E-mail Marketing 101: 6 Basic Tips to Get You Started

Whether you've just started or had your business for a while, you've likely heard about e-mail marketing. Even if it hasn't been a topic of discussion for your particular business, if you're a consumer and you have an e-mail address, you've likely been involved in e-mail marketing. And chances are, there's an e-mail in your Inbox currently advertising some product or service.

That's because e-mail marketing can do wonders when growing a business. With more than 4 billion current e-mail users worldwide and a forecasted number of 4.6 billion by 2025 (Statistica, 2021), e-mail is a potential goldmine for businesses looking to engage with consumers. In fact, it is said that for every $1 you spend on e-mail marketing, you can expect an average return of $40 (Omnisend, 2022)! Impressive, right?

But before you run to open up your e-mail and start sending out marketing messages to any and everyone, there are a few important things to think about and know.

First things first...

Mailchimp.com defines e-mail marketing as "a powerful marketing channel, a form of direct marketing as well as digital marketing, that uses e-mail to promote your business's products or services."

What exactly is e-mail marketing?

Mailchimp.com defines e-mail marketing as "a powerful marketing channel, a form of direct marketing as well as digital marketing, that uses e-mail to promote your business's products or services."

There are several reasons why e-mail marketing is an excellent idea for small businesses. It offers many benefits, such as:

the ability to personally engage and build deeper relationships with your audience
keeping your brand and offerings at the top of their mind
providing a place to share relevant and helpful information and promote your products and services
providing a more intimate platform for building trust with your audience

Not to mention, e-mail marketing is affordable, easy to implement, and can reach a much larger audience in a short period. Just think about how many people worldwide are checking their e-mails on their phones at this very moment!

But where do you begin once you've decided to incorporate it into your small business marketing plan?

E-mail marketing is much more than just throwing it together and sending an e-newsletter to a list. There are quite a few components to it if you want to do it right and have it impact your business and audience.

Here are a few basic tips to get started with e-mail marketing in your small business.

1. Establish your goals.

Before you start your e-mail campaign, it's necessary to determine your goals for that campaign. For example, is it to bring in new leads or sell your products or services? Or it could be another way to engage your customers and boost awareness and trust in your small business and brand. More than likely, it is a combination of all of the above. Either way, you'll want to develop specific and measurable goals you can track after sending your campaign.

2. Build an e-mail list.

What good is a perfectly well-put-together e-mail if no one is there to open it? Once you've decided on your new e-mail marketing campaign goals, it's time to start building the list of subscribers to whom you'll send it. However, you don't just want to fill up your list with just anyone. You want the people on your list to be qualified leads who are actually interested in what you offer and may eventually turn into buying customers. These leads are also your target audience.

One of the best ways to start building your list with your target audience is by offering a lead magnet. A lead magnet is an interesting "freebie" or special deal that interests your customer that you provide in exchange for their contact information, or in this case, their e-mail address.

Some lead magnets you may offer for your business may include a discount code, free webinar or course, template, checklist, e-book, or report. Your lead magnet will also tell you a lot about the person who signed up for it and their unique needs (which is super helpful for future content creation)!

Marketing Tip: Whether your marketing list has one person or 100 people, don't wait until your subscriber list reaches a "certain number" to send that first e-mail. Those who have already signed up are ready and waiting for you to deliver content, so send away! (Plus, you never know whom they may forward your e-mail to-- you may gain a new subscriber or customer)!

3. Select a platform.

When sending out an e-mail campaign, you want to choose a platform that best fits the needs of you and your small business. Some of the basic things to consider when selecting a platform are:

Your budget
How many people are on your mailing list
How many e-mails you plan to send per month
User-friendliness of the platform

For beginners, I recommend Mailchimp, as I mention in my blog, 17 Time-Saving Tools and Apps for Small Business. Not only does it have a free option, but it also has many features and templates to make sending your first e-mail marketing campaign a breeze.

4. Develop a content plan.

Now that you have your goals, a list, and a platform, it's time to develop a content plan. This plan includes deciding what content you will share (i.e., blogs, updates, inspirational messages, sales) and how often you will share it (daily, weekly, or monthly). Whatever you decide, it is important to be consistent with the type of information you share and when you share it so that your subscribers know what to expect and when to expect it.

In each of your e-mails, it is vital to have a call to action (CTA). CampaignMonitor.com defines an e-mail marketing CTA as "a button or hyperlinked line of text that directs a user to a website of a brand's choosing." The CTA is perhaps the most critical part of your e-mail message, as it drives your readers to engage and take action.

5. Know the rules.

One of the worst things that can happen to you as an e-marketer is to get blacklisted. In other words, all of your e-mails will go straight to the recipient's spam or junk mail folder because e-mails from your e-mail address have been known to send unwanted or inappropriate e-mails.

To prevent this from happening, it is critical that you become familiar with the CAN-SPAM Act and what it means for your business. The CAN-SPAM Act is a law that establishes requirements for commercial e-mail messages and provides a list of requirements to ensure that you remain in compliance. These requirements include:

Using accurate header information that identifies the person or business sending the message
Using subject lines that accurately represent the information within the e-mail
Clearly disclosing that your message is an advertisement
Including a valid postal address for your business
Disclosing how to opt out of future e-mails
Promptly honoring their requests to opt-out of future e-mails; and,
Ensuring that any external company hired to handle your e-mail campaign follows the law.

6. Analyze the data.

After you send that first e-mail, you'll want to pay attention to what happens next. In other words, you will want to monitor and analyze how your e-mail performs to see how many subscribers are reading your e-mails and clicking on the links provided.

One of the first steps to doing so is to research the industry standards for e-mail marketing in your industry, so you know which numbers to aim for. CampaignMonitor.com shares a helpful industry e-mail benchmark chart with the average open rates, click-through rates, click-to-open rates, and unsubscribe rates for a number of industries.

Once you have this information for your e-mail campaigns, you'll want to analyze which of your e-mail campaigns had positive numbers (high open and click-through rates and low unsubscribes) and which had negative numbers (low open and click-through rates and high unsubscribes). The subject and preview text of the e-mail is often the culprit, as they are not strong or interesting enough to make someone scrolling through their Inbox want to stop and open it-- but I'll save that topic for another day!

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