How to get started using mail merge and other email marketing tools.
Whether you’re a small business owner who’s using a blog to generate brand awareness or you’re a freelancer trying to monetize your writing in the form of a blog, starting an email marketing campaign can help you gain readers and increase your revenue.
Though the benefits are undoubtedly worth the effort, email marketing can be a lot of work. Luckily, from sending a mail merge through Gmail to analyzing the success of your campaign’s call to action, there are tons of outreach tools designed to optimize email marketing like never before.
Trying to bring more traffic to your blog through email outreach but don’t know where to start? Here’s everything that you need to know about taking your blog to the next level with email marketing.
Developing a strategy
If you want to make your blog more profitable, the first thing you need is a gameplan. Who will you be sending emails to? What kind of emails are they going to be? How will you keep readers interested? Of course, your marketing strategy will likely change as your campaign progresses, but you still need something to start with.
Audience
In order for your email marketing campaign to be successful, you need to understand your audience members and appeal to them. Figure out who your audience is and what they want to see so that you come up with emails that will prompt them to be active subscribers.
So, how do you build up a mailing list? If you don’t already have one, adding an email subscription form to your blog is an easy way to start collecting email addresses from your readers. But you also want to make sure that you advertise some sort of benefit that comes along with subscribing to emails from your blog, like exclusive content or promotions.
Your intended audience members will determine the tone of your emails, the formatting, the CTA, and just about everything else that goes into your campaign. Image courtesy of Pexels.
Platform
Email marketing comes in many different shapes and forms. The type of platform you use for your campaign will depend on what your goal is. Here are a few kinds of marketing emails:
- Newsletters — Sending out a regular newsletter is a great way to keep your readers informed about your brand and alert them to any new products or services that you might be offering.
- Post promotions — Advertising your most popular posts of the week will remind your subscribers to check your blog and give them a direct link to posts that they might be interested in.
- Welcome emails — Welcome emails are designed to introduce new subscribers to your brand and familiarize them with your content and/or products.
Call to action
A call to action is a must-have for email marketing. If you’re not asking your readers to do something in response to the email, then what’s the point of sending it? You should be asking the recipients of your emails to look at a new post, follow you on social media, share your blog with their friends, etc.
Including a call to action button in your emails makes it so readers can be redirected to your site (and the material they’re interested in) in the click of a button. Image courtesy of ConvertKit.
Email marketing tools and services
Email marketing has become a necessity in the world of online business—which means that there’s are plenty of tools and services that you can use to make the process as easy and efficient as possible.
Mail merge
Mail merge allows you to send personalized mass emails, which is exactly what you want in email marketing. If your email provider isn’t conducive to sending this kind of mass email, don’t worry—there are mail merge extensions that can be applied to even the most limited email platforms (yes, even Gmail!).
Design
Creating exciting, colorful copy that is aesthetically appealing is vital to your email marketing campaign. From standard images and videos to infographics and gifs, a visual design tool can help you create and incorporate these (seemingly) advanced features into your email campaign.
It’s important to remember that a lot of people read emails on their smartphones nowadays, so always make sure that you’re using responsive design in your emails—otherwise, they might not be compatible with mobile devices. Image courtesy of Pexels.
Analytics
Analyzing the results of your email campaigns is super important to understanding what works and what doesn’t. Tracking each campaign with an analytic tool will allow you to assess your success using metrics like click rates, open rates, bounce rates, spam percentages, and more. If you see that your open rates are low, you can use an email warm up tool to help your emails land in someone's inbox instead of their spam folder.
Get creative
Experimentation will most likely become your friend in the process of perfecting your marketing strategy. This means that you can’t be afraid to get creative and try new things. That being said, you can’t force it. If one tactic isn’t working, you need to tweak it until it does or move onto something else.
Email marketing is certainly a long game, but it’s also one that’s worth playing. The hardest part? Getting started. But with so many online tools out there, at least you have technology on your side!
