their new laptop, what features they can use. And also, you could also send some emails, cross-selling related features like laptop bags, accessories, and things like that to complement the product that they've bought. Again, one thing to look out for with these types of e-mails, especially review requests, as these can often be sent from third-party companies, is to make sure that the email is on-brand and fits with the style of the rest of the e-mails that you send. I've got a couple of examples here of companies that have recently sent me a post-purchase review email. Now the first example is Pandora again, and this is actually, I would say quite a bad example in the sense that the email is not branded. It's good in the sense that you can actually leave feedback directly in the email, but they haven't branded it and it looks completely different to the rest of their e-mails. And I think this is something that can negatively affect the customer experience with the brand. Where as an example here that I've got from sport shoes.com, this is a better example. They've obviously taken the time to make sure that their review e-mails looks similar to their marketing emails. This is important because if an email looks radically different to what the customer expects to receive, then it's obviously going to affect engagement rates. Customers might not think it's genuine, they might think it's spam. So it's obviously going to affect the amount of reviews that you receive. Another type of email that can do really well as a trigger email is a basket abandonment email is emails can be triggered to automatically send when a customer leaves an item in their basket or if they abandon a page on your website. These e-mails, you can offer a discount code to get people to combat. Or you can add a survey to ask for feedback to find out why somebody abandoned, which can be really, really useful in improving your checkout process, is a nice example from headspace of an abandonment email that they send when somebody abandon signing up for their headspace plus subscription. You can see in this email, they're asking for feedback if they need any help with checking out and then they've got a call to action to go back to the checkout. Nice and simple, and I'm sure that works well for them. It's a good idea to send a basket abandonment email within the first hour, I would say of abandonment. Obviously, this is something that you can test. You can also test sending one email versus sending a series of follow-up emails. Another example of a triggered campaign is back in stock emails. I can stop emails can be a really useful email to send to prevent potential lost revenue. E.g. if you have a product that's gone out of stock on your website, then instead of just putting a message on that page saying products out of stock, you could instead put a email sign-up form there to say, if you are interested in hearing when this product comes back in stock, then leave your email address and we'll let you know. And then you could set up a trigger so that once that product comes back in stock, anybody that has put their email address in that form will be sent an e-mail to let them know that the product is now back in stop. These types of e-mails can perform really well because obviously the people that have left their details are very engaged. So they're more likely to open the email when they receive it and make the purchase funnel email type that I'm going to talk about in the triggered emails is product replenishment emails. So these e-mails are like reminder e-mails to remind the customer when it's time to restock their products. So e.g. if you sell a product that has an average life cycle. So something like makeup, e.g. or vitamins, something that's likely to run out within a set amount of time. You could automatically set up a trigger to e-mail customers when it's time to restock their product. These types of emails can be powerful because from the customer's point of view, they're often seen as useful, a helpful reminder rather than a sales tactic. An example of this is that my pharmacy will email me when it's time for me to reorder my prescription. You can even ask customers to set their own reminder sites like moon pig and thoughtful and many card websites also allow the customer to set their own reminders for upcoming events like birthdays. This is an example of a reminder email that I received a company called thoughtful that cell birthday cards. So I set a reminder in my account for my brother's birthday, which is in March. And they sent this on 15th of February. So a few weeks before, the subject was not wrong to go. Louise, don't forget their cards. So again, very personal and they have offered me a discount codes get free postage, and they then put some birthday cards there as well. Then there's also a section to manage reminders to the customer. This is useful and it's highly relevant. And as a result, campaigns like this can perform very well. These are some of the main email types that you can send. Obviously, there are other types that you can send as well, but these are ones that I've used in my own working life that have performed well. Obviously, what you use in your particular business will depend on what your goals are and what your industry is. And I would advise always to start small, see what works well and then build upon that. And always remember to test everything that you do to make sure that what you're doing is working. In the next lesson, we'll go through some practical tips to help boost e-mail engagement. 10. Practical tips to boost email engagement: You've chosen your goals, you've built your e-mail template. You have segmented your audience and you've got your e-mail campaign all ready to go. What are some practical tips that you can now do to help increase e-mail engagement. In this lesson, I'll run through some tips that I have learned in my years working in email marketing. This tip is something that we've already touched upon and it's personalization. Segmentation. Personalization is absolutely crucial. If you can segment your email and make it more relevant to your audience, then you will see better engagement and better results. How you choose to personalize your emails will depend on the campaign. But one highly effective tip is to try and include some personalization in the subject line. So e.g. the subscribers or customers name, location, job title can really, really help to boost open rates and engagement and other more advanced way using personalization in your e-mail campaigns is you have the data and resources available to you to utilize dynamic content. Dynamic content is essentially content that changes depending on the receiver of the email, e.g. you may have blocks of content that change based on products that the customer has bought before or products that they viewed before. Or you may have a different messages for people who live in different locations. Or maybe male subscribers would receive different items than female subscribers and so on. This is a bit more advanced though, and will require a larger e-mail list, a lot of data. And also an e-mail service provider that offers the dynamic content as well. A really good example of a highly personalized campaign is Spotify wrapped campaign. This is an email that I think is highly effective, is highly personal and highly engaging. And due to this, it always creates a lot of buzz, a lot of sharing on social media every year. And although this is a bit more advanced and requires a lot of data, it shows you just how powerful, highly targeted, personalized e-mail campaigns can be. Another way to help boost engagement is through AB testing or split testing. This is essentially where you split your list in half and send one part of the list, one version of the email and the other part of the list, another version of the email and see which one performs best. Again, this does require a certain amount of subscribers, and I would suggest anything less than 1,000 subscribers, the results are probably not going to be significant. If you don't have 1,000 subscribers yet, it's probably not worth doing the AB testing, but it's something that you can do as your list grows if you can, I would suggest split testing, the subject line content of the email, the images used in the email, the call to actions used in the email. Anything that you can think of really. But it's important to only test one thing at a time so that you know what change has been effective, the benefits of AB testing, or the more you test, the more you learn what works. And then over time, this will increase your engagement and performance. Most e-mail service providers will give you the option of setting up AB tests, and it's usually relatively straightforward to do. So. I would recommend if you have an email list above 1,000 subscribers and you have an email service provider that allows you to set up split tests. It's definitely worth starting as soon as you can on as many campaigns as you can, so that you can build up your knowledge over time and learn what works for your business and your customers. Another way to boost e-mail engagement is through the CTA, which is the call to action. Every email you send should have a call to action. It should be the action that you want the customer to take after opening that email. Whether that's to click through, to purchase something, to download something, whatever it is, it needs to be very clear, it needs to be prominent and it needs to be above the fold, which means that it's above the area that the customer will see when they first open the e-mail. It's really important to look at the language of the call to action experiment with different ways of saying what you want to say. There's lots of different call to actions you can use like shop now, click here, download now, register here, e.g. but it's really good to experiment with different call to actions and learn what works for you. Ideally, the call to action should be a button and it should be as large and tappable as possible so that it is easy to click on a desktop and also easy to tap on a mobile. You should always check your emails on a mobile, makes sure that they look good and that the call to action is clear and obvious. You don't want to have too many call to actions and your e-mail because otherwise. It's gonna be confusing and the subscriber won't know where to click if the call to action isn't clear or the customer can't see it, then they're unlikely to click through. And this will obviously affect your conversions and engagement rates. You should also make an effort to optimize your subject lines. Subject line is arguably the most important part of the email because it determines whether the email is opened or not. In my experience, short snappy subjects often work best, as well as also creating a bit of curiosity or urgency. I'd suggest avoiding words that may trigger the spam filter. So words like free or words that are all in caps, definitely test your subjects where you can, make sure they're readable, make sure they're not too long. So e.g. have a look at what it looks like on a mobile because there's a character limit on a mobile. And if your subjects too long, it will get cutoff. So you'd want to keep your subject short. And if you can't, make sure you put the most important part of the subject at the beginning. Also, as already mentioned, try to make your subject lines personal way. You can, including the subscribers name e.g. this can really help to boost open rates related to the last point, you really want to make sure that your emails are mobile optimized. More people now are opening emails on a mobile than they are on the desktop. Obviously, this varies by industry. Mobile is very, very important. So most ESPs will have template builders and the templates will already be mobile optimized. So you don't need to worry about that too much. But I would definitely, once you've built your campaign, send a copy to yourself and have a look at what it looks like. Make sure that it looks good on a mobile. In terms of building an email for mobile, you want to avoid really long paragraphs of copy. You want to make the call to action buttons large and tappable and obvious. This would also include making sure the font size is readable and making sure the subject is optimized for mobile as well. In relation to this, it's important not to neglect their pre header text. The pre header text is a bit of texts that shows on immobile underneath the subject. So it's essentially an extension of the subject. Definitely make sure that you use this. It's prime real estate. It allows you to extend your message. Studies have shown that using this three-headed texts can help to boost open rates. It's also important to check what your email looks like on different devices and in different email clients. If you're short on time, then I would just check the main email clients that your subscribers use and you should be able to find stats about this in your email service provider reports. Don't forget about accessibility and making sure that your emails look good in dark mood. And for people that are colorblind as well, you should make sure that your templates contain a good mix of images and copy the font sizes are readable and that you use alt texts on all of your images. Texts essentially makes images accessible to people that use screen readers so that they can tell what the image is. It's important to remember as well that images aren't always automatically displayed. So the email has to make sense with the images turned off. So in this sense, I would avoid using an email that's heavily just images, because if the images are turned off, then there's gonna be no content there. You can use tools such as litmus, which I've used in the past, which help you to see what your emails and look like across different devices, across different email clients, and also make sure that they're accessible as well. And also some e-mail service providers will also offer this kind of thing as well. Obviously, if you don't want to pay extra for litmus, then you can also send your emails to yourself or your colleagues or your friends and just make sure that they generally look good. So another tip is to make sure that your emails are consistent. So by consistency, I mean, make sure that they are on brand, so they use the branded colors, the logos, the fonts, etc. And that there is consistency with your landing page as well. The page that you're sending them through two, should be consistent with the email. And this helps to increase engagement and conversion. And it's also worth as well at this point, checking that your landing pages look good on a mobile, e.g. if you're sending somebody to a registration form and it doesn't work on a mobile or doesn't look good on a mobile, then obviously that's going to impact your conversions. Another tip to boost engagement is to test different times. Sometimes in terms of engagement will vary by industry, will vary by country, and at different times will work better for different audiences. So it's really important that you test sending the emails at different times, on different days to see what works best for your industry and your audience. If you're not sure where to start there and have a look at your competitors, what they're doing, sign up to their newsletters, see what times they're sending their emails. This could be a really good place to start just to get an idea. There are also many studies online where people have experimented by industry on the best day is the best time. So send an email, so definitely do some research as well. Another tip is to look at your friendly from them, friendly from essentially the from name that the email is sent from. In many cases, this is normally the company name, but it is possible to increase engagement by testing this one of my previous roles, we put somebody's personal name in there. So you could say Sarah at company name e.g. this can help to create a bit more personalization and it can help to increase response rates. So definitely have a go at testing that and seeing what works for you. In the next lesson, we're gonna be looking at how to optimize and analyze your e-mail performance. 11. Analyse and optimise your email campaigns: It's always important to analyse your e-mail campaigns performance to find out if they were effective in achieving your goals. Analyzing performance will help you improve your emails going forward, there are many different metrics that you can look at. This will depend on the particular campaign and the goal of that campaign. E.g. if a goal of your e-mail campaign is brand awareness and you may want to focus on open rates of that particular campaign. If your goal is sales than you would be looking at conversion rate of that email, the revenue driven from that campaign. If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, then you would probably be looking at click-through rate or page views on your site. I would recommend adding tracking links onto all of the e-mail campaigns that you send so that you can closely monitor performance and make sure that your campaigns are meeting your goals. I personally use Google Analytics to track performance and you can easily generate tracking links for Google Analytics that you can add onto the end of your email links. And I would recommend doing something like this, either with Google Analytics or with whatever tracking software you use, you'll still be able to access that in your ESP if you don't add the external tracking gone. So open rates and click-through rates and bounce rates and things like that. But the benefit of adding on the external tracking will give you a much fuller picture. It will enable you to see things that you might not be able to access in your e-mail service provider. So things like sales, which products were viewed, which products were purchased, which pages were viewed as a result of the e-mail. All of these things can be seen in Google Analytics and we'll give you a much fuller picture of campaign performance depending on what goals you have. If you are new to email marketing, then it can be difficult to know what makes a good performing campaign where open rates are concerned or where click-through rates are concerned. It's a good idea to have a look at industry benchmarks so that you can see how your campaigns are performing compared to the average. And then you can make tweaks accordingly. If you need to move the time, you'll get to know what's good for your particular business and what's not good. And if a campaign has performed well or not for you, once you've built up a history, you'll be able to analyze historical data and trends. If you've been sending emails for awhile, then analyzing previous performance and comparing emails to last month or last year can be quite a good place to start and can help you to identify trends and areas for improvement that you can focus on with your e-mail strategy. E.g. if you analyze your emails over the last six months or so and you'll notice that the click-through rate is going down gradually. Then it may be that your customers are starting to disengage with your emails. So you might want to look at your segmentation and targeting and whether this can be improved or even the content that's in your emails and the templates and doing some tests on this to try and increase the click-through rates. Individual campaigns, it's worth looking at the reports that the e-mail service provider will provide. It easily include stats like open rate, click-through rate, deliverability rate, and unsubscribed rate. It's worth keeping an eye on these metrics so that any potential issues can be addressed quickly. It's also worth looking at the performance of your emails on mobile versus desktop, which links are clicked on, and which e-mail clients, the emails are opened on most frequently, most e-mail service providers will provide this information. In the previous lessons, we've talked about the importance of AB testing in order to optimize your e-mail campaigns. I would also recommend collating the results of these tests so that you can build a best practice document on what works and what doesn't work for your business, depending on how often you email, then you'd want to be looking at your email stats at least monthly, maybe weekly if you e-mail more frequently. And then doing a more of a deep dive into performance every quarter and comparing to the previous quarter or the previous year, this will help you to identify any areas that are doing well and any potential areas for improvement that you can focus on in the next quarter of your e-mail strategy. 12. Conculsion: Thank you so much for taking this class. I really hope that you've learned something new about email marketing that you can implement into your own business. For a quick recap, we have learned about what email marketing is, benefits for a small business. We've looked at how to set your goals, building your subscriber list, segmenting your audience, the different types of emails you can send. Practical tips to boost engagement and analyzing and optimizing your e-mail marketing. If you take anything away from this class, it is not to be overwhelmed by email marketing. If you're just getting started, then start small, start with a monthly newsletter and then over time, gradually increase new campaigns that meet your business goals. You really don't need a big team to make a start. It's also important to test as much as you can when it comes to email marketing. And focus on quality over quantity when it comes to your e-mail subscribers, you want to build and engage list of quality subscribers, of people that really want to hear from you and that are interested business and your products or services. Don't forget to post your projects in the project gallery. And if you enjoyed this class, I'd really appreciate it. If you could leave me a review and follow me on Skillshare for future marketing related courses. I look forward to seeing you in the next class.