Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. It excels in generating demand, nurturing leads and acquiring new users. Implementing these tools well is essential for a good business.

For that reason, I’ve written the following guide to help you master email marketing.

So what are you waiting for? Dive right in!

The Right Vendor
In order to get started, you’ll need an email marketing vendor. There are a number of them out there, so you’ll want to do your research. Some of the leaders in the field are Salesforce, MailChimp, dotmailer and iContact.

Email marketing software is essential toy our enterprise. It will help you build customer loyalty, increase brand recognition, and make sales via email. And with the tools of email marketing at your disposal, you can segment contact lists based off of a diverse set of criteria.

However, you need to ask yourself an important question first. Are you doing B2B or B2C Marketing?

When marketing to consumers, your vendor needs to work well with social channels, have a great e-commerce platform and design oriented templates. For example, Sendicate and Movable Ink are vendors with a focus on design.

With B2B marketing, take into account vendors that integrate CRM and automation. With B2B, the majority of the large vendors provide these email marketing tools; a small sample is Pardot, Eloqua, Marketo, and Hubspot.

Email Traffic
When considering vendors, I suggest analyzing the amount of emails you’ll be sending. Some vendors may be more appropriate than others. If you have a small mailing list, then consider something like MailChimp. They have a free version which may suit your needs exactly. On the other hand, if you’re sending a large amount of transactional emails, think about an email deliverability vendor such as SendGrid or Mandrill.

Welcome Email
Once you’ve gone through the arduous task of perusing email vendors and selecting one that fulfills your needs, it’s time to send out your first email!

This is one of the most important aspects of the onboarding process. In order to engage a new user, you want to give them a positive first impression of your product, service or brand. It should let subscribers know exactly what to expect while staying interesting.

Consider taking a lot of time into crafting that first line. It has to hook your readers and build excitement about your endeavor. It truly is an art form. The last thing you want is for someone to sign up for your email only to delete it when it arrives in their inbox for lack of interest.

Email Newsletter
The newsletter is a common tactic used by both small and large companies. They are scheduled and recurring messages from your company to a large list of subscribers.

The purpose of them is to build strong relationships with prospects and customers by offering them useful information and news. You can only accomplish this through the use of smart copywriting and engaging visuals.

Drip Campaign
Once you have leads being funneled through your email marketing machine, you’ll need to nurture them until they’ve become customers. For this reason, you need to implement a drip marketing campaign.

This is a series of emails that will help to move a lead towards the sales and marketing funnel. A good practice is to follow up with leads that have signed up for your service but haven’t confirmed their email yet.

There are many vendors that have built in automation for drip marketing. This will allow you to consistently stay in touch with leads while freeing up time for other marketing and sales resources. Personally I used Mailchimp to set up my drip campaign “The Ultimate SEO Crash Course”, after I had all the content created it only took me a few hours including testing. Another tool I used in the past was Drip, I probably liked it even more then Mailchimp but the cost was a bit to much for what I’m doing.

Observe and Experiment
Once you have your email marketing set up, the process doesn’t end here. Now, you have to monitor the results and make adjustments as necessary. If you’re not happy with the results, consider using A/B testing for other formats or content.

Conclusion
Email is a marketing medium that is not going away. In fact, it’s only going to get stronger. If you want to increase lead generation and sales, it behooves you to not only implement this marketing tool but to master it.

I hope that this guide starts you on your way. Contact me today if you need help.