How to use market your business with email

Everyone knows email. It’s ubiquitous. In fact, most people use email to communicate at least once a day.

And, in many ways, email is one of the most familiar and easy ways to get started with your digital marketing.

That’s why it’s really important that you learn to use email for your marketing.

Now,

Many email marketers say that the money is in your email list…

so, you may be curious, how do you build your list…

and you may even wonder how to educate, nurture and persuade the people on your list to buy from you.

Well, I have investigated this thoroughly over the last ten years or more and I have created a high level step by step process to help you to use email to market your business.

Step 1 : Decide on which email marketing platform to use

You can choose from a range of different email platforms.

Some people start out with gmail or outlook.

This is ok, but you really want to have a way of centralising all your email addresses in one place, and none of these platforms is designed to accomplish this goal.

So, here’s what I recommend…

If you are a start up there are a few free options…

We mostly recommend Mailchimp to get you started.

It works reasonably well, although there are a few pitfalls if you want to automatically send out emails when a person joins your list, so you’ll probably want to upgrade to the paid version once you get going. This enables you to send an automated campaign containing several emails, scheduled to go out over several days, weeks or months.

If you are a more established business…

As you progress and build a list of 1,000 email addresses or more you, and your revenue increases, you may be ready to move up to a more robust, highly featured system, which enables you to build more complex campaigns, like Infusionsoft. This is the system I have used in my own business for the last 7 years.

Once you have chosen your email system, you will need to gather all the email addresses that you have and put them in a spreadsheet, export as a csv file, then import into your email marketing platform. This step is a bit “techy”, but you can easily get help.

Step 2 : Now, it’s time to craft your message.

Email tends to be slightly more conversational and informal than “snail mail” and people generally don’t read long emails, so it’s useful to have a simple structure you can follow, to get your email opened, read and clicked.

Get your email opened

The subject line is really important as this is what will get your email opened.

I write out 200 headlines for every new client to create around 10 to 20 email headlines that I can split test to see which one gets the best open rate.

Open rates vary massively from one niche to the next, so it’s difficult to generalise, but you should be aiming for an open rate of 20% or more.

Get your email read

Step 3 : Create your opener

The opening paragraph that you use in your email needs to continue the theme in your subject line and encourage your reader to continue to the call to action at the end of your email.

I tend to use an “if….. then” structure to open my email.

Get your email clicked

Step 4 : Create your call to action

You will need to decide before you write your email what action that you want your reader to take.

This is one of the really basic aspects of email marketing that is really easy to overlook.

Unless you know the person you are writing to really well, they have been on your list for some time and you have already nurtured your relationship with them, I do not recommend selling or even sending to a landing page in your email.

I recommend…