How to Get Started with Email Marketing

Running an online business means staying in touch with your customers and keeping them engaged with your brand. One of the most effective ways to do that is through email marketing. Whether you’re new to email marketing or looking to improve your strategy, today’s episode is all about getting started with email marketing.

From selecting the perfect email service provider to crafting compelling incentives like lead magnets and coupons, we promise actionable insights to enhance your email marketing efforts, no matter your level of experience.  So, join me as we dive into how you can use email marketing to grow your online business. 


Mentioned Resources

-> Email Marketing Platforms Recommendations

AWeber*

Convertkit / Kits*


*Contains affiliate Links


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Chapters

• 0:45 Effective Email Marketing Strategies for eCommerce
• 4:31 Email Marketing Strategies
• 12:59 Advanced Email Marketing Strategies

Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 0:45

Running an online business means staying in touch with your customers and keeping them engaged with you. So how do we do this in such the busy day we have anymore, with social media bombarding us all the time? Well, if you didn't already know, email marketing is actually one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers and brings a great return on investment. So if you're not already doing email newsletters and marketing, or if you're not quite sure if you've covered all the aspects, then this episode is for you. Welcome to the eCommerce Made Easy podcast. I'm your host, ke Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine-month-old my main goal To help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech into easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place. So sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together. Welcome back to the e-commerce made easy podcast. Today we are focusing on email marketing. This is something I discuss on the podcast regularly and it's super important aspect of your business and your marketing efforts. Email marketing boasts one of the highest return on investments when you are using it properly, and even when you're not using it quite right, it still does a really good return on investment. It's much easier to keep in touch with your customers, bring them back into your world, than it is when you're doing social media marketing. Now, that's not to say that social media marketing isn't important in today's world, but email marketing shouldn't be forgotten and should be refined and made sure that you're still doing it. So let's go over some of the steps that I want to make sure that we're covering, to make sure you're doing email marketing and doing it completely, and I'll be going all the way back to the beginning. So if you're not already doing email marketing, then this is going to help you as well.

Carrie Saunders: 2:52

So, first off, we want to choose the right platform. We want to choose the right email marketing system or ESP is what people will say for short and there are quite a few out there and many of them do a really good job. We're going to link in the show notes to our two top favorite ones, which is Aweber and ConvertKit. There's also MailChimp and Constant Contact. And actually let me go back to the word ConvertKit. They just recently past few months renamed themselves to just Kit, so you may see both words if you're listening to this in real time out there in the marketing currently, but they pretty much slowly converted to just the word kit, but a lot of us who've known ConvertKit for a while still use that word. So the reason that I am suggesting to you, as a listener, convertkit and AWeber is I've tested both of these and I've actually worked with MailChimp and Constant Contact through some of our customers as well. But when I was looking for an email service provider for ourselves, I looked at these two the most because they provided the most modern features at the time I was digging into this, which was about two years ago, probably about 2022. And they also provide some really good tools for when you're just starting out and they aren't super expensive when you're just starting out, so I really like that. I also like their customer service. I, in particular, liked Aweber's customer service best, but I know a lot of people love ConvertKit or SlashKits customer service too, so they are definitely a strong contender as well.

Carrie Saunders: 4:32

Now, what you're going to want to look for in an email service provider is one that can scale and grow with your business, as well as one that really protects your email list and makes sure that your emails don't go into the spam inbox. That is actually one of the reasons I picked AWeber over Kit or ConvertKit. It's really hard to say just the word Kit, to be honest with you, and I'm not saying that ConvertKit doesn't do good email deliverability, because from all of my business friends who use it, they have no problem with that. But what I did find whenever I was importing my customers into AWeber is they were a lot more strict. Now, in some ways that was kind of a pain because there were some legitimate customer emails that use generic emails like sales at or admin at, and they were customers that I would regularly email back and forth at that email address. And AWeber is a bit more strict in importing something so generic because that looks to them like spam, because many times it's just a generic and not really a person's email address. But some of our clients actually use it as a personal email address. So that let me see that AWeber really is concerned about the cleanliness and the viability of your email list. So it's just something to take into consideration. All the ones I mentioned are, you know, really good, and I know that other people use them a lot, so I can't like say any one of them is necessarily bad. I just know that Kit or ConvertKit and AWeber are two really popular ones, and we will link to those in the show notes if you don't already have one.

Carrie Saunders: 6:11

And then the next thing you're going to want to do is, once you have an email service platform, or if you already have one and you want to revive it, you want to build and grow your email list. So there's quite a few ways that you can do this. You can give customers, like a way on your website to submit a form and sign up for your newsletter. Now, many times, you're going to want to make this compelling, because we all get tons of email. I know I get like hundreds in a day and some of them are newsletters Actually, a lot of them are, but I only stay subscribed to the ones that actually use most of the time. I do try to clean out the ones that I'm not reading anymore occasionally. So you want to make sure that you're giving them something compelling, a good reason to sign up for one, because we all don't want necessarily more email if it's just going to be noise, right. So you want to give them a good reason. What value are you going to provide them on the email newsletter list?

Carrie Saunders: 7:11

Now, a lot of people will give something for free for signing up for a newsletter. This is really typical. If you're a service provider or a coach or something like that course creator, you might want to give them what's called a free lead magnet, so some sort of helpful information, a PDF, a checklist, a quiz to help them determine whatever they're you know, whatever they're needing to determine that you serve. Another thing that a lot of people do, especially when you tend towards a more typical e-commerce, is a coupon the first time coupon for ordering from them or from you, really and so you want to give them something exclusive that will entice them to sign up for your newsletter but is still genuine. Obviously, we don't want to do this just to kind of click bait and get people on your newsletter list. You want genuine people who are truly interested in your information as well, and you can also use social media and other marketing channels to get people on your newsletter. Social media and other marketing channels to get people on your newsletter. I know we have a free Facebook group and one of our questions is what your email address is and we'll give you our free search engine optimization course and that's an exchange for email.

Carrie Saunders: 8:20

You can always unsubscribe at any time. So you want to make sure when you're doing these, they can unsubscribe at any time. That is actually the law across pretty much the whole world is they need to be able to unsubscribe at any time. That is actually the law across pretty much the whole world is they need to be able to unsubscribe at any time, and that needs to be easy to do, and most email the new modern email marketing platforms will have that automatically for you in the bottom of your email, so you don't actually really have to worry about that too much. So once you're doing that, once you get people on your newsletter and your email list, what you might want to do is consider, you know, tagging them for better targeting. So let's say somebody's signing up on our newsletter and they sign up for a search engine optimization free mini course. I'm going to want to tag them on that because I know they're interested in search engine optimization. Similarly, if you have somebody sign up to get a free coupon, then you might want to mark them that they like good deals and they may be interested in sales you have. So you can think about how did they sign up and use? Your email service provider should have an easy way to tag them based upon which form they filled out. If you need any help with that, you can always get a hold of us and we can help you. But you want to target that because then you can start tailoring your information to the customer.

Carrie Saunders: 9:41

You can also do this by when you're sending newsletters, the links they click on. You can, if there's a specific link that's talking about a specific type of subject, you can then tag them on it. So let's say you have a newsletter and I like to go in the dog treat realm. I'm not sure why I always do that, but let's say you're a dog, you know you sell dog treats and you have a newsletter on um the different types of dog treats you sell, and you have links to the different groups. So you have like a green, free one, an organic one and um. Let's pick a free range. I'm not sure what the third one should be, but anyway you have these three links in the email for more information.

Carrie Saunders: 10:20

To find more products on your website, you can tag your customers who click on the specific link. So when they click on the grain-free ones, you can tag them with grain-free. So then you know when you're promoting grain-free products you need to send to this specific segment even more so than just your generic whole newsletter list. So tagging can really help you get a really good return on your investment and really market the people to what they're already interested in. So that's the whole point in doing targeting on your emails and tagging them.

Carrie Saunders: 10:54

Now the next thing that you want to do is be able to craft engaging emails. We want to keep our audience interested in what we have to say, and this can actually honestly be a really hard balance. This is something you know we still struggle with because, being a business of over 20 some years, you know we were. We grew up in a time where you're really formal in your emails, and so we've been trying to break the habit of being super formal and being more engaging, because we are super friendly engaging people here at BCSE and we're working on making sure they're more engaging, but we always love to provide value on our emails and that is something that can keep people coming back is when you're providing value in the emails, whether it's a new resource that you have that could help them, whether it is maybe a tip on how to train your dog. You know, a simple tip on how to get your dog to sit, or something like that. Say, you're, you know, selling dog treats We'll go back to that example but giving them a little bit of value in your emails is going to really help them want to open your emails and want to engage with you.

Carrie Saunders: 12:03

Now the really important part is you want them to be opening your emails because that then sends signals back to your email service provider that this person is a warm person and they actually do exist and your emails aren't just kind of crap, honestly, and they're not deleting them. So having people open your emails is super important, and that actually can go into email subject lines as well. So you want to think about what is a good, engaging email subject line, and we're going to link to a course that I took several years ago when I was wanting to relearn and get back up to date on how to do email marketing, and it's called List Builder Society. It's a course I took by Amy Porterfield and it's a really excellent course on how to really bring those people into your newsletter and then how to keep them engaged and how to do all these things we're talking about on this podcast episode, so be sure to check that out in our show notes.

Carrie Saunders: 12:59

It's called List Builder Society again, and so after you've created these engaging emails and are keeping them, you know coming back for your emails then you're going to want to do potentially add on some automation so you can automate your email campaign. So this is a little bit more advanced, and what you can do is when somebody first signs up to your newsletter, it's very likely they may be new to your world. So what you can do is create what's called a welcome sequence and that's referred to in this course I'm talking about too and that's where you send several emails you know more closely together than you typically would on a newsletter to have them help get to know you better. Now you know your audience best. So this could not this could be every day for five days or, if you think that's too much, based upon who your typical audience is, it could be, you know, say maybe three or four emails across a week, so one every couple of days.

Carrie Saunders: 14:01

So this is something that's just a really great way to you know kind of break the ice and get to know your customers, and you can even include some call to actions. You know, reply back and let us know. You know what you think of this email. Or you know, click on, click on one of these links to see which you know, click on these links for which, what you're interested in I'm having a really hard time spitting that one out Basically, kind of like the dog treats you know. Hey, we see you have, you know have dogs, since you were interested in our dog treat company, you know what kind of treats do you prefer or what type of dog do you have. Then you can learn whether they have a large dog or a small dog or a medium dog. So those are some things you can do in your campaigns to really get some more information from your customers.

Carrie Saunders: 14:53

And then it can go back into the tagging we talked about in a few minutes ago. And then you can do some automations based upon that, the welcome sequence. You can do automations on checkout. So if somebody purchased your services or products, you can do follow up emails to check in, make sure that they loving their product or their service they have. So you can do a lot of these things that really level up your customer service. But once you've got the system set, then you're not having to push the button to have these things happen. Obviously, I think you should revise and review these every so often like maybe every six months to a year kind of depends on your industry to make sure that they are being effective. But you can set up automations like this to really make your customer service so much better, but yet not taxing on your end.

Carrie Saunders: 15:45

And then another item you can do is track and analyze, and I kind of just alluded to this. So track and analyze your results. What's your email open rate? Is it pretty good? Are you having people unsubscribe from a specific email subject? Maybe you sent an email that people didn't like. Learn from that. Did a particular email get open more than another one?

Carrie Saunders: 16:10

Another thing to think about when you're picking these email service providers providers and all the good ones do this too is you can do A-B testing. So what they typically will have you do is they will send approximately half your email list one subject and the other half your other subject and then you can figure out which subject performed better, what got a better open rate. Subject lines are key to getting emails open, so you want to be testing this as well, and so take a little time to do this because, like I said in the beginning, emails have such a high conversion that it's really good idea to spend a little bit of time here and really analyze these results. And then you know one if people are opening your emails, are they clicking any of the links that you give them? So look at the click through rate too on your emails. Maybe you didn't draw them in enough to compel them to click on it. Maybe they got enough information in the email that they didn't need to click on the link for more information. So kind of ponder on these things as you're going through your emails and as you're trying to figure out what's working, what's not working.

Carrie Saunders: 17:21

And the last point is actually really important but very simple is stay consistent and don't overwhelm. Now, what I mean by that is you need to set, you know, a rule as to how often you are going to email your list. A lot of people say you must be emailing your list weekly. Some even will say, twice a week. I feel like every each business is a little bit different and I think that you kind of know your audience best and know how often you should be doing it, but you're going to want to be doing it regularly. So, whether that's even just monthly, or whether that's twice a month or every week, pick a set schedule and stick with that, because if you're unpredictably emailing your audience, they might either A forget who you are, especially if they're new to you, or, b you're not in front of them potentially enough for when they actually do need your product or service. You want to be top of mind and that's why we one of the reasons we have an email list is to be top of mind when that person needs your product or service. I'm like oh yes, bcc helps with website customizations. You know then you're top of. You know we're top of mind to people because we're emailing them regularly. So when they're ready for it, they know how to contact us.

Carrie Saunders: 18:43

So you want to make sure that you're emailing regularly, set that schedule and you can change it. If it's not working for you or working for your you know email newsletter people and your customers on it, then go ahead and change it, but just make sure you do stay consistent for a period of time. Typically in an industry, you want to be trying something for about three months before you change it up and see whether it's working or. The other rule is three times, but I feel like with email it can't be three times. You can't just send three emails, know whether it works or not. That's not quite enough data. But three months would be probably a good watermark on how well it's working and then you can adjust then. But you want to make sure that you're communicating this to your consumers that are on your newsletter as well and keeping them informed. And, you know, really just be there and be there for them and make sure you're being regular on your emails.

Carrie Saunders: 19:39

Ok, so let's recap. So, first off, we talked about picking your email marketing platform and we gave you several suggestions you can find them in the show notes on some ones that we recommend. And then next, you want to build and grow your email list. That list builder society course that I recommended is a great way to do that. As well as some tips that I gave in here, you're also going to want to do some more advanced things once you're comfortable and segment your email list so you can better target your customers that way. And then we want to make sure we're crafting engaging emails, and some of the ways we can do that is by tracking and analyzing, which was one of our tips as well. You also are going to want to automate your email campaigns once you get more comfortable doing email marketing.

Carrie Saunders: 20:27

If you're, if this is new to you, if you're already doing email marketing, then I challenge you to go ahead and start automating some things to make your life better and to make your customer's experience a lot better. And then, finally, stay consistent, but don't overwhelm. Don't email too little or too much. Find that good sweet spot that your consumers really seem to resonate with and enjoy. All right, so that's all we have for this week's episode of the e-commerce made easy podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. We look forward to serving you at our next podcast episode. If you have any questions, you can email us at podcast at bcsengineeringcom, and in your podcast app there's also a way to text me directly, so click on that little button and send me a text message. I would love to hear from you. All right, well, we will see you next week.