Email marketing is one of the most profitable marketing channels any business can use to engage their customers and drive revenue growth. In this article we will be exploring what is email marketing and how you can use it to grow your business’s customers and sales.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is the use of email as a channel to promote your company, products or services while developing relationships with potential customers or clients. The use of email marketing within your marketing efforts also works as an incentive for customer loyalty.

Email marketing is a channel of marketing that can make the people on your customer database aware of new products, discounts, and other services. It can also be used to educate your audience on the value of your company brand and keep your customers engaged between making purchases

How to start an email marketing campaign?

Here are the steps involved to setting up your email marketing initiatives:

1. Choose an ESP (email marketing service provider)

You will need to work with an email marketing service provider who is reputable in the market. Working with a reputable provider is one way your business can leverage email marketing templates, features, and automation to effectively deliver messages to large groups of contacts or subscribers.

2. Build an email marketing list from your customer database

Most businesses operating will have an existing customer database to start building their email marketing list. But even if you’re building an email list completely from zero, there are many tactics and strategies you can use to build you list. Start by putting a paper sign-up sheet near your POS in your shop front, or add an online sign-up form to your website. You can also start by encouraging your social media followers and loyal customers to sign up to your email list.

3. Add your customer database emails into your email marketing ESP account

Once you have registered and setup your email marketing account, you can create an initial list to send to, add your customer contacts into your email service provider account.

4. Setting up your welcome email

Your welcome email will be the first message your new email subscribers get from you. Welcome emails are very important because they act as your first impression and reach people at a time when they are highly engaged with your business. Once you have set it up, your welcome email will send to all new contacts automatically.

5. Create an email marketing template

Depending on the email service provider you choose, they usually have free email templates for you to choose from. So selecting the right email service provider is important to ensure, you can send beautifully designed professional emails that look good on any device.

6. Write interesting subject lines & email copy

Your email subject line is one of the most important lines of text in your email. This is because your subscribers see your subject line even before they open your email message.

In regards to writing email copy here is a simple three-step formula helps you write effective messages fast.

What are you offering? — Headline
How will it help the reader? — Message body
What should they do next? — Call to action

7. Preview and test your email before you send to your list

Most email service providers have the ability to send a test email before you send to the whole email list. Make sure you send a test email to yourself and check the email before you do a mass email send.

8. Send your email

Make sure you send your email at the best time possible, usually when people are most open to opening your email and reading it. Now this depends on many factors, but a good rule of thumb, is to send when people are awake and have time to spare.

9. Track your results

You will definitely want to track your email open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rates, etc. and work to improve these metrics over time. Most email service providers will have all these metrics that you can monitor after the email has been sent.

How to avoid email spam filters?

1. Request you subscribers to whitelist your email address

You can ask your subscribers to add your email in their contacts address book Gmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo assume that if an email is from someone in your contacts, it’s not spam. To ensure that all your emails get this treatment from your customers, include the whitelisting instructions guide in your first welcome email, that you send when someone joins your email list.

2. Getting permission to send emails

Nothing will get your emails marked as spam faster than sending an email without permission from your customers. Even if the email even makes it through your email service’s spam filter, you customer will mark it as spam without even opening it.

3. Follow the local laws governing email marketing

Different countries can have slightly different laws when it comes to privacy and email marketing, but they will mostly cover these important rules:

• Don’t send without the recipient’s permission.
• Don’t send without including a mailing address.
• Don’t send with a deceptive subject line.
• Don’t send without including a way for recipients to opt-out.

4. Use a reputable email service provider

You need to find a reputable email service provider because one sign that major spam filters always look for when assessing an email, is to look at the IP address associated with the sending email address and see if there are any other spam complaints associated with it. If there are, then even a legit email addresses can get flagged as SPAM just due to association.

5. Always proofread your emails

If your emails are written with many typos, grammatical errors, and sentences that just doesn’t sound right, then there is the risk that spam filters will stop them, as they may flag the email as a phishing email. Also having poorly written emails will not give your customers a good impression of your brand.

6. Avoid writing spammy subject lines.

Many email providers like Google & Microsoft have specific lists of “spam trigger words”, so you need to avoid using them in your marketing emails. Also spam filters are now much more sophisticated, so you need to ensure that you don’t write subject lines that sound like spam.

7. Purge your email list of abandoned email addresses

Another metric that spam filters use to catch spam emails, is to look at how many of the emails to which you are sending are active, or how many have been bounced. If the email bounced percentage is too high, then that can be a tell tale sign that you may have purchased your email list.

To ensure this doesn’t happen, you should regularly remove addresses associated with email accounts that don’t appear to be active. Some email service providers do this automatically, but it is very important to keep your email lists clean.

8. Make sure you use a SPAM checking tool

These days you can use a SPAM checking tool to verify your emails and email lists. These tools are able to tell you if your emails will likely get caught by spam filters or if your email list is even valid at all. You can simply send your email to their provided email address in order to automatically receive a report on how likely your email is to go to a recipient’s spam folder.

9. Having a clear email sender address

Your email sender address is what appears in the “From” field when someone opens your email. If you have a sender address that just sounds suspicious, there is the risk of your email will get flagged as SPAM.

10. Email your subscribers on a regular basis

If you only send one email every few months, then you risk your database forgetting who you are or why they subscribed to your email. This often results in users unsubscribing or even marking your email as spam when they do finally get an email from you.

To stop this from happening, you need to keep in regular contact with all your subscribers. Not just sending out emails for the sake of it, but actually sending them valuable content that benefits them.

11. Make it easy for users to unsubscribe

I know you are wondering, why would you want to make it easy for subscribers to leave your email list? The answer is complying with the CAN-SPAM Act and ensuring that subscribers trust you. You need to have confidence in the value of your content, while also complying with the law. Because when you think about it, if you don’t think that your emails are valuable, why would you send them to your customers to begin with?