All you need to know about Email marketing — A email marketing guide for beginners — Marketing & Growth Academy

“ A study from Adobe estimates that millennials spend about 6.4 hours each day reading their emails. “

You would have heard business owners talking about the need for having an email list and building out your own subscriber base — an asset that you own for a lifetime. You can nurture them and sell to them and if you have built a good relationship with your list they will lap up your product. But how do we start? How should we start building up this dream list where whatever we want to sell, gets sold (of course, quality products only!)

Before we look at how we can start building an email list, let us look at the benefits of building one and what you get to take out of it:

Benefits of email marketing:

1. Build stronger relationships — On social media, you can only have an assumption of what your audience likes by looking at the engagement. Here you have a chance to not just engage but take their opinions into consideration. Send out questions, forms about problems they have and they can reply with their responses. You can educate, entertain and grow with them!
2. Establishing authority — We must understand that it takes effort to consistently show in someone’s inbox. When you do it consistently and strive to build a relationship, you start establishing authority. How?

Here’s a simple question for you. Which emails do you look forward to, in your inbox? Chances are you can count those number of people on your fingers. Why? Because they have taken the time, patience and effort to consistently bring you value.

How to build and nurture an email list:

Now coming to the more difficult part of Email marketing — ie. List building. Basically this is the only/most important step that ensures you continue generating a passive inc

1. Create content hooks( lead magnets) and build your email list — Usually the simplest way to build an email list. Create a course/ebook/video and give it to your audience for free and in exchange, ask for their email ids. Most people have built their list in this way. Provide high value content that people would want to lap up.
2. Audits — Offer people audits where you would review their article/content/instagram account etc and they can register for free using their email ids. These get you leads with a higher intent but it is more time consuming. So pick your options of building email list tactfully.
3. Trials — If you offer products, then you can offer trials for a small duration of time to get them experience your product. Bonus is you get their email id and other relevant details as well!
4. Consultation calls — You can provide free strategic consultation calls to people to help them with their goals/business etc. For joining the session they would need to provide email addresses.
5. Content creation — If you are regular with your content creation and create value based post/articles — you can link your landing page details where you can collect email ids. The proposition would be to send interesting articles and compilations like the one you do as articles or on social media.

What are email service providers

An ESP or Email marketing tools allows you to send mails to a large base of subscribers using your domain/subdomain which looks more professional, as opposed to using Gmail or Yahoo.

Which ESP works for you best?

Based on your requirements I would suggest the following. I will do a deep dive into each of these tools shortly, but until then here’s a snapshot to help you get some clarity around which of these products suit your needs.

Mailchimp — A simple interface, can start with a free account. You can customize with pictures and images and the analytics is also pretty cool!

Mailerlite — Often preferred by people who are starting new, it’s absolutely beginner friendly and easy to start off with. Again free until you build a substantial subscriber base.

Convertkit — This is one of my favourites. It’s very simple and you can start off with text based mailers or with a small header. It gives you a chance to create interesting landing pages to capture leads. Also, with the premium models you can build automations and sequences for mailers (to ensure mails go on a pre-decided time and date!)

Activecampaign — This is for heavy users of email marketing. You can experience the product on a trial. Analytics, automations, email support all are extremely advanced in Activcampaign. Good to start if you have 5K + subscribers already.

Moosend — This is for small to mid-level startups/freelancers who need to scale with optimized costs. Analytics, CRM, automation all embedded to make your journey smooth.

Amazon SES — By far the cheapest way to send mails, also the most complicated. Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable email service that enables developers to send mail from within any application. You can configure Amazon SES quickly to support several email use cases, including transactional, marketing, or mass email communications.

Email Octopus Connect — If you want to use Amazon SES but want something that makes it simpler, you can use Email Octopu connect, usually a little costlier than SES because of the cost but far cheaper than most mailer services. This is for bulk services and high volume/frequency mails. Also connect to your own domain.

And a lot more as per you need and budget. But these are usually top of mind as they are economical, have good features and are very effective.

If you are looking to start a side-hustle or become a freelancer,(or learn more email marketing examples) you can join and be a part of my newsletter. I send out useful articles like these on my newsletter that help you take your first step in building a side-hustle/freelancing career. I call it the Profitable Freelancer newsletter.
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Originally published at https://marketingandgrowthacademy.com on April 17, 2022.