Intro to Email Marketing With MailChimp for Beginners

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to this e-mail marketing forest brought to you by employed by Wi-Fi. We are a group of online entrepreneurs teaching others how to make money online in various different ways. In, in this course, we're going to be focusing on email marketing. You're going to be learning exactly how you can use email marketing to start building your audience and you're growing your business. And because this is a very beginning of the course, we're going to start from the basics. So we're going to talk about what exactly email marketing is, why you should do it. For example, did you know that email marketing has proven to be almost 40 times more effective than social media marketing. That's exactly why you should be doing it. And don't worry, because we're going to be teaching you exactly how you can get started doing it within this course. So we're going to talk about how you can get started with Mailchimp, which is simply the e-mail marketing software that I'm going to be using throughout this course to give you different examples. However, if you're using a different e-mail marketing software, there's no problem without as well because it's going to be a very similar process to do things like build lists or create email automations, no matter which software you decide to use. There, we're also going to be talking about different campaign types. You'll learn how to create different e-mail templates. And I'm going to give you some email templates that you can simply copy and paste. So after this course, you can get started sending emails right away. You will learn how to build sign-up forms and add those sign-up forms onto your website to start growing your audience. I'll show you how to turn that audience then into a list and how to categorize that list using things like tags in groups. From there you're going to learn how to create email automations, funnels to turn your audience into converting customers. And I'm going to be giving you various different methods to actually grow your list and grow your audience. Which of course in the end is going to help you build your brand and grow your business. And last but not least, we're going to talk about how to properly analyze your email reports, which is going to help you maximize your work e-mail performance. Okay, so if you're looking to get started with e-mail marketing or if you've already been doing some e-mail marketing and you're looking to improve your strategies. This course is the perfect place for you to start. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get started right now with lesson number one. 2. What Is Email Marketing?: All right, So to get started with this course, I wanted to first begin with the symbol question. What exactly is email marketing? So before we get into how you can start email marketing, how you can start building your list and your audience, and then how you can convert that list into potential customers. I wanted to start with the basics. So email marketing is simply an email sent to a group of people with the purpose of marketing a business, a product, or a service. So anytime you go on your email and you get e-mail notifications from a company like Amazon for example, something like apple, emails from eBay or whatever it may be. If it's an email from a company or a business, they're doing that because of email marketing in their goal is to either sell something to you right off the bat, or they're trying to build loyalty and build a connection with you before they eventually try to get some kind of sale of their product or their service. Okay, So why exactly should you be doing some e-mail marketing? If you have anything to market, anything that you're selling, any kind of business that you're trying to grow. Email marketing is going to be a great way to do that. And what it does is first gives you the ability to build a targeted list of potential customers. And that's because you can put that sign-up form for your email list on your website. You can link it on your social media, which is going to allow you to get a very targeted list of people that are again going to potentially be customers down the road. Number 2 is that it's going to help you gain information about your audience. So by having an email lists, you can find out information like the age, the gender, the location, and so on and so forth of the people on that list. And by doing that, that's going to give you a better understanding of who your potential customer is going to be. And you can also use that information to do other things, such as paid advertising on websites like Facebook or even on Google. All of that information is going to help you target your audience even better with those paid ads. And he's going to help you get more conversions and grow your list even bigger. Number three is going to be that it's going to help you build a relationship with your audience. And this is really because email marketing is a lot more personal than other types of marketing. For example, like social media marketing, which is not really going to be direct one-on-one. But when you're sending an email to an email list, even though it's sent out to a bunch of different people, because your audience is getting that directly from you. It feels like a much more personal touch. And it's going to help you build that relationship and build that trust with your audience. And of course, all of these things are going to improve your sales and help you grow whatever business it is that you're trying to grow. So a very commonly asked question today at this point is, how is email marketing still so effective today when compared to other forms of marketing like social media marketing. You know, since Facebook is huge, Instagram is huge, twitter is huge. Youtube is huge. All of these different social media platforms are huge parts of growing a business. So as email marketing still going to be an effective way to grow your business? And the answer to that is, of course, yes. There was a study recently done by a company, McKinsey and Company, which showed that email marketing to this day is still up to 40 times more effective. Social media marketing. Not only that, but the buying process can happen up to you three times faster with e-mail marketing as opposed to social media marketing. So from the time that somebody interacts first with some of your content or with your business in any way. From the time that they are converted into a customer, that process has been shown to happen up to three times faster with e-mail marketing as opposed to social media marketing. So hopefully that proves to you how effective it can be to do some e-mail marketing for any type of company trying to grow. Thankfully, you're in the right place because we're going to jump into now how you can get started doing your own email marketing and start building your list and converting that into customers. 3. Getting Started With MailChimp: Alright, so the first step to getting started with email marketing is of course going to be to have some kind of email marketing software and have an account with that software. So for the examples throughout this course, I'm going to be using Mailchimp. However, as I believe I mentioned in the preview of this course, if you are using a different software, that's not going to be a problem because for the most part it's going to be a very similar process to do all of the things that we're going to talk about in this course with any of the commonly used email marketing softwares. So with that being said, the first thing that you're going to want to do is create an account here with Mailchimp or with whatever software you're using. And once you've met a username and you've put in your e-mail and your password, it's going to bring you to a page like this where you can get started with one of the plans that they have. We're going to start off with the free plan. And the free plan is actually going to allow you to have a list of up to 2000 people and send up to 10 thousand emails every single month for entirely free. If you have a larger list are sending more emails at that point, you may have to upgrade to one of their paid plans. But until then you can get started with e-mail marketing for 100% free, which is a really nice feature of a lot of these email marketing softwares. So we're gonna go ahead and select free. And from there you're going to be asked to put in some information like your name, your business name. You can put in your website URL if you have one, as well as your phone number if you choose to do so. So I'm going to go ahead and put in the business name here and go ahead and click on continue. After that, it's going to ask you for your address. Now this is very important because with e-mail marketing, you have to have some kind of address at the bottom of your email to make sure that it's complying with the anti-spam laws. Go along with e-mail marketing. So if you notice, anytime you look at one of these email marketing campaigns that you get from a company like Amazon, like Apple or whatever it may be. If you do scroll down to the bottom, there's going to be some kind of address line that is tacked on to the bottom of that email. Okay, So I'm going to go ahead and put in my address here. Feel free to use your personal address if you choose to do so. A company that you're working with. If you have a PO box or you want to set up a PO box, you can do that pretty cheaply. There are many different ways that you can go about this, but unfortunately, you do have to have some kind of address attached to the emails that you sent. Okay. But anyway, after that, you're going to go ahead and click on Continue yet again. And at this point it's going to ask you if you have any contacts are ready that you want to go ahead and add or upload onto your list here in Mailchimp. So since we're starting fresh here, I'm just gonna go ahead and select No. And then we're gonna go ahead and click on Continue. They're going to ask you if you're selling products, services, both or neither. And we'll just go ahead and say that we're selling both for this example. And then we're going to be selling these on our own website or e-commerce store. And after that, you can go ahead and finish the setup process by clicking on Continue. And it's going to go ahead then and bring you to the dashboard here for Mailchimp. And here on the dashboard, this is where you're going to be able to see many different things, such as the campaigns that you've sent or that you're planning on sending. You can go to your audience and see all the different contacts that you have within your audience. You can add other contexts. You can remove past contacts. You can kind of categorize your contacts by different tags or segments. And we're going to talk about all of these different things here throughout this course. Now that we do have step one done, which is just going to be to create your account with some kind of email marketing software. 4. Creating Sign-Up Forms: Okay, so now that we have our account setup with Mailchimp, the next step is going to be to set up a way for people to actually sign up onto our email list and start getting our emails. And what we wanna do then is go over to the audience tab on Mailchimp. And we're gonna go ahead and select sign-up forms. Now before we create our sign-up form that the people are going to actually use, sign up. What we wanna do is actually kind of design when our default form is going to look like. So we're gonna go to the form builder and click on Select. And this is going to give us a ton of different options of customization. It's going to allow us to change the font size, is going to allow us to change the color. And first and foremost, what it's going to let us do is actually asked for specific criteria for somebody to sign up onto our list. So for example, if you want to require somebody to put in their email address, their first name, their last name, their phone number. You can require all of that in order for somebody to sign up to your list. Or if you want to keep it more simple, which is what I personally tend to do with my e-mail list. You can just select to have the e-mail and the firstname required, for example, um, and that's actually what I'm going to do for this example. So I'm going to click on email address. And by default, of course, this is going to be a required field in order to sign up to your email list. Then I'm also going to require that the first name is put in when signing up on. However, I'm not really interested in getting the last name. I'm not interested in getting the address, the phone number, the birthday and so on and so forth. Because at the end of the day, if you think about it, the more information you're requiring people to put in in order to sign up to your list, the less likely they are going to do that in the less your list is going to grow. On the other side of the spectrum, if you're looking for more information, then of course there are benefits to requiring this information from people when they are signing up. And then you can use that information for other things like paid advertising. So there are benefits for requiring other information as well. But again, for this example, I'm just going to keep it simple so I want to make sure that the last name is not a required field, and we also want to hide it from our list. And by default the address is hidden in his now required same with phone number. And then down here with birthday as well. I'm gonna go ahead and hide that. So after doing that, we're going to save the field. And we can go up here now and actually start designing what we want this sign-up form to look like when we embed it on our website or embedded on our blog. Now when it comes to the design and the customization, this is of course going to be entirely preference. You want to make sure that this is going to fit in with whatever the design or the style is of the website or the blog that you're posting this sign-up form on. So you can see there are a ton of different options here with what you can change as far as the color goes. If we click on the body, there's a background color we can change. We can change the button color, which is actually something that I definitely recommend doing. For example, if the theme of your website is all red, it's a good idea to make that button red as well. So that way it fits into your website a little bit more naturally. And it's going to really look like it's part of your website as opposed to a male chimp form that was simply embedded onto your website. Okay, but anyway, after you have it setup and design the way that you'd like it to look on your website. Next, what we're going to do is go back to the sign-up forms. And we're going to go ahead and actually start creating our embedded form that we're going to copy and paste onto our website. So very quickly, aside from these embedded forms that I was telling you about, there's also other options. For example, like a subscriber pop up, which you can embed on your website as well. And that's one of those things that when you go on a website, it pops up on the front page and actually to put in your e-mail and your first name or whatever it may be to sign up to their e-mail list. And those definitely have their benefits as well. And they can be really great for capturing emails in certain situations. But in my personal opinion, they can be a little bit annoying when they pop up. So I tend to kinda stay away from those and just stick with the embedded forms. So we're gonna go ahead and select embedded form. And you can see with these embedded forms, There's a couple of different options as well. We have the Classic, which you can see previewed right here. We have condensed, we have horizontal, unstyled in advanced. And I'm gonna go ahead and stick with the classic for this example. Now, depending on which fields you put in that you'd like people to put in in order to subscribe to your list. For example, if you have e-mail address, FirstName, LastName, Earth Day and so on and so forth. You can go ahead and select to show only the required fields, or you can have show all fields selected. So that way if somebody wants to put in like their birthday for example, it's not necessarily required, but it's going to give you more information. So you can have it there as an option. In order to do that, you would have show all fields selected. Otherwise, if you only want to show the required fields, you would just go ahead and select that. Now the nice thing about these email marketing businesses is it's very easy to copy and paste this code then onto your website to actually show this exact embedded form on your website to start capturing those e-mails. So what you have to do is just copy this section down here. Go over to your website, go over to your blog wherever you decide to share this. And once you're there, all you have to do then is go ahead and paste that code into a text box or into an HTML editor. Go up to the corner, click on save. And if we preview this page, we can now see that we have our email sign-up form on this page. Now if you notice, it is pretty wide and it goes across the entire page, which in my opinion looks a little bit weird. So if we go back to the HTML code, what I'm going to do is go up to the top of this code in this top section here, which you may wanna do next to the actual style of the fonts, is simply add a one I'm going to add in here, which is width. And I'm going to put 30 percent, which is about 30 percent, then out the page. That's going to take off as opposed to spanning across the entire 100% of the page. And then after that we're going to put the margin on auto. And that showed kind of take care of this problem. So if we save this and go over to the preview, you can see now that it's spanning across 30% of the page and it's centered in the middle, as opposed to being across the entire page, which in my opinion looks a little bit better. And if you wanted to make this even smaller, you can change that 30 percent, you 15, 20 percent, or you can go the other way and make it a little bit bigger by changing that to maybe 50 percent. So there's really an unlimited amount of customizations that you can do with your sign-up form, both on the Mailchimp website or if you know some basic HTML and CSS. Okay, So with that being said now just to make sure that our email sign-up form is actually working. Let's go ahead and test this by putting in my e-mail and my first name. And click on Subscribe. As you can see what you would subscribe, it's going to take you over to a thank-you page. But in this case, there's an error because by default, once you sign up for your Mailchimp account, it's going to add you to your own lists. So my email is already on that list, but this would just be a Thank You page. And just like that, we have a way for people to actually start signing up to our list and start getting our email marketing campaigns. 5. Campaigns & Templates: All right, so now that we have a way for people to start signing up to our e-mail marketing list. I wanted to just briefly go over a few of the options when it comes to creating campaigns. In sending these e-mail campaigns, the people that are on our list. So we're on the MailChimp campaign page here. And I'm gonna go up to create campaign. Now if we go up to email, you can see that there are a few different options. We first have a regular email. We have a plain text email, which is essentially a regular email with just less customization options. It's not going to have things like pictures, videos. You're not going to be able to add buttons for people to click on. Just a very basic plain text email, which I personally tend to stay away from because I like to have a little bit more customization and branding when I send my emails. And then last we have a template down here which is going to allow you to kind of save the e-mails that you've sent in the past. So that way you can use the same design and the same customizations in your future emails without having to do the styling on every single email that you sent. Okay, so we're going to start off first with irregular e-mail. And I'm just going to give this a name of test and click on Begin. Now this page is where you're going to add things like the subscribers that you're sending this to is where you're going to add the subject line. And this is of course, where you're going to start designing the e-mail itself. So by default it's going to be sent to everybody that's on your e-mail list. However, what you can do is click on Edit recipients. And in the future, once you have different segments or different tags in your list, which I'm going to show you how to do in the future of this course. You can go ahead and select to send to just a specific group or a specific tag of the people that are in your list as opposed to the entire list. Now additionally, by clicking on Edit recipients, you can also personalize the two field, which is something that I recommend doing. Because if you click on this, what you can do then is go ahead and select FirstName. Because if you remember in the previous section when we created our sign-up form, the two things that are required to sign up to my list for the email address and the firstName. So now we have the firstName of people in our email marketing software here is going to automatically then put their first name into the email when it's being sent out. And what that's going to do is make it a little bit more personal. And it's also going to help prevent our emails from being sent to their spam or their junk folders. So I do recommend doing that. And if you want to, others quite a few different options depending on the things that you require when somebody is signing up for your list. You can do just the first name, you can do that last name. You can say their first and last name or you can make a custom option. But I'm just gonna go ahead and put firstname, click on Save. And the next thing is they want to know who this e-mail is actually coming from. So if we click on Add from here, you can put in your personal name, you can put in your business name that you'd like your email to be sent from. And you can also adjust the email address that you're sending from. Now if you have a website and you have a business e-mail, I do highly recommend putting that in. Even though it's not 100% necessary, it is going to kind of help your email come across as a little bit more professional in at the end of the day is going to help your e-mail marketing perform a little bit better. Okay, but after you have that put in, you're going to click on Save again. And from there you would just add your subject line. So we'll go ahead and put email marketing 1, 0, 0, 1. And then you can also put the little preview text that you see just below the subject when you get an e-mail. So if I was sending out an email about e-mail marketing, I want to put something that's going to be interesting to the people on my list. Something that's going to want to make them click on this email, open it up, read the content that's in it, and hopefully click on any of the links or the buttons that we have within our e-mail that are going to potentially turn them from an audience member to a conversion or a sale. So maybe I will put something like use this tip when email or getting to get better results. After that, we were just click on save. And from there we can go over to start designing the e-mail itself. Now the first time that you start designing your emails, you're going to kind of have to go through the process itself. So we're going to start off just with a basic design here. But after you do this the first time, like I said, you can go ahead and save that as a template. So that way in the future, when you make another email to send to your list, you're not going to have to go through this entire process of designing and setting up the e-mail. You can just go ahead and click on that template, open it up, and adjust the content that's within the e-mail itself. So as you can probably see, they make it very simple to actually design and set up these emails. They have a bunch of different boxes over here that you can go ahead and just click and drag into the email. So if you wanted to add more text, you can do that. You would just edit the text over here as saying 1, 2, 3. Save it. You can add in an image. You can add in different dividers. You can add in videos. There's a ton of different options. You can add in buttons, even to have people click through to your website or your blog or whatever you're trying to market within your email list. And once you kind of have it set up the way that you think you want it when you start to send your emails. You can go up here to the preview page and enter the preview mode to see exactly what this e-mail is going to look like when someone opens it up on their desktop, you can click on the mobile tab up here to see exactly what this will look like when somebody opens it up on their mobile phone. And in order to then go ahead and save this design as a default or as a template. What you would do is go over to template, click on save this design as a template and go ahead and give it a name. So we'll just go ahead and call this default email and click on save. So now as you can see, this is going to be saved under our Saved templates. So anytime you create a new campaign now you can go to the Saved templates in open up this exact design. So all you have to do then is add different texts and add different content into the e-mail itself, rather than designing the whole thing, changing the colors, adding the logo, and whatever it may be that you're including within your emails. Okay, so I'm going to click Return to campaign. And if we go to Continue, then as you can see, we are getting an error just because we didn't do any editing to the default. We still have the, it's time to design your email. So if there's any issues at all with the e-mail, it's not going to let you send it. So you would just have to go back and edit that. But here on this page is where you would just click send and it would send to all of the recipients of your list. You can also, before doing that, click on send a test email down here. And by doing this, you can put in your e-mail or whatever emails you'd like it to be sent to you. Just to make sure that it's designed and set up the way that you like it to be, to make sure that all the links and all the buttons within the email actually work properly and are being sent to all of the proper locations. And I do recommend you do send a test email before you send out your campaigns, just to make sure that there are no issues before you blast out this campaign to everybody in your list. 6. Groups, Tags, & Segments: All right, now with any email marketing campaign or email marketing automation, you want to do your best to put the right email in front of the right person at the right time. Now if you do have a very small list or you're just starting off with e-mail marketing. This step is not going to be 100% necessary for you yet. However, once your list starts to grow, you're going to want to categorize the people in that list a little bit more. So that way you can start to send specific emails to specific groups of people, which is going to significantly help your e-mail performance. And one way to do that is by using things that are known as groups, segments, and tags. Now these three things are going to be a little bit different. But at the end of the day, what they do is categorize or split up the people in your list, again, can make your email marketing campaigns a bit more effective. So let's go ahead and start off with what groups are. If we go up to View contacts in the audience tab, we can go to Manage Contacts and then go down to groups. Now I should preface this by saying groups specifically to not be used with embedded forms, which are what we talked about in the previous section. So if you're using an embedded form to put on your website, you're not going to be able to use group, so you'll have to use things like segments or tags. But if you're using the pop-up sign-up form, for example, when you do that, you can use a group. And these groups are going to kind of allow the people in your audience to put them into one category or another. So the way that they work are if we go to create a group, what we can do is we can ask a question when someone is signing up to our email list. So for example, one of the businesses that I run online is about the stock market. I teach people how to day trade, how to swing trade, and how to long-term invest. So all of these three types of investing are on one website itself. And when I have somebody sign up for my e-mail list, what I might wanna do is ask what interests you the most. Are they most interested in day trading? Are they most interested in swing trading? Or are they most interested in long-term investing? Okay, so now when somebody uses this to sign up to my e-mail list, I'm going to know exactly which type of trading or which type of investing this person is specifically interested. And then I can use that information to target them a little bit more specifically when I'm sending out an email campaign. So after that, I would just go ahead and click on Save. And if you want to, if you already have a list of people that you want to import into these groups, you can do that or you can just go ahead and click done for now. And now I have this group that's going to tell me a little bit more about the people signing up to my audience so I can click on View Groups. And when I have people signed up for any of these specific groups, I would be able to click on the Contacts and see exactly who's in these specific groups. I can also go over here and click on send. So if I wanted to send an email specifically to the people that selected day trading, I could do just that. And hopefully you can see how beneficial that may be when it comes to targeting the people in your audience. Now groups are going to be a little bit different from another way of categorizing your audience, which are going to be the tax. So again, if we go up to manage contacts and you go down this time two tags. Like we just saw, a group is a way for the people in your audience to kind of categorize themselves by tags, on the other hand, are going to be a way for you to categorize the people that are already in your audience. So for example, what we can do is create a tag. And we'll just call this tag welcome. And once we start talking about email automations in the future of this course, you're going to see exactly how this is going to be beneficial. But if you have a welcome tags can have a automatically be placed next to a person in your audience that has just been welcomed or has just joined your email list. This way you would know that they are a fresh subscriber and they've already received your welcome email to thank them for signing up for your email list. Now another way to go about using tags is, for example, if you have an online store and you're selling a bunch of products, you can create a tag that's called existing customer. And you would add this tag to the audience members that have already purchased something from your online store. Because at the end of the day, it's easier to resell it to somebody that is already purchased from your website than it is to create an entirely new customer. So by knowing who is already an existing customer, you can use that information to be a little bit more aggressive with your sales. To then try to get this existing customer to purchase something else from your online store. And really there are endless different things that you can use as tags. You can even add tags for gender, for location. If you're using multiple different sign-up forms on multiple different websites or blogs. You can use tags to specify where exactly this person signed up from. And all of these uses are going to be really beneficial for, again, being more specific with the content that you're putting in front of certain people. Okay, so now that you know a little bit about groups, in a little bit about tags. The last thing that I want to talk about in this section is going to be segments. So again, if we go to Manage Contacts this time down to segments, segment is going to be a little bit different. This is essentially going to be a way for us to filter the people in our audience by specific criteria. So for example, if we wanted to create a segment here, and obviously for this example here, we're just using this list that I've set up that it has only two contacts in it, both of which are myself. So if I wanted to look for all of the people that are in my audience that have the firstname, Travis for example, which of course is my first name, just so we can actually see this work, all you have to do is put that criteria in and then click on Preview segments. And it's going to tell you all of the people within your list that have the firstname Travis. And even though that's a very basic example, if we go to Edit segment here, you can see there's a ton of different things you can use to filter your audience. We have a bunch of subscriber data up here is like automation activity, contact rating, date added, the sign-up source. We can even use groups that we previously created. We can use their address, their birthday e-mail address, first name, last name, and so on and so forth. Now on top of that, we can also select to have any of the following conditions met or all of the following conditions met. So if we have multiple things here, multiple different pieces of criteria, let's just say the first name in the birthday. Again, we can select to have any of those or all of those met. So if we have any of those pieces of criteria met, we would only need one or the other for them to actually be part of this segment. If we select all, then only people that have the selected FirstName and the selected birthday are going to be a part of this segment. So again, this is really just a way for us to find specific people within our list to be a little bit more targeted with the e-mails that we sent. 7. Setting Up Email Automations: All right, so now in this section I want to start talking about email automations, which are a huge part of email marketing. So just about anytime you sign up to someone's email list, you're going to be a part of an e-mail automation that is automatically going to be sent to you as soon as you sign up for that list. And that e-mail automation may be just a welcome email. It may tell you what you expect from being signed up to their e-mail list. Might just be a quick thank you for signing up to the list. Or maybe they offered you something in exchange for signing up to their list. And that's going to be sent to you as part of their automation. Now on top of that, along with that initial email that you get for signing up, email automations continue to send over the next couple of days usually, or even sometimes over the next couple of weeks. So you can set these automations to send maybe one day after someone signs up and then another one being sent two days after they sign up, and then another one being sent three days after they sign up. So that way it's going to kind of automatically send someone down a sales funnel as soon as they sign up for your email list. Okay, So in this section we're going to start talking about these automations. And again, I'm using the Mailchimp platform here. But it should be a pretty similar process if you're using something else. Now I do want to preface this by saying with just about any e-mail marketing service, you are going to have to pay or use one of their upgraded plans in order to use a lot of their automation features. But don't worry, I'm going to show you kind of a work-around in this example. So that way if you are brand new and you're just starting, you don't get have to upgrade to a paid plan and you can still do some automations by using their free plan. Okay, So first and foremost, if we go over to the automations tab on the left side of the screen. And once you're on this page, you can scroll down and you can see a bunch of different options that they have pre-built for you to start doing some email automation. So they have one to welcome new contacts. For example, they have one designed to send multiple offers to O'Bannon card customers. They have one specifically designed to recover lost customers, want to promote cross-sell opportunities, and so on and so forth. And all of these are very useful automations that are against specifically designed to do different things. Which can be a really great way to make the most of your email automations. Now unfortunately, as I mentioned, e-mail automation with just about any software is going to be a part of one of their paid plans. And to use any of these pre-built automations, you do have to be signed up to a paid plan. However, I wanted do my best to keep this 100% free because I understand that most of the people watching this course are going to be brand new to email marketing. And while your list is still small and growing, you want to of course, keep your costs as low as possible. So what we're going to do in this case is go up here to this right-hand corner and click on Create a classic automation. Now these classic automations are something that melt Champ used to allow for 100% free before they updated their software. And now I believe to use any of the multiple email automations, you do need to be signed up to a paid plan. But with this classic automation builder, you can see we have a few options here to send an email. For example, when a subscriber is tagged, you can also send one to welcome new subscribers. You can send one even to say happy birthday. You can send once you share blog updates. But we're going to stick with the basic here. And we're going to automatically send an e-mail with someone signs up to our list to welcome them and thank them for signing up. So if we click on Begin, it's going to take us to the email builder. And a really nice feature about this is that you can choose when you want this email to be sent. Now by default, it's going to be sent immediately after someone signs up to your list. But you can also adjust that to send one hour later, six hours later, or even one day later. I recommend keeping this one on immediately because if you are welcoming or thanking someone for assigning out to your list, most of the time they're going to want to get that confirmation email as soon as they sign up. You can also select to have they sent to people that are imported into your audience. So if you're manually adding people into your list and you still want him to be a part of this automation that you want to make sure that you have that checked. Afterwards. You would simply go ahead then and edit your subject line in your preview text, in edit the design of your email. In once you go up here and pigs starts sending. Now every time someone uses your sign-up form that you have embedded on your website or your blog. They're going to be automatically put into this e-mail automation and immediately sent this first e-mail welcoming them to the list. Now to take this a step further, still keeping it 100% free. What we can also do then is go back, create a new e-mail, go to the classic automation builder once again. And this time what we're going to do is instead of having it sent immediately after someone is added to the list, you can change this to one day later. So now if you had saved and you come up with an entirely new email with new content and new marketing methods is one is going to send one day later. So you have one being sent immediately when someone signs up. And then there's going to be a followup that happens one day later and it's going to again be a 100 percent automated, while still of course being 100% free. And unfortunately, that's really as far as you can go with free automation. If you did want to use any of those Automation templates that we previously talked about, then of course, it is definitely worth it to sign up for 13 paid plans. But this is kind of a really great way to work around and be able to do some automation while still being on the free plan. 8. Grow Your List & Audience: Okay, So after the previous section, you should have an e-mail automation setup or you at least know how to do so in order to start welcoming subscribers to your email list once they sign up. So in this section I wanted to give you some tips to actually start growing that list. So that way you can put those email automations to use and you can really begin your e-mail marketing process. And the first way of growing your list in growing your audience is to give something away. So this is going to depend on whatever brand or whatever business it is that you are promoting. Some common examples of what to give away or what you may say in order to get people to sign up to your email list would be, for example, subscribe to our email list and save 10 percent. You can say join our e-mail newsletter for exclusive giveaways. Maybe if you're a YouTuber or some kind of influencer trying to grow their YouTube account. You can say subscribe to my list to get early access to new videos. Whatever it may be giving something away in exchange for their e-mail is really going to be the best way to actually capture that e-mail because people are not really going to be inclined to sign up to your email list if there's not going to be some kind of benefit to them and if they're not getting anything in exchange for giving away their email. So with that being said, another nice thing that you can do is you can add whatever it is that you're giving away into your automated welcome email. So for example, let's just say that you are promoting some kind of clothing business. You could use this first example up here and say subscribe to our email list in save 10 percent. And then you can have a 10 percent coupon code that you put into your welcome email. So that way as soon as someone signs up to your email list, they're automatically going to receive that welcome email. And they're immediately going to get that 10 percent coupon that you promised in exchange for them signing up to your list. To another really great way to get people to sign up to your list into grow your audience is to have some kind of contest. Everyone likes contests and everyone likes giveaways. So you could say something along the lines of sign up to our email list for a chance to win, whatever it may be. Again, going back to a clothing brand business, you could say Saddam to our email list for a chance to win a free t-shirt, a free hoodie, or free jacket, whatever it may be. And then every once in a while you can do a giveaway and actually give away a piece of clothing to someone that's in your e-mail list, which you want to do also is make sure that everyone else knows that. Or so, maybe send out an email congratulating the winner, but also sending that to everyone else in the list. And you also may want to share that on social media, for example, just so everyone knows that your contest is actually legitimate. And there's actually real winners of this giveaway here. But this is kind of the same idea as the previous, giving something away. Like I said, everyone wants something in exchange for their email. So by having a contest and having a chance to win something, that's a good way to actually get people interested in signing up for your list and starting to grow your audience. Now the third way is going to be to add a sign-up form onto your Facebook page. It's no secret that Facebook is huge when it comes to social media marketing. You can do Facebook advertising, you can do Facebook groups, and you can of course, have a Facebook page for your business or for whatever it is that you're marketing. So a really great way to drive people from your Facebook page directly into your email list is to actually put that sign up form directly on your Facebook page. And in order to do that, I put these steps below, but we're gonna go ahead and go through these right now. So first what we wanna do is go over to MailChimp and we're going to go into integrations. So integrations can be found over here on the left side of the screen, just above the search tab, we click on integrations. What you're going to see is that there are quite a few different things that you can actually integrate with Mailchimp. We have first and foremost, Facebook, there's Google, Google Calendar. We can do Twitter. If you want to do surveys with the people in your email lists, you can use survey monkey. There's a bunch of different e-commerce options, different website builders, and so on and so forth. But what we wanna do here first is connected to Facebook. So we're going to click on facebook. And we want to connect our account. Okay, So if you're not already signed into your Facebook account, is going to ask you to do so. And afterwards it's going to connect you to your Facebook account here and Mailchimp. And what you want to do then is select the face that you'd like to integrate this Mailchimp sign-up form widths. It's then going to ask you for an audience to use. And you just have to select your audience here in Mailchimp. And then it's going to ask you if you want to use a sign-up form tab. I'm going to select yes, because this is going to give a sign-up form tab on our Facebook page. So that way people can directly sign up through Facebook and start joining our e-mail list. You can then go ahead and change the theme. So if you want to use the theme that you created a few sections ago when we talked about setting up your sign-up forms in doing different customizations. So if you change the color and you change the name of your sign-up form, for example, make sure that you have this selected so that also up on Facebook. Or you can also go with the Facebook asked sign-up form, which is really just all of the default options with very little customization that is done to it. So I'm going to select the audience theme that we created previously. And then we can go ahead and change the name of this. By default, it's going to be e-mail sign-up. So what you might want to do is if you are offering a 10 percent discount, for example, you may want to change this to save 10 percent or something along those lines. And then go ahead and click on Save. So now instead of just saying e-mail sign-up, people are going to be on your Facebook page. They're going to see a tab that says save 10 percent. And they're going to be more likely to click on that tab and actually put in their email as opposed to an e-mail newsletter or an email sign-up page that really offers nothing in exchange for their email. Okay, So anyway, after you do all of that, you can go over to your Facebook page to check it out. Up here we can see we have a save 10 percent auction. And if we click on that, it's going to show us our sign-up form. So now we can start capturing emails directly from our Facebook page and immediately putting those people into our email automations in, into our sales funnel. Now also very quickly I wanted to mention that by default, this tab here for your e-mail sign-up is going to be under the More tab and it's going to be way at the bottom, so it's going to be much less visible. So if you want to change that, you can just go settings and then click on Templates and tags. And here you can just click and drag your email sign-up page all the way up to the top. So that way it's just going to be more visible and it is just going to be more likely to capture more emails there. So anyway, those three ways of growing your list are three great ways to start building an audience and driving traffic from different areas like Facebook, for example, into your e-mail list in start doing some e-mail marketing. I do recommend that if you are using other social medias, you can also try out these other integration features. Facebook is just one of the many integrations, but each one is going to use in some way, help you grow your audience and grow your e-mail list. 9. Email Report Analysis: In this section of the course, I wanted to talk a little bit about email reports to kind of determine how well or how poorly your emails have been performing. So that way you can make adjustments based on your past e-mail performance to make your future emails perform a little bit better. So in order to kind of get this data, of course, you have to have emails that you've already sent in the past. But once you do, you can go to the campaigns page. You can see all of your past email campaigns. And you can see the open rate in the click rate right off the bat on this page. However, if you want some more information, which you can do is click on View Report. And this is going to break down an entire report of how well this e-mail performed. You can see the total number of people that opened this email. You can click on that number to see exactly who these people in your audience are. You can also see the total number of people that clicked on something within the e-mail itself. Again, if you click on that, you can see exactly who those people are as well. You can see if any of those emails bounced, meaning that they weren't properly delivered into someone's inbox. And you can also click to see exactly who unsubscribed from this email. All of which are very important things to kind of determine and emails overall performance. So if we scroll down a little bit further down here, we can get some information about the open rate as well as the in the unsubscribe rate. And we can compare this e-mails performance with those things to pass the emails that we've sent, as well as the industry average. So it's going to take the average open rate, the average click-through rate in the average unsubscribe rate from people or businesses that are in the exact same industry. So that way we can compare how well our emails are performing to how well our peers emails are performing. In this case, this specific e-mail had a 27.8% open rate. The average open rate for this specific e-mail list is about 23.7%. So this e-mail performed a little bit better than this list does on average. However, it is still lacking a little bit below the peers average, which is 31.6%. So just by looking at that information itself, you may be able to determine that the things that make people open your emails, like the subject line in the preview text, are not quite as good as they should be because people are opening our emails less than they are our competitors or our peers. And the two things really that make people open these e-mails are the subject lines in the preview text. On top of that, if we look at the click rate, this e-mails performance was 2.4% of the people clicked on something within the email. To 0.7% is the average for this email list. In 5.6% is the average for peers that are in the same industry. So obviously the people that are in this list are clicking on things in the e-mail itself much less than they are the average for this entire industry. So that just might mean that maybe you don't have a clear call to action. A call to action might be a link or a button. And you may say to click here for more information. Click here to learn more, click here to download this content, whatever it may be. But regardless seen these numbers kind of just let you know that you need to work a little bit more on that call to action and maybe put a little bit more effort into getting people to click on the content that's in your e-mail. And last but not least, is going to be the unsubscribe rate. This specific e-mail had a point to unsubscribe rate. On average, this list has about 8.3% unsubscribe rate. And the industry average here is about 0.2%. So this is kind of right on par here with the industry average, which is a good sign because you definitely don't want to have a higher unsubscribe rate than other lists do in the same industry. Okay, but anyway, looking at all of this information in analyzing your email reports is a really great way to kind of take that past information, apply it to your current email marketing methods and hopefully help you to improve your future e-mail performance. 10. Top Email Marketing Mistakes: All right, So to kind of begin wrapping up this introduction to email marketing course, I wanted to briefly talk about some of the most common e-mail marketing mistakes that a lot of new email marketers make, which end up causing their e-mails to perform not quite as well as they should. So the things that we talk about in this lesson, I want you to make sure you avoid because without them, your email performance is going to be much better. And the first of those things is going to be that there is little to no personalization in the e-mails that you send. So we briefly talked about personalization throughout this course when we talked about segments and talking about adding names and emails. But I did not mention yet that personalized emails actually have about 26 percent higher open rates and 14 percent higher click-through rates when compared to non personalized emails. At the end of the day, a higher open rate means that there's more people that are opening your emails. Looking at the content in a higher click-through rate means that there is more people clicking on the links or the call to actions that you have within your email, which simply ends up as more conversions or more sales from your emails. Okay, so you should use things like segments to be a little bit more specific with the e-mails that you send, you can target more personalized groups of people within your audience, as opposed to just sending one email to your entire audience. And then of course, like I mentioned previously in this course, you'll want to make sure that you add some kind of personalization to the subject of their email, which you can do by adding in their first name, their last name, or even their first and last name. So just to quickly recap how you can do that when you are setting up an email and you're actually designing it and adding the subject line and the preview text. There's going to be an option to personalize the quote unquote to field, which is going to allow you to again add the firstName, the lastName, or the first and last name of the person that the e-mail is being sent to. So this way, even though this emails being sent to a large group of people, it's going to have every person's name within an email. So it's going to feel like it's being sent directly to that person. And it's going to feel a little bit more personal, which is just going to make it a little bit more likely to be clicked on by the person that it's being sent to. Okay, So the next biggest email marketing mistake is not having a good email frequency. Now this is tough to say because again, like most things with e-mail marketing, depending on whatever it is that you are marketing, whether that's a brand or business or yourself, you may be better off sending a few emails every single week or maybe even just a few emails every single month. You want to make sure that you do some kind of testing to see what works best for you in whatever it is that you are marketing. But you don't want to be annoying, Of course, by sending one every single day. And you also don't want to be forgetful by sending one every month or every other month, because the people that signed up to your list are eventually going to kind of start to forget that they signed up to your list and they're eventually going to lose interest in the content that you're sharing. So in my opinion, you should start off kind of in the sweet spot of sending maybe two to four emails per month. See how well those emails perform, see if there is a lot of subscribers. And then of course you can make some adjustments from there. Start sending more frequently or starts sending less frequently. Again, depending on your past e-mail performance. And I know what you may be thinking. A lot of people think that if they send an email every single day or every other day, that's just going to be more content in front of their audience at more times. And that's going to lead to greater sales and greater conversions. And to an extent, with some situations that may be true. But at a certain point with so many emails being sent, eventually people are going to start getting annoyed by all of the content that you're sending. They're going to be less likely to open or less likely to click on your email. In at the end of the day, they're going to be more likely to unsubscribe, to stop receiving e-mails from you entirely. So things like blog posts, customer stories, customer testimonials, new products and services, or education, advice, tips, and so on and so forth. Those are good things to start off with when you're sending your first e-mails. Again, keep them minimal and kind of stick to the basics and start gradually adding in things here and there. Once you start to figure out which frequency is going to work best for whatever it is that you are marketing. Okay, and then number three, when it comes to the biggest email marketing mistakes is going to be having a poor subject line. Now the subject line essentially is going to be the main thing that's going to cause somebody to open your e-mail or just deleted from their inbox. If you're familiar with YouTube marketing or if you watch a lot of YouTube videos at the end of the day, the main reason that someone is going to click on a YouTube video and watch that video is because of the YouTube videos title and the picture thumbnail that they have on that YouTube video. When it comes to email marketing, unfortunately, we cannot use a picture as the subject. So the subject line is going to need to kind of take the place of what a title in a thumbnail does on YouTube to make someone interested enough to actually click on your email and read the content that's inside of it. So when I'm putting together an e-mail, I like to think to myself, what subject line would I use to make me open this e-mail? And of course, that subject lines still has to tie into the content that's actually in the e-mail itself. In at the end of the day, what you want to do is keep that subject line short and simple. You want to avoid using all caps and you want to limit emojis. Now I say to limit emojis as opposed to avoid using emojis in certain situations. Using an emoji or two is a great way to kind of stand out in someone's inbox. But you definitely don't want to go overboard with them because once you start using 23 or four emojis and a single subject line, that's when you e-mails are going to be more likely to be sent to someone spam or junk folder in at the end of the day, it's just going to make your emails look less professional. Alright, but with that being said, those three things are three big e-mail marketing mistakes that you should avoid doing. In, in the next section, we're going to talk about a couple of general email marketing tips that I recommend you should do in order to improve your e-mail marketing performance. 11. Top Email Marketing Tips: Top e-mail marketing tips. The first one is going to be to give, give, give, and then sell, as opposed to just selling right off the bat. So when someone first signs out to your email list, they're not signing up to that list in order to just get a bunch of sales pitches in aggressive marketing tactics right off the bat. Most likely they're signing up in exchange for something in return. So this goes back to what we talked about a few sections ago when we talked about growing your e-mail marketing list, I mentioned to give something in exchange for someone signing up to your list. And that may be a discount code, that may be a giveaway, that may be early access to YouTube videos or your content or whatever it may be. That free value is something that you want to give before you actually start to convert this person into a sale. And what this does is a kind of allows you to build trust with your audience before you actually try to sell to them. And this really goes hand in hand with any kind of marketing. If you're familiar with other types of marketing, you may have heard of cold audiences and hot audiences before. Quote, audience is simply an audience that is just first getting to know you. And they're not necessarily a 100 percent familiar with whatever it is that you're marketing yet. Whereas a warm audience or a hot audience is a group of people that has been kinda familiar and engaging with your content for a while now. And those are the people that are going to be more likely to buy something from you because you've already built that trust with them and they already know that they like what it is that you're providing as opposed to someone that is still cold. So by giving a bunch of free value first, that's kind of just warming up the audience to make them more likely to buy something from you once that trust is built. Email marketing tip number 2 is going to be to always get emails. I recommend you require people to sign up to your list for anything and everything. So for example, I mentioned previously in this course that I also day trade, swing trade and long-term invest in the stock market as actually what I do full time and I have a business also. People, how to day trade, swing trade and long-term and best. So if I go over to my Twitter page for that business, We can see I have full-time trader and then I have a link to a free trading course down below. If you click on that link. And instead of just bringing you directly to that free course and giving you that content right off the bat. What this page does is shows you what you're going to learn within this course. Shows you that it is a seven part series teaching you how to trade stocks. And in order to actually get that content, while you have to do is put in your first name and put in your e-mail and subscribe to the list, and that's going to automatically be sent directly to you. Now there's way they're still getting that course for 100% free. But on top of that, I'm also getting their email address. So I can use that for marketing down the road. And I can hopefully turn them from someone that just watched this free course into someone that is interested in one of the PE courses or the paid programs that I offer on my website. And really this same idea is true for just about any type of marketing. You want to try to require an e-mail for just about everything that you give away. I've seen a bunch of YouTube videos, for example, in the past where, you know, there'll be going over some kind of software or some kind of product. And they'll say that you just have to click the link in their description in order to access this product. And I for 100% free. And once you click on that link, it's going to give me that product for free. But first you have to put in your first name and you have to put in your email. And again, they're just doing that in order to have your e-mail so they can use it for marketing down the road and hopefully down the road, convert you into a customer. Now tip number 3 is going to be to join competing email lists. What I mean by this is I recommend signing up to your e-mail lists of people or businesses that are similar to what your marketing. This is going to help you get an idea of what your competition is doing. So if you're new to email marketing and your new business, you can get an idea of what people that have already been in this business for a while are doing. So you can kind of analyze subject lines. You can analyze their email formats. You can see if they're using different images or different links within their emails. Get an idea of how many emails they're sending every week or every month. All of this at the end of the day is going to kind of help you get an idea for what you should maybe be doing with your business in with your email marketing to help your e-mail performance and to help drive more traffic onto your website or onto whatever it is that you're marketing. Okay, and these three things are some great e-mail marketing tips that I highly recommend you put to use in tryout for yourselves. I hope you enjoyed this course and good luck with your email marketing career.