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The first step in setting up email marketing is figuring out how you want to send your emails out. There are tons of options out there for all business sizes and price ranges, so check out this article by Hubspot that explains the pros and cons of 13 of them here. I used to use MailChimp, and I really enjoyed their free plan, but it’s changed a bit over the years so I recently moved to Substack since I wanted to combine my blog and newsletter. Flodesk is also really good, although a bit pricier. Overall, you should choose what's best for your business and your budget.
Next, you want to prepare for sign ups. You do this by creating a sign-up form and an automated welcome email. This means that when someone signs up through your form, they'll automatically get sent an email welcoming them to your newsletter or whatever you're offering. A great way to do this is to offer some sort of freebie and include that in the welcome email. For example, I've offered different documents with helpful tips for small business owners, and I try to change up the freebie every few months to something new. It's all about providing value to those who consider subscribing! We'll talk more about this later.
Depending on your email marketing service, you'll have different options for sign-up forms. Through Substack, I can embed a form in my website or create a landing page that I can link to. You can even do both and share your sign-up link on social media to bring more people in! The important thing is to make sure that you give people a reason to sign up for your newsletter in a concise way. A simple "Sign up for our newsletter and we'll send insert your freebie here straight to your inbox" works really well. Keep your explanation short and sweet, and have them give you their name and email address. Then it's time to start sending!
The way to keep people subscribed to your email list (and in fact to get them to sign up in the first place), you need to offer something of value. Whether that's sales, tips and tricks, or just encouraging words, you need to be giving your audience a reason to be subscribed to you. By consistently sending your audience things that benefit them, you're keeping yourself in the front of their mind as an authority in your niche.
On that note, if you're going to be churning out consistently valuable content, you have to learn to create in batches. Plan out some content, create it all at once, and schedule it for the future. If you try to send content out as you create it, you'll end up with a sporadic emailing schedule that confuses your audience and does more harm than good. It's also a lot less stressful to create a bunch all at once and not have to worry about it on sending days. Trust me, I learned this one from experience.
Currently, I have monthly plans for my newsletters, which I send out once a week. I have a structure for each week’s email since my newsletter is built on the phases of the moon, but even just having a rough schedule for your newsletter is a great way to make batch creating easier and ensure that your newsletter is smooth and cohesive.
Your email marketing campaign has one overarching goal: to build a relationship with your audience that inspires loyalty. Some ways to do that include asking for your customer's birthday at sign-up and sending them a birthday offer every year, sending surveys and acting on them, using personalization to include their name in emails, and using a conversational tone in the text of your emails. These simple steps can help you use email marketing to build loyalty in your customers and encourage them to buy from you again and again. If you treat them like the valuable part of your business that they are, they'll respond.