How to use Email Marketing in 2020 – Step by Step Guide

Email marketing is one of the most personal tools you have to connect with your customers. You write them letters where you tell about yourself and you probably know that email marketing is really important, but how to do it in the right way.

When I open my inbox majority of promotional emails are bad, but before you send me that bad promotional email you need to get my email and that’s super hard too.

Email marketing is a really powerful digital marketing tool that lets you connect to your customers, it’s also a great tool for boosting sales and building your brand exposure and loyalty.

So, I decided to write this article to help you understand how to use email marketing. From collecting emails to sending your first campaign and actually reaching your potential customer and not ending up in the spam box.

Why use email marketing?

Before doing anything professionally you probably want to have plan and goals on why you are starting out.

It’s important to understand what are your goals regarding email marketing and how you are going to use this tool to accomplish those goals.

Slowly write down why and how you are going to use email marketing. I know it sounds overly dramatic but believe me you want to do that. Because if you do not write down what you want to accomplish you will end up sending those boring spammy emails and you don’t want that to happen.

Those goals should define what you want to achieve, make more sales, drive traffic to your website and only after that write down how you will use those emails to accomplish that particular goal.

After you have your goals and small plan you have to get the emails of your potential customers.

Choose email marketing provider & Build your email list

Building your email list is a slow and hard process, but if you are doing it in the right way after some time you will have a big list of people that are interested in your venture.

At this step, you will need to choose an email marketing provider that will determine what type of tools you will have to collect emails. I recommend ConvertKit. There is a lot of other email marketing providers but they all have their downsides. Form bad interface to emails ending up in your subscriber’s spam folders.

ConvertKit is super easy to use and it has tons of integrations and add-ons that help you manage your email marketing.

No matter if you are just starting out with your blog as a creator or you are big business ConvertKit is truly unique and powerful email marketing tool.

So now when you have your goals written down and choose the right email marketing provider it time to talk about the ways you can build your email list.

Make a freebie that you will give away in exchange for your email.

Make a freebie that you will give away to your subscribers for the exchange to there contacts. This does a few things for you:

• • It helps you collect the emails of potential customers.

• • It shows how qualified you are. If you build freebie in the correct way it works as a content marketing tool and shows to people what quality they can get from you.

I personally spend many hours on my freebie about Digital Marketing because I wanted people to see how much I know and how much I can help. So make your freebie outstanding.\n

Make it easy to sign up

Integrate your signup form in places where people could see it on your website. ConvertKit has many tools to help you with that. Also, a good recommendation would be to talk about your freebie and link to it in the correct places. In other words, make it as convenient to your new subscriber as possible.

Integrate your opt-in forms in almost every page of your website

When you log in ConvertKit you could easily build email opt-in forms for your website. Try to build those forms for almost every page of your website.

• • After blog post – offer that freebie to your readers after blog post and integrate opt-in form. I personally see one of the best conversion rates in after post opt-in forms and I put them after every blog post.

• • Homepage – Straight away when they enter the website offer that freebie and get their contacts.

• • Sidebar – if your website has a sidebar integrate signup form in the sidebar of your site.

• • About page – about page is to show people what you are. Your freebie can work as content marketing material and also collect emails of potential clients.

• • Footer of your website – before they leave to give them something.

• • Your email signature – if you are a business owner you probably use email a lot, add a link to your freebie in your email signature.

• • Social media profiles – integrate a link to your freebies landing page on your social media profiles

• • Integrate it – I think you are getting it? Just remember try not feel like a spammer.

Start Contest or Giveaway

I know that your freebie is cool but sometimes people just don’t need it or don’t want to register to your list. Try to run some sort of contest or giveaway and ask people to subscribe to enter the competition.

Make a Pop – up for your website

I have mix feelings on this one, in one way popups are intrusive and annoying but in another way, they still produce really good results on collecting email. So you are sacrificing your general user experience to get that email.

I personally think that the only correct way to use popups is to program them that when someone is leaving the site or just finished reading your blog article popup appear only at that time. It could be hard to do but ConvertKit has some tools to make that happen.

Create your first email marketing campaign

Now when you started collecting emails and have all your email marketing goals it’s time to set up your first email marketing campaign. There is a lot of options on how to set it up, so let’s talk about them.

First and probably one of the most important aspects of email marketing is a good title of your email. Try it to write it as short as possible but still give enough information to intrigue your subscriber to open it.

Personalize Your Email Campaigns

Personalized email marketing campaigns reach much greater conversions than regular ones. When I am collecting emails I always try to get the first name too, this way when I am building new email marketing campaign I can use their name in the title and in the text of the email itself.

This what emails seem more personal and receive bigger engagement and conversions than emails without personalization. ConvertKit has tools that let you easily personalize your email marketing campaigns.

Use your email marketing campaign as a content marketing

Your subscribers believed in you and gave you their email so don’t spam them with offers. Look at your campaigns as a content marketing tool and give them value. Emails should give something to your subscribers not just talk how good your services are or about the products that you are selling.

The good rule is 80/20 that you could build your emails around that. Simply put 80 percent of the content to bring value to your subscribers and only 20 percent to promote your business.

Believe me, it’s enough because if you bring value to your subscribers they definitely convert.

Branding your email campaign

Your subscribers probably know you well, they are reading your articles, visiting your web page and following you on social media. It’s really important that the vibe – branding is the same throughout all the platforms.

Write your email campaigns according to your brand and try to have the same feeling as in other platforms.

Also if you are sending designed email campaigns and not just a text try to design email related to your brand. It’s colors, text fonts, logos and etc.

Make your email marketing campaign mobile friendly

Majority of the people these days read their emails on the smartphones, so customizing email to be responsive to the screen size is essential to your email marketing success.

Choose the responsive template and try not to add to many elements to your email campaign. ConvertKit has a lot of responsive templates to choose and all you have to do is just edit them accordingly to your branding.

Adjust the timing of your email marketing campaign.

\nThere are two basic timing things to think about before starting with email marketing.

• • First is how often you are going to send emails. Once a day or once a week. You have to decide what day of the month or week you are going to send your emails and stick to that schedule. Remember consistency is key.

• • The second thing is the timing of your email marketing campaign. Sending emails at night probably isn’t the best idea. So you have to test a few different time slots according to your subscribers and see what works best.

Measure your email marketing results

Data is key in business it helps you to make decisions that influence the success of your business. Like any other marketing tool, email marketing has its own metrics that you have to track.

It helps you to make your decisions regarding your email marketing and change your campaigns according to those results.

You don’t have to guess are your campaigns successful you can evaluate the metrics of your campaigns to see what is working for your business.

When you are just starting out with email marketing it can be hard to understand all the numbers and percentages that show something. It’s hard to understand what is good and what is bad and what to do about it.

Here I will try to talk about most important email marketing metrics there is and hopefully, it will help you.

Email deliverability rate

Email deliverability rate is the percentage that shows how many email subscribers you reached with your campaign. I know that it sounds crazy but a lot of your emails end up somewhere between you and your subscriber. There is a majority of factors like spam filters, bounces and etc.

You can increase your deliverability rate by constantly taking care of your email subscriber list. In ConvertKit you can simply ask if your cold subscribers are still interested in staying on the list.

Email open rate

One of the most important metrics is the email open rate. It’s the metric that shows you the percentage of your subscribers that opens the email in their inbox.

Usually, this metric could shock you because it’s only about 15 to 30 percent of emails are getting opened but this is a regular result.

The most important thing that affects email open rate is a subject line or title of your email marketing campaign. As we talked before I always offer using the first name of your subscriber in the subject line.

ConvertKit has tools that help split test email campaigns and see with subject line is working better.

Email click rate

You probably want your email list subscriber not just to open an email but open the link that you gave them in your email campaign.

In short email click rate shows you the percentage of people that clicked on the link in your email.

Email conversion rate

Now when they clicked on the link you probably want to sell them something or you have other goals as your conversion.

In my opinion, email conversion rate is the most important metric of email marketing and all other metrics just shows you what you are doing wrong to increase this one.

The best advice that I can give you to have a better email conversion rate is to focus your email campaign for one particular goal in mind. Don’t overdo with many unrelated call to action buttons and just make it simple with one goal in mind.

Email unsubscribe rate

This metric shows you those people that decided to leave your list. This is a sad metric but it can still show you a lot of information about your email marketing campaigns.

You can look at the campaigns that have high email unsubscribe rate and see the pattern in them. It could tell you what you are doing wrong.

How to track your email marketing analytics

There are basically two main tools that can help you track all those numbers. First is Google Analytics that you have to know how to integrate into your email marketing campaigns. Other is provided by your email marketing provider.

ConvertKit automatically calculates all the most important metrics that show you everything in numbers and percentages, it’s easy to navigate and understand. So at the beginning of your email marketing, I don’t even see the point of integrating Google Analytics.

Conclusion of Email Marketing

I hope that this article about email marketing helped you to learn something and maybe helped your business. I also wrote Digital Marketing E-Book that I am giving away for free so it could help you understand more about other marketing strategies.

It also would be interesting to hear about your email marketing experiences so feel free to comment below. Also if you have any questions feel free to ask 🙂