8 things to know before starting email marketing

At the start of every knowledge journey, people’s confidence changes too many times, that’s what happened with me and people around me and when I searched for it, I found that there’s something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s a graph showing the relation between confidence and level of knowledge. In the beginning, it’s nothing and after a little bit of knowledge you think that you mastered it, while in reality you just know a little bit of it, and then the more knowledge you gain the less confidence you gain until you eventually, start mastering your field.

That was the case with so many people in many fields but here we will focus on one field and what should we do and know before starting to think that we have already mastered it or thinking it’s a really easy process, just create emails and send it to your audience or contacts and wait for the results to show. This is a typical action when it comes to email marketing before you start to realize what and how to master it?

Before we get deep into this, we want to confirm that this post is not about how to optimize email marketing, it’s about the things that every business owner or marketer needs to know before even starting email marketing. So, if you are a professional marketer there might not be too much information for you but if you are starting a new email marketing business or will/just started using email marketing in your business then this is the right place for you. We will sum it all in 8 important points so you don’t get overwhelmed, we don’t want you to think it’s a big hustle and not important to you because we think email is very important to every business, in fact, we wrote a small post about what is email marketing and why every business needs it?

So, that’s enough for an intro and

Let’s get started

The 8 things you should know before starting email marketing are:

1. Choose email marketing service provider
2. Collect appropriate audience or contacts data
3. Think then rethink about killer subject lines
4. Focus on your content
5. Using call to action
6. Never send a campaign without testing
7. Check your best time for sending
8. Analyze and optimize

Choose email marketing service providers

If you consider marketing using an email marketing channel, you should also consider using any of the available email marketing tools out there on the internet, if you decide to just use Gmail, Yahoo, or your email provider then you must know that you are pulling yourself down and missing a lot of good possibilities and analytics.

Working with a professional email marketing platform is the only way to excel at it, they give you automation tools, email templates, lead magnets, and other tools that will help with collecting more contacts data, tracking features for open rates and click-through rates, and more, effective delivery messages to bulk emails. And last but not least most important insight you will get is analytics.

All these insights and of course more cannot be done using just Gmail, Yahoo, or another general email tool

Collect appropriate audience and contacts data

let’s face it, purchasing email lists and sending them emails without knowing their interests or if they even exist is considered the best way to waste your money and time. Your contacts must have interest in the product or service you provide, they must opt-in to your list, or else you will get your emails deleted or flagged as spam

So, you need a lead magnet or opt-in form which takes us back to the first point: choosing a good email marketing service provider because of the facilities, they provide to collect contacts data as we do at FastDeliver. You may use lead magnets to offer a freebie and get emails, there are also opt-in forms, another automation tool that you will definitely need right after collecting contacts is setting and sending welcome sequences

It may be a long time-consuming step to build your email list by yourself, but it is irreplaceable.

Think then rethink about killer subject lines

You have joined an email marketing tool so you can send thousands of emails easily, build your email list successfully, and now is the time to think about subject lines. Subject lines are the gate to get your emails opened because people do judge their new coming emails from it. This short sentence that some people falsely think about after writing their emails and right before sending it have the bigger impact on your campaign’s success or failure, while your email body or content has not changed, you can’t imagine how a good vs a bad subject line might affect the same campaign, we will not go further and write more about writing and optimizing a subject line because we already have a separate topic about writing a professional email subject line

Focus on your content

This step should have been number 3, because as they always say “Content is the king”. You should always focus on creating compelling and trustworthy content. Once you’ve established goals, the content for each email you send out is by far the most important part of the email, including the subject line. Your voice needs to be consistent, you need to have a call to action, and based on your audience segment, you need to know when and how to alter your content.

Also, In order to succeed in email marketing, your emails must be branded, must be revised carefully, and checked for any mistake, mistakes in campaigns can be costly and might affect your reputation either positive or negative, the reason is email campaigns are different than social media campaigns when it’s sent then it’s sent, you can’t pause the campaign to edit something and restart it again. If you want to know more about email content we have a post about email format checklist: 8 must-have sections for writing a professional email

Use Call to Action (CTA)

The purpose of an email marketing campaign is to attract people to your brand and raise conversions. Therefore, you must place strong call-to-action (CTA) buttons in the newsletter that urge readers to take a particular action as a result of reading. These buttons should stand out from the rest of the newsletter. Choose a color (on-brand, of course) that contrasts with the other colors in your template, then size the button so it's both visible and appealing.

There should be an element of urgency and benefit to recipients in your CTA, and you can use the button to convey it. Consider using specific, action-based phrases like "Call now" or "Get this look" to make your offer more compelling.

Never send a campaign without testing

while successful campaigns can bring you full joy, you can’t imagine what failing campaigns can make to your business and how they can dramatically negatively affect your business, and that’s why is step will go with you from the first campaign to the very last one as it’s easy to slip up every once in a while.

Maybe you forget to add in an important link or make an embarrassing spelling mistake right in the subject line. Unfortunately, there’s no Back button with email as we said in the Focus on your content step, so always remember to send yourself or a staff member a Test Email before sending it out to your entire list.

Building success is very hard but destroying it is as easy as throwing a bomb.

Check your best time for sending

When you’re ready to send out an email, timing is an important factor to consider. Every audience is different and the best time to send will differ based on who’s on your email list. Some of the email marketing tools provide you with analytics in email report that includes email open time and calculate the average time in the day for email opens that help decide on the best time for sending emails, you can also create a consistent sending schedule and stick to it. For example, if you send out a newsletter on the first of every month, your audience will come to expect it in their inboxes.

If you do decide to follow a set schedule, tell people at the point of sign-up. Your subscribers will know when they’ll hear from you next and you can schedule your message to send based on your established schedule.

Analyze and optimize

Once you click that send button, a new journey of analyzing and optimizing begins. Email marketing doesn’t end with clicking this send button. You will want to track your open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rates, etc., and work to improve over time.

If you want to see real results from your email marketing, you need a strong understanding of how each email performs so you can make improvements and learn more about your customers and subscribers.

Spending a few minutes in your email reports will tell you valuable information like who opened your email, who clicked on specific links, and what information was the most interesting to your readers.

While it’s important to know how engaging your campaign messages are, make sure you’re tracking actions that happen beyond your emails. How many clicks to your donation page are translating into real donations? What is the total amount of funds raised from a single email?

These are the types of questions that will show you the real impact of your marketing efforts.

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Ramy Samaan

PrimeCode founder, FastDeliver founder, addicted to learning, building and developing apps, chess, soccer, and family time.