Email marketing is ranks as one of, if not the #1, way to market yourself online. In fact, 99% of Internet users check their email at least once every single day. And almost 60% of marketers say their biggest ROI source is email. So as you can see, email is the most effective way to reach your prospects and leads online. And that’s why in this article I’m going to go over 5 easy steps you can take to start email marketing.

1. Get or grow your list. The first step in any successful email marketing campaign is to get or grow an email list. There are a plethora of ways you can do this. The most important thing is that you create a list. It doesn’t really matter as much as to who is on your list. In fact, to be most effective, you want to make your list as big as you can. So ways to do that are, collect up all your current and past clients. I’d even suggest going through your email and adding to your email list, all your contact’s email addresses. In addition, if you’re not already you should be implementing a strategy to collect more emails. You can do this with an ad campaign, or simply with a sign-up form on your website. You’ll notice we’ve done the same on our Tampa web design company website. Once you’ve created a list don’t stop there. Continue to grow and add to this list. It’s key to keep adding to the list as you want to continue growing your list, and if you simply never add to it, your list will continue to shrink as you’ll naturally get some unsubscribers.
2. Get a mass email sending solution. There are a ton of options out there when it comes to how to send a mass number of emails. What you want to look for is a solution that can get overzealous with opt-ins. Meaning they’re not making you jump through a ton of hoops to make sure the people on your list have opted-in to get your emails. So what I suggest is asking the solution provider what their requirements are for you to send to an email address. Also, it’s important to know how many emails you can send out per month. Some solutions will only tell you how many contacts you can have on their system. That’s not really that important as knowing how many emails you can send. Because they may allow 1,000 contacts but only 1,000 email sent to per month, which means you can only send out one email campaign. In our own company’s search to find the best email solution, we’ve ended up creating our own service. So if you want to get send out mass emails at a relatively low cost, be able to send a large quality, and not have to worry so much about validating opt-ins, then I’d suggest reaching out to us about our email service.
3. Create a schedule for sending. This is a super important step. You want to create a schedule where you can be consistent with your sending. For an email campaign, I’d suggest sending several times per week. At first you might think this is a lot and people will just unsubscribe but you have to remember people are constantly being inundated with emails, text messages, ads, and the like every single day. So emailing only once or twice a month will just get lost in the noise. Although don’t get me wrong, emailing once or twice a month is better than nothing. It’s just you’ll get the best results if you email more frequently. In fact, emailing once a day can work. The key is to make sure your emails are of high value. So create a schedule you can stick to. Also here are a few tips on the best times of the day to send your emails. According to a recent study, 11am is the best time of the day when most people open their email (except for Sundays, where it’s 9pm). So plan to have your emails sent out and in the inbox by that time daily. This way your email is at the top of their inbox when they go to check their mail.
4. Design an email template. This step is essential but your email doesn’t actually have to be fancy. There have been numerous studies done that show text only emails can be just as effective as designed emails. When I dive deep into those studies what I find is that it really depends on your audience. So if you’re not sure what your audience is more receptive to then, you may want to send a few of both types of emails to test out what works best for you. And here are a few pointers if you’re designing an email template. Make sure the most important content is at the top of the email. Don’t waste that space with large images and headers. You don’t want people to have to scroll to read the opening of your email, as some people won’t scroll and they’ll just delete the email as they may be too lazy or busy to put in the effort of scrolling down. Next, don’t make your email too lengthy. Studies show people don’t tend to read long emails. In fact, in a study they found the best response rate where emails with 50 and 125 words. After the meat of your email, make sure to always include your company name, contact info, address, and a way for people to unsubscribe. This is important as you’re required by law to include these elements on every email campaign. I’d suggest adding these to the very bottom footer of your email.
5. Check your email address’ sending score. Most people don’t know this but your email address has its own sending score. And then your score is low, no matter how good your emails are, they’re not likely to reach the inbox and you’ll end up in the dreaded spam folder. In fact, some email service providers won’t even accept your email if you have some of the points in your score wrong. So you’ll want to check on several factors that play into your score. Now I don’t want to get too technical in this article but you’ll want to do a Google search for email sender score tools and check your email address. Or you can reach out to us, I’ve put a link at the bottom of this article to get a free evaluation where we can look into this for you.
6. Start sending your emails. Now that you’ve got all the above points in you’re ready to start sending emails. But before you do, always send yourself a test and check overall links and content in the email. Then once that’s done go head send. After sending, don’t be so worried about who unsubscribes. Just realize you’re going to get a percentage of people doing that no matter how good your emails are. It’s better to send something bad, than not to send anything at all.

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