What's Email Marketing and How to Get Started?

Email marketing is a way of sending emails to customers and prospects with the goal of increasing awareness of your business or brand, engaging with them, and hopefully generate more sales.

What's Email Marketing and How to Get Started?
Photo by Melanie Deziel / Unsplash

What's Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a way of sending emails to customers and prospects with the goal of increasing awareness of your business or brand, engaging with them, and hopefully generate more sales. It’s one type of direct marketing (alongside print advertising, direct mail, and online marketing).

Email allows you to reach out to people in a personal way who are interested in what you have to say. If you have an email list that consists primarily of people who have already purchased from you or at least signed up for your newsletter, then it becomes much easier for you to send out automatic messages about new products, special deals, or updates on how things are going at the company.

Why You Should Use Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a great way to build relationships, get repeat business, and make more money. You can learn about your audience through email marketing and use that information to improve your sales and retention rates. Email marketing also allows you to build an integrated marketing strategy with other channels like social media, search engine optimization (SEO), PPC ads, etc., which will help increase the effectiveness of your campaign overall.

Here are some top advantages of using email marketing:

Email marketing is a great way to reach your customers and prospects. It can be used to promote products, services, and events.

  1. It's more personal than other forms of advertising, so people feel like they're getting a message from you rather than from a company. This can lead to higher engagement and trust.
  2. It's easy to track how effective your campaign is, because you can see how many people opened the email, clicked on links within it, and interacted with it in other ways (such as by filling out forms or clicking an unsubscribe link). You can then use this information to refine your campaigns in the future.
  3. Email is still an effective way for people to communicate with each other—even though there are many other ways for them to do so these days!

Where to Start in Email Marketing?

First things first: how do you go about building an email list? It all starts with capturing leads. These are people who have given you permission to contact them by filling out a form or signing up for your newsletter. The key here is to present something valuable enough that they're willing to give up their personal information in exchange for it.

You can offer discounts or freebies as incentives, but sometimes the best thing is simply giving people something they want—like information about a topic that interests them—and asking them if they'd like more info later on down the line (when they're ready).

Once these leads have given you their information, it's time for step two: tracking them! If you don't know where someone lives or what kind of product they bought from you last time around. Here's a list of three ideas you can do right away to capture leads:

1. A free ebook that gives you tips on how to get more traffic to your website.

2. A list of resources for starting a business from scratch, like a list of books you should read and websites where you can get advice from experts in the field.

3. An email course about how to build a successful online business.

Email provides that you can use

You can use your favorite email service to send newsletters, sales pitches and more. To get started with email marketing, you will need an email account that allows you to collect leads and store information about your contacts. Here is a list of popular services that allow you to add contacts and send emails:

MailChimp: MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools around. They offer a free version with limited features, as well as paid plans with more capabilities. They also have integrations with many third-party services, such as Salesforce and Zapier.

ConvertKit: ConvertKit is an easy-to-use email marketing tool for bloggers and other content creators who want to build their email list but don't have time to learn coding or design skills. It supports many advanced features like automation workflows and RSS feed integration.

Aweber: Aweber is another popular email marketing platform that offers both free and paid options for small businesses and individuals looking for an easy way to manage their email campaigns without having any tech skills at all!

Sending a welcome email

Welcome emails are emails sent to a new subscriber, usually within 24 hours of them signing up for your list. These emails aim to establish a relationship with the subscriber so that they know what you’re about from the very beginning.

The purpose of this email is to welcome new subscribers and explain why they should be excited about your content. You can also use this opportunity to tell them more about yourself, provide some helpful resources like links or tips on how to navigate your site or blog (if applicable), and tell them what kind of information you plan on sharing in future emails.

A well-written welcome email will make it clear why someone would want to keep receiving updates from you on a regular basis—and it will also give readers an idea of what they can expect from these updates (i.e., useful information).

Starting a newsletter, and why it's important to offer value first

Email newsletters are a great way to keep your customers engaged with your brand. They can also be used as a lead generation tool.

When writing your newsletter, remember that its purpose is to provide value and help your readers solve problems. The best way to ensure it's successful?

Start with the end in mind: what do you want readers to do after reading your newsletter? This will help you determine what kind of content you should include.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve learned the basics of email marketing, it’s time to get started. Don’t hesitate to try out new techniques and see what works for your business. The most important thing is that you continue testing and learning from your campaigns so that you can grow your list and keep your subscribers happy.

Email marketing is an effective way for businesses of all sizes to reach their audience in a personal way. Whether it’s one-to-one communication or group emails, there are many ways to engage with customers through this method. If done well, email marketing can be an inexpensive way to promote content or sell products while also nurturing relationships with existing customers by providing value in between purchases or service calls.