How To Use EMAIL MARKETING For Business (Beginner to Advanced)

1. Introduction: Hey there, my name's Scott declared and welcome to my course on email marketing. I'm a career long sales and marketing executive. Over the course of my career, I've sold and marketed to some of the most iconic Fortune five hundred and four hundred, one hundred brands. I've built out, grown and scaled sales and marketing teams. I currently hosts success story podcasts where I have incredible conversations with highly successful entrepreneurs and individuals and break down their story. I'm also the founder of ROI overload, a sales and marketing publication. Both myself and my team have trained thousands of individuals on various sales and marketing tools, technologies, insights and topics. Today, we're going to break down the basics of email marketing. You are going to learn the best tools for email marketing, the best coffee that you have to put in emails, as well as some tips and tricks to help you scale yourself through automation. This course is broken down into three modules. First, we'll discuss the various platforms you can use for email marketing. Then we'll go into a copywriting master class. What do you have to say in your email? What's subject lines should you use to get people to open the e-mails and respond back to you. And last, we'll talk about automation, sequencing. How can you scale yourself so that you can send more meaningful messages to people when certain triggers fire and certain actions are taken. This class is created for beginner marketers or entrepreneurs, or even sales reps who want to learn the tools and strategies to send emails that get open, get read, and get conversions or results. There's no true knowledge or tools that are required before you go into this course, I would just recommend you are trying to achieve a sales marketing or business objective so that you can apply some of the things learning in this course to your own email marketing strategies and campaigns. The value prop of this course is that you are going to understand not just the tech, not just the copy, not just advanced automation, but all of it in one course, which should effectively bring your e-mail marketing game to another level. My project or my ask of you when you finish this course is to write an e-mail using some of the techniques and strategies that you learn in this course and AB test it against your existing e-mails so that you can see an improvement in your open rates and your click-through rates in your meetings book and your replies, whatever it may be, I hope you enjoy this course. Let's jump right in. 2. Email Platform Basics: So in this lesson, we're going to be covering email marketing basics. And we're going to be focusing on just one email auto responder service. And the reason I say that is because there's tons of them out there. There's an infusion soft, There's GetResponse, a Weber convert kit, active campaign. There's so many out there and some new ones as well. Drip market hero every day it seems like there's a new one that comes out. And the thing is, almost all of them, despite having slightly different terminology, are going to have the same basic functionality, okay, it's almost universal. Now a lot of them are also basically all in one apparatuses. Okay. They're moving sort of in that direction where they handled not only your e-mail marketing, but also everything else. Landing pages, webinars creating your forms and e-commerce related stuff, literally everything you could possibly think of. Since this course is about e-mail marketing, we're just going to focus on those main categories having to do with email, okay? And what we're going to be doing in this lesson is covering contacts, email marketing, which is divided into auto responders and newsletters, and automation. Once again, all of the terminology that you see here might be a little bit different depending on what auto responder you're utilizing. However, the functionality and the concepts are all the same and you won't have any trouble figuring out how this sort of correlates to what you're using. So to start our little tour, we're going to go over here to contacts. Now contacts, again, we talked about terminology depending on what auto responder or system you're going to be using. Sometimes it's called subscribers drip. A relatively new email marketing platform has just come out with a new theme of their own where they don't use either of those words anymore. Now it's called people, but you get the idea, you'll be able to figure it out pretty clearly. So what we have here are all of our email list under our contact lists section, email list. And this is how we sort of sub-divide and segment all of our subscribers into different audiences based on what funnel they came through or what group they belong to. Okay, so here we can either browse our contexts by drilling down into the different lists, or we can actually just search by name. So for example, right here, what will get us results not only the e-mails and names, but also the lists that they belong to. It's pretty easy to find a specific contact if you are in fact looking for a specific one. Let's talk about list hygiene. This is an important one here. List hygiene. The concept of list hygiene is basically having low-quality contacts on your list. Contacts who don't open your emails or send you to the spam folder or that sort of thing. Actually that hurts your deliverability. So you want to come in and do some list hygiene, which means we're moving people from your list or blacklisting certain e-mails that advance to ensure that no problematic people get added to your subscriber lists. And a lot of times your email auto responders will have their own built-in systems for that. Another important one here is statistics. So this is really good to monitor so that you see the health of your list building over time. And this will give you information on how your growth is. And that's sort of the main thing that you're looking at here, as well as what types of sign-ups you are getting. So for example, if we were to switch the date here to the last two months, you'll see a lot more data here. And what we'll see is that pretty much our entire list came through API integrations with third party platforms. So in this case, most of these people came onto our list by purchasing a product and we had an API integration with our billing or our purchasing. The platform. So there's plenty of analyzing to do and when plenty of searching that you could do inside of the contacts section, Let's move on now let's come back to the dashboard. We're going to move on to the e-mail marketing section, okay, now email marketing is divided into actual real-time newsletters that you type and you send out or you're scheduled to go out later, or auto responders, which means things that are automatically sent out in sequence based on a point in time from when someone joins your list. Okay, so first let's go over newsletters. If you wanted to create a newsletter, you would do that once again in real time, you could use your drag and drop e-mail editor is an each HTML option. If you're sort of a coder and you know what you're doing in that area. However, its recommend that you just use the drag and drop builder. And pretty much every auto responder, a platform out there has one of those. You could choose a template here and then just go with it and create your email message that way. Now, in another module we'll go over actually creating the email messages. That's not really what we're going for right now. We'll come back to the dashboard, back to email marketing and we'll talk about the difference between newsletters and auto responders. So auto responders, this is where you would come inside of GetResponse to set those up or to monitor those. As you can see, you've got statistics here. Keep in mind the statistics here are not for a single broadcast. Auto responders are based on the individual who joined us. So from the moment that they joined, your auto responder sequences are set up to send them an e-mail the next day and the next day and the next day, and the cumulative performance of each of those auto responder messages. It can be viewed here in the statistics columns, but it's not the same as checking out the statistics for a single broadcast, okay? And basically what you would do is you come up with an auto responder name and you would choose what listed applies to, and you would choose it's recommended that you choose the same time they signed up because based on the person's day to day schedule, the only one time that you can be sure are almost sure that they will definitely be at a computer is the time that they were at a computer when they signed up. Okay. So that's sort of makes logical sense. So it's recommended that you choose time they signed up. Well, you've got some other options here as well. And choose days of the week. And right here for this message, if we wanted it to go out immediately after they signed up. For example, if we want to immediately deliver a lead magnet, after they opted in for lead magnet, like a free report or something, we would set this to day 0, okay. And it'll go out immediately. Okay. But for subsequent days, so the next day would be day one, we recommend that you stick with same time that they signed up. Again, this is GetResponse, but the process is usually the same for other email platforms. Still have auto responder sequences and pretty much it for auto responders. Onenote, don't get auto responders confused with automation, which is what we're going to be looking at. Momentarily. Let's go over here to drafts. And drafts are pretty self-explanatory. If you're in the middle of creating an email and you don't quite get it finished, you can save it as a draft or just save it in case your computer shuts down or something, all that will be found here, you can grab these and pick up right where you left off and send those. Okay, so now let's come back to the dashboard and the final part of the e-mail marketing equation is automation. Now this is different from auto responder sequences. Auto responder sequences are kind of just cut and dry. Day one, day two, day three, et cetera. There's no customization. There's no adaptation based on behavior. The whole idea behind automation is creating workflows that change and adjust themselves based on the behavior of your subscribers. It gets pretty in-depth. It's a pretty nifty tool to have. You would basically come over here to click Create Workflow to create one. And we'll do that in another module. Or what you could do is come over here and mess with an existing one or check out the performance of an existing one. So that's pretty much it for the basic overview of the basic functionality of email auto responders. Again, I know I've beat this dead horse a few times. Keep in mind, terminology may be different, but functionality is pretty much the same no matter what email auto responder service you're using. Now let's move on to the next module. We're gonna get more into the actual emails themselves. 3. Types of Emails & Email Content: We're going to go over how to create an email newsletter, and it's going to be pretty barebones. I just want you to understand the whole process and the concept. And then we're gonna go into some examples of e-mail newsletter types. Okay, so we're gonna come over here to create a newsletter. Will choose the drag-and-drop email editor. Don't mess with the HTML source editor unless you're an actual coder or you have a coder who works for you. And we're going to give her a message. A name doesn't really matter for this example. We'll hit Next. And you have lots of templates to choose from here already created by GetResponse. And the same goes for any email auto responder, or service that you are using, okay, login and I guarantee you'll find several predawn templates that you can utilize that may or may not match your style. In our case, we're just going to sort of start with a blank template, one column, just like this. All right, so here we are inside of the builder. We're just gonna go over the basic process of the drag and drop and building experience. And again, this is mostly going to be the same no matter what email auto responder you are utilizing. However, the layout, the terminology might be a little bit different. So let's start with an image. It's always good to start with a good image. Let's go ahead and grab this one here. This is a good one for choices, right? And we're going to come over here and add another text block up here. Okay? And this is pretty basic stuff. Salutations. So dear customer. And we're not actually going to fill this in here because we don't have anything to type it, but we'll get into the actual content of your e-mails in a moment. We're just going through the mechanical process right now. All right, so we've got a basic e-mail here, okay. And then finally, signing off. All right. Now there's a few things to keep in mind about your e-mails here. Number 1, personalization is a thing nowadays. Okay. So if you wanted to, and it depends on what kind of data you collect during the opt-in process. But if you wanted to, instead of customer right here, you could click this little icon here for personalized and put their name or their first name right there, and their actual name when they read the email would be here. There would be no brackets or anything like that. Customization and personalization, tailoring it to your specific individual subscriber that has been shown quite a bit to, to increase your e-mail performance and you know, your sales and so on and so forth and your click-through rates. So it's definitely something that you want to toy with at least a little bit if the technology is available, which it is with the vast majority of auto responders and if name is something that you collect during the opt-in process. So another thing to consider here is link placement. So a lot of people will just place their link sending to promotional offer or a product or a cross-sell or something inside of the main body. However, one thing you want to keep in mind with regard to emails overall, a huge percentage of your customers and have your subscribers. We'll skip and skip everything in your email message and just go straight to the ps. It's a fact, it's a phenomenon, it's well-known. And so you want to accommodate those people as well and write a little message, usually one or two sentences long, sort of TLD are too long, didn't read. Summarizing what it is that you're offering and a link there as well. Now let's continue. I know this is just a bare-bones example here we'll get into some actual email writing and email style in a moment. Let's go through the process here as though we were going to actually send this to someone. So the next thing we're going to choose is our recipients. Okay, so lets just grab one of our email lists here. We could grab as many as we want it to. Here we have an option to actually exclude recipients. So let's say we have one list which is sort of an umbrella list of all of our customers and we want to send it to everybody, except we also have another list that everyone goes onto when they buy product a. Now what we want to do if we're doing a promotion for product a is get everyone else to buy it but not bother or bug the people who already own it. And the best way to do that is simply to create an exclusion and choose a list to not send it to. Does that kinda make sense? So we're gonna go ahead and click next step. And here we have options for either sending or scheduling. Now if we send it, it'll go out right now real-time. It's an actual newsletter broadcast if we want to schedule it. All right, We can actually choose the date and time and make sure you're paying attention to your time zone as well. And most email auto responders have a little bit of customization and added features when it comes to how you schedule it in relation to where your folks are on the world. I get response in particular has two features. One is called perfect timing, and that actually is based on data for your subscribers, based on when they usually open emails. It's universal data on each subscriber. Okay. It's all anonymous data. But basically, if you have Bob over an Arizona and he opens most of his emails between 34, GetResponse somehow knows that. Alright. And you can make sure that it sends out at whatever the optimum time is for that subscriber. Okay, and just keep in mind though if you choose this, it could theoretically be 24 hours before this newsletter goes out to the last of your subscribers because it's going to be based on out of a 24 hour day when each individual is going to be most likely to open it. Okay. The other thing here is to choose time travel, and that's just what the feature is called in GetResponse again, the terminology might be a little bit different, but basically you send it out at 04:00 PM universally based on people's time zone. So whatever 4PM is for them. So in this case, 450, five PM, it'll go out to the folks here at 45, 455 PM in the UK. It won't go out to them until it's 450, five PM, their time and so on and so forth. And that can be useful for various reasons. If you're trying to catch people at certain times of the average typical workday, you want to catch people before they go to work at six in the morning or after they finish their separate seven o'clock at night or something like that, it can be really useful for those purposes as well, especially if you have a large international audience. Once we're happy with that, we would hit schedule. Or if you're just wanted to send a right now we would go back to just hitting send, cancel and send. We're not going to send this obviously because it's not a real one. Let's look at some real ones and talk about the different styles of email newsletters. Okay, so first off, we've got. What I call the blind style. Okay? This is sort of a teaser. It's very low on text, okay, It's very short on content. And the idea is just to arouse curiosity so that people want to click that link and get there. So this is for maximizing clicks and you will typically get higher click-through rates on these types of e-mails because it's just human nature. People see what you're saying. Maybe you throw out a bold claim or something along those lines, like in this case, yikes, this is incredible. Your average person wants to at least see what that is. Now the quality and the follow through of the click might not be so great. You know, so clicks does not always directly correspond to higher levels of sales. Okay? Usually it does, but not always. Okay. You might actually especially if the quality of what you're sending people to. We'll turn them off and maybe give them the impression that you are using. Clickbait as they call it, you could have the opposite effect. So be careful with this. All right, Don't, don't annoy your subscribers, but this is one style of e-mail that is especially optimized for increasing your click-through rate. Next, we have the sort of long form pre-selling. There's different names for this. I call it a pre-sell email where you're going to be sending people to an offer, but you're actually going to be an engaging in the actual selling process. You're trying to convince people in the email, you're trying to sell them in the email on why they should buy what you're going to be sending them to. So in this case and oh, by the way, I guess ID branded these because I want you guys to understand it doesn't matter what's being sold. These styles and these types of emails apply to anything that you're trying to sell. And this case, you can see it's pretty long form. There's a bunch of wise, there's much of a justification, there's a bunch of logic going on here. It's basically a little sales letter inside of the email message, Okay, now for some people, it might not be this, this is just purely logical selling, hey, you should buy this for this reason. Look at these trends, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And in some cases it might be a story. Okay, Hey, I woke up today and this is what I thought about or I was on a walk with my dog and this happened and that's how you sort of tie it into clicking on all Incan and selling them something. The point of this, however, is that it's long okay, It's long form. And you're doing the heavy lifting of selling yourself before you send people to an offer. And finally, we have the standard old way, I guess you could call it the old school newsletter type email. Okay. Once again, this is d branded, redacted, if you will, because it doesn't matter what type of business you're in it. You can utilize this and it can apply to what you're doing. So in this case, we've got sort of a table of contents at the top to let people know what's going to be talking about in this quote unquote issue, alright? And a lot of people, they resonate with this because they often don't feel like they're being sold to in these cases, okay, it looks like they're actually being given so important news, some important topics, okay, So in this case we've got three topics that are being discussed. In this case. We've got a feature or an opportunity here. Over here we've got another feature and an update on slow Support Desk time. Over here, we've got the actual pitch and it's a little bit bigger and in red. Okay. So this is the item. It's still a sales e-mail, but it's being dressed up as something that's not as salesy. Okay, so we've got the actual headline here. We've got a little bit of pre-selling. And of course we gotten a link. And down here in the ps and other soft sell link, like we discussed earlier for those people who just skim and go straight to the bottom. Now, your list or your business might have its own style, okay, its own sort of theme that sticks to most of the time. However, a lot of people resonate with each of these different styles of emails, okay? A lot of people are more likely to click through and buy something based on one style or the other. And so if you're doing a three or four or five-day campaign trying to sell something. Hey, why not utilize and incorporate each of these different styles of email writing at least once to make sure you're touching all those bases and increasing your chances of selling. So that's briefly touching on the actual emails themselves. In the next module, we'll move on to discussing the concept of e-mail automation. 4. Email Automation: We're going to go over basically how to create an automation workflow, as well as the logic behind the different types of workflows. So really we're going to click on Create Workflow here. Really what you wanna do here is leverage the technological ability that we have these days. This is getting more and more popular, okay? It's, it's actually getting to the point where it's not negotiable. You have to have this in your business these days. You want to basically be able to adjust automatically the messaging that you're sending to your contacts or to your customers based on how they interact or don't interact with your email messages. Okay, and just to give you an example, we'll come over here. We'll click Start now. And we're just going to toy around a little bit with the different types of workflows that we can create. Okay? So we're going to start with, there's always a starting process, okay, for a lot of people, It's when a contact is tagged in a certain way, either automatically or manually. In our case, we're going to go with subscribes, okay? When someone subscribes to our list, we can then come over here to send them a message. All right, now that's pretty self-explanatory. Okay, That's pretty basic stuff. If they subscribe to any list, we send them a message. Now in this case, if you have lots of lists, you want to see us specifically select an actual list that you're working with. Okay, so somebody grabs this case study, will send them a specific welcome message that is particular to that case study. Thanks for grabbing the case study. You can download it here, something along those lines. And basically you would select a message that already exists inside your brewery email marketing software, or create a new one and add it there. And then we're gonna do something special. This is where we're going to sort of showcase what automation can do over your two elements. We're going to go to message opened question mark. Okay, I'm going to delete this. Oops, I should not have to leave. That actually controls Z to bring that back. Alright, so message was sent, right? We'll just grab a random one here. And then we're going to connect this newsletter, opened one to that particular email. Okay, So we've got this email message and this is asking the question, it's an automation question. Was this message opened by each individual subscriber? Okay? And then we're gonna do something special. In the case of note the red x here. If I subscriber does not open this, we're gonna do something special. We are going to come over here and we're going to say, Wait for, let's say 12 hours. Okay. We'll wait for 12 hours. And then we're going to send them. So we're giving them a little bit of time to still open that initial message, okay? 12 hours later. If they still have an open, then we're going to send them another message. Okay. Come on over here. And this message can be a follow-up along the lines of, Okay, and it listen to this along the lines of, hey, we sent you a welcome message. It's got some important links in it. Did you get it okay, something along those lines or just making sure you saw this this morning? Something. Increases the chances that people who are going to click on your links or interact with three males. Okay? So you're basically taking two swings here to try and make sure people get it. And you could do this perpetually if you wanted to. It's not a good idea, but technologically speaking, good, just keep doing this, keep hitting the people who do not open with another one. Okay. And the subject line can say, Hey, did you get my last email or something along those lines? And so that's a whole new world of customization. If they did open that message, okay, if they did open that e-mail, you can then send them into what some would call a welcome or an indoctrination sequence. Okay, So the first one was literally just the delivery of a lead magnet of a free report or what have you. And the next one's going to be, Hey, let me tell you a little bit about my brand, about my identity. We are at company X. All right? That's very important. All right, that's very valuable. And for some people, those emails, will, those sequences, excuse me, will actually be three or four emails long? Okay. And if they open this one, then you could send them to another e-mail. Right? Let's go ahead and go to message open. And let's connect here. All right. And if that message was opened, we will send them another email. Okay? And in this case, we'll go to maybe a content piece for now you're starting content marketing. You're sending them to your blog, right? In that case, what we're really interested in is, did they click the link to the content piece? Okay? And once again, let's come over here and select a message. You've always going to select a message. And basically what we would do next is if they didn't click it, we would do another one of those follow-ups. Hey, did you check out this blog post that we sent you earlier this morning? Okay. If they did click it, you could activate the next portion of your content marketing email sequence, okay, and send them on something else after that and so on and so forth. Now that's the actual messaging and how you link all of that together. But there's a lot of other things you can do here. There's a lot of things that you can do in terms of the cause and effect space monitoring scoring. If you've got people who get down here and they still haven't opened your your initial delivery e-mail. Or if they get down here and here and they haven't opened your welcome email or something like that. You can actually tag them. Okay, If you wanted to, you could create a tag, okay? And you've got to create these in advance or you can select one that's already in existence. Again, you could create a tag and it could be non openers or tire kickers or something like that, right? And that way you can just sort of start categorizing people based on their behavior. And you'll have an idea of how many people sort of don't interact with your welcome sequence and the ones who do. All right, And based on people's interaction with your email so you can later on take those and let's say you're putting together a high ticket offer and you only want real action takers. Okay. Then when you're sending out that newsletter, you can specifically send it only to the people who are tagged as action takers. And exclude the people who are sort of tire kickers. So that's very useful in and of itself. And of course, scoring helps you do something similar, okay, you sort of apply arbitrary numerical values to people based on how much they interact or whether they click links or whether they buy things from you. Okay? And then of course there's the effect, okay? Cause and effect. So if people, let's say that you get all the way down here, okay. And yeah, you've tried to follow up with them and they're just not answering. You can just remove them from your list because that will hurt your e-mail performance by the way. Okay. If people will just sign up to your list and they never opened and they never opened and they never open. That can actually have a negative impact on your deliverability. Okay, because it's telling all of the software and all the gizmos out there on your side with your auto responder, but also on the Gmail and Yamaha Yahoo Mail side of things that people don't want to open your messages, okay, so it's not good to have people on your list who your mailing, who aren't opening your messages. And you can literally just remove them from the list right here after you've given them several chances. Ultimately though, you want either the thing to just end by itself or send them into a new pipeline or a new sequence. Okay, so what you could do is let's say that they've done a good job and their action takers, and they've read all of your content, click your links at the very end. You could, and move them to a new workflow. And the new workflow could be cross-selling something else. Okay, you're the new workflow could just be a general 14 day content marketing thing or it could be anything that you wanted to. And then you would go and create that new workflow in and of itself. So you're basically, you're creating workflows that accomplish in one or two goals, okay, don't make them too long or overly complex because you're increasing the chances of something going wrong or making a mistake. And then you just move them into another workflow and another workflow and so on and so forth. You can also change what lr on, okay, you can move them to a different list. You know, if they're if you've got a list, if you don't want to remove people from your contacts. But you want to, if you want the ones who were sort of not interacting as much to go to a separate list. You could do that right here, okay. You could copy people to different lists. You can do a 100 things in here. And it's incredibly, incredibly important that you utilize the power of automation. Now let's head back over to where we were a moment ago, to the actual automation dashboard. Or those templates were. And let's look at some example templates just so you get an idea of what other businesses are doing, okay? We have affiliate cross-selling. Okay. This is pretty basic. You're just putting people through sort of a gauntlet where you're trying to get them to buy something else, okay. And you're using tagging there so that you can later on know who people are based on whether or not they interacted with that sequence. Another one here, upselling, right, we've all been up. So before, you can create your email sequence that does that for you. And by the way, these templates are all plug-and-play, okay, so they're ready to go and you just choose what message goes here, right, and what tag is assigned, so on and so forth. Converting contacts to customers. Okay, So changing people from just being a subscriber or a freebie seeker into being an actual buyer who pulls out their credit card. Okay, that's a good place to start after your welcome sequence. Another thing here, abandoned cart, okay, if you're doing e-commerce, okay, and you've got people and you've got the software that will add people to a mailing list and let you know if they didn't buy something that they added to their cart. Boom, right here, plug and play. All right, down here we've got, let's see a welcome sequence over here we've got rewarding people who are loyal. So hey, thanks for opening all of our emails and reading our content. We want to give you this message here could be, Hey, we want to give you a reward, want to give you a gift card or something like that here we've got a win back campaign. This was very useful for those tire kickers, those people who are just not interacting with your brand at all. You can send them a series of messages trying to get them to open up those subject lines, hey, are you mad at me or Hey, I'm going to remove you from my list or something like that just to get them to open that e-mail. And if they click on a link, then you know, you, you keep them in your list, you know, and maybe you thank them for finally interacting with you or something along those lines, you survey them, Hey, what would you like from our brand? What can we do? How can we make this more interesting? When that campaign is great for not just getting people to click something and quote when the Mac from a tech perspective, but also for sending them emails that help you learn what they want from you and why they weren't interacting in the first place. And for the ones who keep ignoring that, Bu removed them from the account right here. So this is all Plug and Play and pretty much any email auto responder that you grab these days has automation and Hasn't automation section. And it has templates just like these that you can use and sort of plug and play and really leverage the power of automation and behavioral dynamic response is what Frank Kern called it. Really, really basing your marketing on the actions and the behavior of your customers and your subscribers. There's nothing really more powerful than that. So make sure you're making good use of this technology.