Learn About Email Marketing: A Beginner’s Guide (2023)

Most readers will not spend a lot of time understanding what you’re trying to say. So, make sure to write your email copy easy to read. To do that, you have to:

• use short and brief sentences and paragraphs
• avoid difficult words and jargon
• use bullet points

Your readers will probably engage with your emails more if they are simple to read.

Use Storytelling as a Tool

Through storytelling, you can motivate and influence your target audience while establishing deep connections with them. Stories can easily captivate your readers and move them to respond to your message.

One of the most effective formulas in storytelling is the AIDA model (Attention-Interest-Desire-Action). Use this model to write an email copy that aims to get readers to take action.

Use Psychology for Your Benefit

You must take into account customer psychology if you want to communicate with your target audience. Knowing what people want to hear and see will make it simpler to produce content that appeals to them.

In the end, it will contribute to increasing conversions, sales, and the general efficiency of a marketing campaign. Here are some strategies you can use to improve the effectiveness of your emails:

• Scarcity & FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
• Simple Solutions
• Social Proof
• Foot-in-the-door Technique

Use these psychological strategies to enhance your email marketing efforts and increase sales.

Email Marketing Step 1: Start Building Your List

Comprehensive email lists can’t be created overnight, but there are effective ways to the traditional email sign-up forms for growing email lists. Start by creating a banner or form on your website that basically requests the visitors to subscribe.

Follow these tips on building your list.

1. Offer An Incentive

Marketers must make it clear to readers exactly what they will receive in return for their email because the average reader won’t give their email to just anyone. In short, offer them an incentive.

For example, Travel Supermarket has an email newsletter signup form that provides inspiration, tips, and deals, all of which are appealing to their target audience.

The Schuh website has an entire page dedicated to capturing emails. Having multiple sign-up options is a great way to ensure you never miss a potential subscriber.

Customers must be assured that when they sign up for receiving emails, they will get something valuable.

There are many ways to encourage people to join email lists by offering incentives. You must present something genuinely enticing if you want to make sure that your readers won’t refuse.

Some examples include special offers for first-time subscribers, coupons, downloadable assets, newsletters, and product updates.

2. Comply with Email Marketing Laws and Regulations

You should be aware of certain legal requirements, such as having and displaying a Privacy Policy, if you use email marketing.  Laws that affect email marketing include GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and CASL.

Do not be scared of the legal terms.

Following the rules means,

• obtaining valid consent when getting customer’s emails
• not using fake or misleading information
• displaying proper contact details
• including an opt-out request that is simple, easy, and accessible

Aside from those stated above, make sure to avoid being spammy.

Email Marketing Step 2: Create An Exceptional Content

As customers wish to receive emails from you, always remember that they are expecting something significant from you.

A successful email campaign needs to have a strong call to action and a consistent follow-up.

You have to follow the schedule you promised to send an email to your list. If it is weekly, do it once a week. If your readers are expecting daily mail, send them daily.

Failing to follow your schedule may annoy your list

The success of your email marketing efforts depends so heavily on the first follow-up email.

Send an Introduction Email

What makes a great introduction email (welcome email)? Here’s an example from Kate Spade. They use a simple but effective tactic in their welcome emails to express their appreciation to those who take the time to subscribe. They write “Thank You” in large, bold letters.

IKEA sends a welcome email that confirms your subscription and tells you what to expect. It also offers you to add an eCard for a better shopping experience.

Take advantage of the opportunity to create an automated welcome sequence that almost all email service providers offer.

Sending the first follow-up email right away will allow you to introduce yourself and let new subscribers know what to expect.

In your first email, it’s preferable to be detailed rather than brief and unobtrusive, but if you can pull it off, all the better.

Live up to their expectation. That’s what matters most.

Don’t Pitch Right Away

It is a fact that sending an email to your list is about engaging with customers and making sales.

However, you need to take time to do it correctly and it can be tricky. Do not surprise everyone with your pitches all of a sudden.

You have to establish rapport first and show value to your customers before making a pitch.

People can’t say yes to every of your request. Anyone, even you, who got nudges too frequently can be irritating.

So, make sure that you send pitches every once in a while. Provide a consistent message and check to see if the expectations you’ve set are being met.

Customize your pitches based on your customer’s needs and interests. Show how your offering would benefit them.

You won’t get anywhere if you blindly send messages with a selfish pitch. You will just lose an asset when your customers turned you down.

Writing a Great Email Newsletter

A great newsletter can ensure ongoing website traffic, webinar signups, other event registrations, and product sales. But newsletters can only be successful if they are perfectly designed and executed.

On the other hand, if you don’t remember signing up for the newsletter, that is an indication that it was a bad one.

This typically occurs when a business doesn’t send emails regularly or they added people to their list without consent.

To avoid sending a bad newsletter, make sure everyone remembers you by sending them regular updates. Sending at least once a month or better once a week would increase customers’ recall.

Your newsletter will be able to attract a loyal and engaged audience if they are relevant, valuable, and interesting.

Instead of trying to sell them something, use your newsletter to strengthen your relationship with the reader or customer.

Save the pitch for special announcements, offers, and updates.

Automate Your Email, But Stay Human

Let’s admit it—we cannot personally send emails one by one to a bunch of subscribers.

As your campaigns become more complex, it will become impossible to follow up with everyone constantly.

That is why top marketers use email automation.

Sending automated emails to a large number of subscribers at once can save you time. Therefore, there’s no need to perform the same tasks for each subscriber separately. The best part is that you can still personalize the content of your campaign.

Email automation is a useful tool for communicating with prospects because it enables you to send emails at a particular time you schedule. It has the capacity to send emails to the right recipients at the right time.

A reminder in automating email is to not forget the human touch.

Keeping the conversation natural is a good strategy for humanizing email. Personalize your email by addressing them with their first names.

Making automated emails more human is all about encouraging recipients to open and respond to them.

Email Marketing Step 3: Analytics and Segmentation

Now that you are aware of the fundamentals of a successful email campaign, we will now discuss how to polish your broadcasts and produce even better results.

Let’s take your campaigns to the next level by learning analytics and segmentation.

How to Use Email Analytics

Email analytics is a technique for monitoring how subscribers respond to your emails by keeping track of various metrics related to email delivery, engagement, and conversions.

The three most important email metrics you should know are open rate, click-through rate, and unsubscribes.

Let’s discuss each one in detail.

Open Rate

Open rate shows how many of your delivered emails are opened by your target audience. You can monitor user engagement and the success of your subject line using this metric.

The quality of your relationship with your subscribers is indicated by your open rates.

A low open rate means that you probably have a large number of uninterested subscribers. You must put your attention on managing expectations and delivering value.

Click-Through Rate

Click-through rates measure the subscriber engagement with each component of your email.  We can see which parts of the message were particularly effective, such as strong CTAs, standout hyperlinks, and powerful graphics.

You can determine how many of your total subscribers visit your website and ultimately convert through email by looking at your click-through rate.

Low CTR indicates that your message is either not being heard or is not being sufficiently targeted. In this instance, concentrate on writing better copy.

Unsubscribe Rate

The unsubscribe rate displays the percentage of recipients who choose to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

It includes both methods of unsubscription, including those made through the inbox’s built-in unsubscribe feature and those made through links in emails’ footers.

Aiming to keep it low will help you keep a respectable deliverability rate.

Email analytics are important because, if you pay attention, they offer very specific hints as to what you’re doing incorrectly.

How To Segment Your Email Marketing List

Email segmentation, also known as list segmentation, is the process of dividing up your email recipients into more focused groups so that you can send them the most relevant content.

Here are some strategies for segmenting your list:

• customer base (as opposed to leads who haven’t made a purchase)
• readers of newsletters
• everyday email list (in comparison to weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc)
• demographics including location, age, and job title
• topics that interest your readers, like marketing or sales

Dividing your list results in sending more direct and targeted content.

The right people will receive the right message and the wrong people won’t—these are the two main advantages of email list segmentation.

For example, you only broadcast to people who didn’t open your previous message (ask them why) or to people who expressed interest using segmentation (a second pitch)

How Much Is Your Email List Worth?

An email list is one of your most valuable assets no matter what industry you’re in. Learn how to properly do it, and it will more than pay for itself.

According to some stats, email generates $36 for every $1 you invest in building it. It will give you an ROI of 3500%. That’s incomparable to other businesses’ returns.

Imagine having a list of over 10,000 email addresses. That’s a significant number of sales without investing any money in paid advertisements.

It is simple to understand how losing several hundred subscribers could be damaging to your bottom line.

The 25 Most Common Email Marketing Mistakes

Email marketing mistakes are unavoidable for everyone. 

Email marketing can go wrong in many ways, from sending too many promotional emails to not using an autoresponder.

Here’s the good news. Every email marketing mistake you might make has a solution or a better way to do it.

Perhaps you have already made some of these email marketing mistakes and learned from them. Maybe some of these errors are new to you, which is great because you can use this information to avoid them in the future.

Email marketing mistake 1: You don’t write each email with a specific goal in mind.

Setting goals is essential for email marketing success. Before you write your email, make sure you have a goal in mind first. By doing that, you’ll become more productive and create amazing content.

Here are some email marketers’ goals:

• To add value and build trust with your audience.
• To establish authority by sharing stories about your expertise and experience.
• To build relationships by sharing something more personal, even vulnerable.
• To show appreciation to new subscribers or customers
• To make a sale by sending pitches.

Some emails may contain elements from more than one of the preceding categories. However, each should still have a single overall objective. A goal helps you stay on track while writing your email and gives your audience a clear idea of what you expect from them.

Most importantly, knowing your purpose in writing will make the writing process go more smoothly (and maybe even more enjoyable).

Email marketing mistake 2: You fail to optimize for mobile

Email is read more frequently on mobile devices than on any other platform. 

Luckily, the majority of email service providers generate responsive versions of your emails automatically. Responsive means the email will display optimally on the reader’s preferred device, whether a desktop computer or a smartphone.

Even if your email service provider generates a responsive version of your email, previewing it on a mobile device is always a better idea.

Email marketing mistake 3: You do not preview your emails

It is a simple task to preview your emails before sending them to your list, but many people don’t do it.

Utilize your email provider’s spell-check tool. Always remember that human eyes can miss things and our brains are not dictionaries. If your readers see numerous typos in your emails, they may not be impressed.

Send an email to yourself first to ensure everything looks good; there is a small chance that the preview in your email service provider won’t exactly match the email you receive, so it pays to double-check!

Email marketing mistake 4: You’re writing poor subject lines

Subject lines affect how many people open your emails.

Sometimes, it took extra minutes or hours to decide what subject line to use while writing emails. Even though they’re short, they’re the first thing people see in your email.

There are plenty of online formulas for writing effective subject lines, and one of them is to use the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). When you create an information gap — when you give people just enough information to make them curious to learn more — you can increase the likelihood that they will open your email to find out what they are missing.

Keep in mind that subject lines are essential, but only for getting people to open your email. If the content inside does not match the subject line, or if you appear to be bait-and-switch along the way, you will not receive any clicks on your emails, and you will also have some angry subscribers. They will cease to be subscribers soon.

Be creative with your headlines, but ensure that you provide value and give people what they want.

Email marketing mistake 5: You’re using too many subject lines

Sometimes, there is a tendency for you to overdo your subject lines. Maybe the tone of your subject lines makes your recipients feel threatened or forced to open your emails.

Avoid using ALL CAPS. Do not overuse exclamation points!!!!

According to the CAN-SPAM Act, a federal law enacted in 2003 to limit the flow of unsolicited emails into people’s inboxes, the subject line of an email must accurately reflect its content.

Remember, effective subject lines grab readers’ attention without misleading or harassing them.

Email marketing mistake 6: You forget to include any CTAs

This relates to having a goal for your email. What do you want the recipient of your email to do or think as a result of reading it?

An email without a call to action is like playing basketball without a ball – incomplete and purposeless.

A call to action (CTA) in an email is a prompt that requests recipients to take a particular action. Typically, this is the next step in the buyer’s journey. Some examples of them are:

• Register Now
• Shop Here
• Get Your 50% Discount
• Start My Free Trial

Every email you send should have a clear call to action for your readers to follow.

Email marketing mistake 7: You’re using too many CTAs in your emails

The other side of not using any CTAs is overusing them. This is typically the result of lacking a clear goal for each email. When you request too many actions in a single email, you dilute the message and create confusion.

Excepted are emails intended for informational purposes, such as email newsletters. You may have multiple internal and external links to articles and landing pages on your website. The purpose of the email is to inform recipients about a variety of topics, so you provide them with clickable options.

Email marketing mistake 8: You don’t put CTAs on their own line.

This is a simple error that, thankfully, is easy to correct. Your email CTAs should always appear on a separate line. Why? Because they will then stand out. They will be more likely to be seen and clicked on.

In addition, placing each CTA on a separate line helps avoid problems with “fat fingers” on mobile, ensuring that users click the correct button. 

Email marketing mistake 9: You’re not setting the right expectations

When people subscribe to your email list, they should be aware of what they agree to, such as the content of your email and the frequency of sending them your email.

People will be more responsive to your emails if they know what to expect and when to expect it.

An email sign-up form is the best way to set expectations with your audience. Ensure that your target audience immediately recognizes the benefits or values of signing up.

If you take the time to set and meet the expectations for your email list, you’ll be rewarded with increased inbox placement and audience engagement.

Email marketing mistake 10: You’re using your emails to sell too much

Email is an excellent medium for connecting with your audience and promoting your products and services. However, as with anything, it is possible to overdo this.

People will be turned off if you overpromote and oversell without providing sufficient value, insight, entertainment, and connection. They will unsubscribe, ignore, and possibly even report your emails as spam. None of these are desirable outcomes to pursue.

You can share tips and ideas with your audience to avoid overselling in your emails. Doing so can gain your customers’ trust and foster relationships with them. This will increase open rates and boost conversion rates.

Email marketing mistake 11: You’re sending too many emails

The average person receives approximately 44,000+ emails per year. Your audience is flooded with emails, and a single email may go unread if the recipient is too busy or overlooks it. That is why it is easy to understand why they ignore you or unsubscribe from your newsletters.

Customers should be excited to receive your email. Consider why they joined your email list in the first place—because they value the content you provide. It would be wise not to abuse their trust by sending an excessive number of emails.

As stated previously, set the right expectations for your audience during signing up.

Create a schedule before you launch your emails.

Email marketing mistake 12: You’re not sending enough or any emails

While there is a possibility of sending too many emails, there’s also a chance of not sending enough emails or any at all.

You will have a cold email list if you haven’t emailed them in some time. You inadequately nurture your relationship with your audience and poorly provide value through email because you are not sending enough of them.

When or if you try to revive your email marketing with a cold list, your emails may be roundly ignored or not delivered. That is because there are instances that the email address no longer exists, which causes you to have email bounce back. Furthermore, people have likely gotten used to not receiving emails from you and have forgotten that they signed up on your list. As a result, they will be surprised and confused why they are receiving your emails.

Clean the list first before reviving a cold email list.

When you send that first email to your stale list, you must set expectations for your subscribers. Remind people who you are, where you’ve been, and how often you’ll be communicating.

Email marketing mistake 13: You’re playing it safe

Maybe you’re afraid of upsetting readers and speaking directly to them. Consequently, your emails become dull, and worse, they won’t be sent to the appropriate targeted recipient.

Let’s face reality: regardless of what you do, people will unsubscribe from your list. The larger your list becomes, the greater the number of people who will unsubscribe when they realize your offer is not for them. And that is totally fine.

Playing safe also means not putting your personality in your emails. You end up sounding like someone else or no one in particular, just generic.

If you want to be noticed and remembered, be yourself.

When you show that you are vulnerable and genuine in your emails, others will feel safe being so, too. You will strengthen your relationship with your audience, which is the key to success.

Email marketing mistake 14: You’re not using an email service provider

This is for those starting an online business. You cut costs wherever you can, including email marketing. You also want to have more power over your email list. So you decide to manually send your emails. 

Why is this a bad idea? Here are a few things an email service provider lets you do that would be difficult to do yourself:

• An email service provider has built-in forms that make subscribing to your list and unsubscribing easier for people.
• ESP helps you analyze email performance. It can effortlessly track open rates, clickthroughs, unsubscribes, etc., as your list grows, which is a very complex task for you to do.
• You can easily segment your list. A well-performing email marketing has a well-segmented email list. Manual categorizing your email will take you a lot of time.

Your list will continue to grow. Utilizing an email service provider is an obvious choice.

Email marketing mistake 15: You’re using too many images

Your initial tendency may be to fill your emails with attractive, professional images that excite your audience.

However, using lots of graphics in emails can lead to trouble. Your emails may be more likely to be caught by spam filters since many spammers use a large graphic instead of text to avoid filters that look for spam keywords. Once spam filters realized this, they flagged emails with only images as spam.

Additionally, it is essential to remember that many of your email recipients may have images disabled. If your emails contain a large number of images and one or two of them fail to load, the result will be unimpressive. You will lose these clients if you do not have a backup plan.

Go easy on images and make sure your readers can find all the important messages in plain text.

Email marketing mistake 16: You’re not adding alt text to your images

If you want to use images, you must add them wisely. Every email image needs alt text. 

Alt text refers to the alternative text that is displayed alongside an image. It appears if an image doesn’t load or is blocked, so your readers won’t be staring at a blank page. The alt text describes what was there.

Alt text is also helpful for subscribers with visual impairments who can’t see images. Screen reader software reads alt text to them.

Best email marketing services let you add alt text without knowing the HTML code.

Email marketing mistake 17: You’re not segmenting your list

Email list segmentation is the process of dividing your email subscribers into smaller groups based on their age, location, status, and job title, among other factors, so that you can personalize your emails to each subscriber. 

Since the content is relevant to a particular group of recipients, segmenting email lists increases audience engagement.

A little segmentation will allow you to optimize your sending frequency. Determine which subscribers are the most active, and then segment your email list to exclude these power users. Thus, you can send them more emails without bothering the remainder of your list.

Alternatively, you can use segmentation to reduce the sending frequency for the inactive members of your list. With a re-engagement campaign, you may even attempt to convince them to open your emails once more.

Given that each group has unique needs, desires, fears, and concerns, it makes sense to communicate with them differently. 

Email marketing mistake 18: You’re not using autoresponder email campaigns

Automating emails is not just about sending welcome emails to new users or broadcast emails. It’s also about utilizing the autoresponder series.

An autoresponder is a series of emails that can be sent automatically in response to a variety of actions. 

For example, if someone downloads a free guide you’ve posted as a lead magnet, you can invite them to join your mailing list with the option to opt out. A few days later, you can send a follow-up email with specific recommendations or opportunities that relate directly to the free guide’s content.

If you configure autoresponders properly, your subscribers will receive the appropriate messages at the appropriate time without you having to send them manually.

Email marketing mistake 19: You’re making it too difficult to unsubscribe

This is a small mistake that can become big.

Some marketers make it hard to unsubscribe to grow their email lists which is bad for many reasons. First, making unsubscribing difficult will make people dislike you. They may report your emails as spam, which is risky.

It would be best if you made it easy to opt-out of email marketing. According to the CAN-SPAM Act, you must allow readers to unsubscribe easily or face penalties.

Let people leave your email list if they don’t want to. Each party will benefit, and your email list will have more subscribers.

Include an unsubscribe link in every email you send and make it visible. Don’t make people log in to unsubscribe; just give them a link. If you’ve segmented your list and have multiple autoresponders, newsletters, etc., provide the option to unsubscribe from the entire list, not just the newsletter or email type the person was reading.

Email marketing mistake 20: You do not monitor your metrics

Remember the goals you formed? Keep track of your progress. Not until it is too late should you alter your strategy. It may take multiple attempts to find a method that works. And what is effective today may not be effective tomorrow. Maintain an eye on your business’s metrics and continue testing new strategies to stay up-to-date on what works for your business.

To be successful with email marketing, you must monitor the performance of your emails. You must know whether recipients are opening your emails or if they are taking the desired actions, such as clicking on links to your sales pages and buying your products and services. Your email service provider allows you to track metrics such as open rates and click-through rates; you should utilize these features.

Email marketing mistake 21: You’re sending from a “no-reply” address

Human touch is one of the most important aspects of email marketing to keep in mind, as your subscribers highly value it. You can’t build good customer relationships if they can’t respond to your emails.

Customers seeking better experiences generally dislike no-reply emails. These emails are ineffective because there is no reason for not facilitating replies to customer emails.

No-reply email addresses are domain email addresses that can’t receive messages. If you send from one of these addresses, the recipient can’t reply, which can be problematic for your email list.

When you send emails to your subscribers and expect a reply, make them feel that they are actually talking to a real person. Use personalization to increase your engagement because that’s what people want. You should avoid sending no-reply emails because they waste opportunities for more meaningful customer interaction and negatively impact your business.

Email marketing mistake 22: You’re not following GDPR regulations

GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation, a comprehensive set of regulations enacted by the European Union (EU) and implemented in 2018 that tightened some laws pertaining to the data protection and privacy of EU citizens.

What does this have to do with email marketing, especially if you live outside the European Union? There is a good chance that your list contains individuals who reside in the EU.  GDPR has enforced some rules regarding collecting and managing personal information. And because email marketing requires collecting an email address, you are responsible for ensuring compliance with the law.

How does this affect you?

At the very least, you may need to request that your existing subscribers re-opt-in to your email list and revise some of your email signup forms. There’s more to it than that, and you’ll need to do your research, but your email service provider should have instructions on how to comply.

Email marketing mistake 23: You’re emailing a list you purchased

It may appear to save time in the short term, but it is a risky business strategy. If you purchase an email list, you jeopardize your email list’s status as your most valuable marketing asset.

Buying an email list is not illegal in and of itself, but sending unsolicited messages to people without their consent is illegal in many nations (think GDPR and the CAN-SPAM act).  By sending unsolicited emails, you automatically qualify as a spammer.  And people respond negatively to spam. They will mark your email as spam when it arrives in their inboxes.  Unless, of course, their email client classifies you as spam before you ever reach their inbox.

This will have a negative impact on your reputation, which will reduce the deliverability of your emails. Even worse, your email IP could end up on a blacklist.

In addition, any email marketing service to which you subscribe will reject your purchased list. Regardless of the legitimacy of your newsletter, vendors will not risk the reputation of their shared IPs for you.

Email marketing mistake 24: You’re waiting until your list is “big enough” to start

How do you describe “big enough”? People subscribe to your mailing list because they desire to hear from you. Why would you, therefore, leave them hanging?

Remember that the size of the list does not matter; what counts is how it is utilized. It is quantity over quality.

Once you have a few people’s attention, do not abandon them. Start building your email marketing strength. As time passes, your list grows, and your business develops, I assure you that you will never run out of topics to discuss.

Email marketing mistake 25: You’re not doing any email marketing

You’ve reached the conclusion of a lengthy email marketing guide, so I’m assuming you’re the type who likes to be fully prepared before beginning something new.

Regardless, suppose you have a business, and you’re not using email marketing to increase your target audience, build your authority, cultivate relationships with people, and make money. In that case, you’re missing out on a tremendous opportunity.

FAQs

What are the benefits of email marketing?

The benefits of email marketing include increasing audience reach, boosting sales, recovering abandoned shopping carts, and strengthening customer relationships. It is also one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies.

How do I build an email list?

Create an email list by providing a downloadable asset, holding a contest, or providing a free email course. Think about adding a banner to the top of your website to collect email addresses as well. By providing a downloadable asset, hosting a contest, or providing a freebie, you can increase your email list.

What email marketing regulations are there?

Email marketing is governed by a variety of laws such as the CAN-SPAM act in the US, the CASL laws in Canada, and the GDPR in the UK. If your business is legitimate and you’re sending legitimate email campaigns using a proper email marketing tool, you’re probably already in compliance.

What is email automation?

Email automation enables you to create complex email campaigns that automatically send emails in response to subscriber actions.

How do I segment my email list?

Use your email tool to divide subscribers into groups based on their interests, demographics, or whether they are customers or not. Send each segment its own unique messages after that.

Conclusion

Email marketing is a fantastic way to keep your company at the top of prospects’ and customers’ minds without the obstruction of your competitors. Your email marketing campaign can be very successful when executed properly and bring in customers.

First, keep in mind that you are a guest in your subscribers’ inboxes. You are just one click away to permanently losing their interest. Deliver value while being courteous and respectful.

Next, keep your word regarding your promises. Give people what they ask for and send emails frequently to meet their expectations.

There is no secret to increasing email automation. It all depends on what suits your voice and writing style the best.

Once you’ve mastered the fundamentals, you can advance to email segmentation and analytics. To deliver more helpful emails, start composing separate emails for each group.