Easy Email Marketing: Our 7-Step Guide to Everything You Need to Know

There are many advantages of email marketing for business owners:

You send different messages depending on what you want to communicate — this applies to your email marketing too.

Here are some of the most common types of marketing emails that are sent as part of a business’ digital marketing strategy:

This free course, aimed at beginners, is constantly updated by Ron to ensure it’s always delivering up-to-date value to new leads.

Ron also keeps any message to his leads less like a marketing email and more along the lines of an honest peek into his life.

Choosing and creating your lead magnet to draw new subscribers will depend on your niche and your audience.

Keep in mind how these two digital marketers have used other best practices and ensured their success.

Because it’s the first thing you see when you reach any of his pages, viewers are likely to drop their email addresses in hopes of a quicker fix than reading a full post.

We suggest that you choose one location for your form and keep it consistent across your site.

Your viewers are more likely to opt-in if you don’t crowd them with pop-ups — design it well, and your conversion rate could climb up to 28%.

This email immediately tells readers what’s included and puts that content in an order of importance to each reader.

They also include posts on hot topics like environmental awareness and online workshops to add value to their hosts’ (and readers’) lives.

Try doing the same with your emails by ensuring the content is topical, valuable, and easy to digest.

The greeting and general diction are cheerful and conversational, making the receiver feel like a welcome friend.

Try crafting a similar greeting in your emails to start your communications the right way.

While National Geographic sends around 38 emails per month, this particular sequence only appears in inboxes once a week.

We suggest you create a newsletter where you regularly send through new content on a set schedule that you stick to.

Even if readers are just skimming their inbox, the subject line and emoji will draw their focus and prompt them to open it up.

We tackle how you can craft the perfect subject line later in this post.

But first, you’ll need to find email marketing tools to help you create quality opt-in forms and send emails.

An email marketing service will not only help with great opt-in forms and email templates, but also:

Systeme.io is perfect for beginners and advanced users.

The best thing about systeme.io is that it’s more than just an autoresponder.

It's an all-in-one marketing tool.

There are a ton of email marketing features available on systeme.io:

The Freemium plan allows you 2,000 contacts with unlimited emails and all the features listed above — it’s a real free email marketing service.

The Startup plan allows you 5,000 contacts with unlimited emails and all the features listed above for only $27/month.

The Webinar ($47/month) and Enterprise ($97/month) plans allow you to increase the number of contacts to 10,000 and 15,000 respectively.

Sign up for one of our annual pricing plans, and we’ll throw in free migration on top of a 30% discount.

With systeme.io, your marketing efforts are completely scalable — whether you’re working for yourself or as a consultant for small business owners.

And even our Freemium plan gives you unlimited emails, so you won’t be paying for an expensive tool before you’ve even got an audience to sell your products to.

There really is no downside to this email marketing software!

Mailchimp is another great tool for people who are starting out.

They provide a Free plan for up to 2,000 contacts, with 10,000 sends per month.

This platform is a good option for small businesses, but other elements of the sales process might come at a surprising cost.

The more advanced features (such as automation) are only available on the paid plans, and if you want to combine your product sales with emails, it gets expensive.

Their paid plans range from $10/month to $30/month and offer a subscriber limit of up to 2,500 contacts.

Affiliate marketing has been outlawed on this platform, and there are loads of limits on your email marketing capabilities unless you’re willing to pay up.

If you want real freedom when it comes to your future campaigns, you might need to look elsewhere.

Mailjet is an email service provider used by more than 150,000 companies.

They offer a free version as well as paid options.

Mailjet’s free version allows you to send 6,000 emails per month with a daily limit of 200 emails.

The Essential plan starts at $15/month — for up to 15,000 emails — then increases as you want or need to send more emails.

While Mailjet is a capable email marketing software, some options such as marketing automation and A/B testing aren’t available on this plan.

The Premium plan does provide these features and starts at $25/month.

If you’re just starting out or want to test drive a platform before you buy, you may want to look at email service providers that come with a more all-inclusive Free plan.

Finding the right email marketing tool is essential to creating your first email marketing campaign.

Once you’ve found the email marketing software that’s best for you, you’ll need to start applying other tactics to get your message to your audience.

The average email open rate is 15%-25% but it depends on your industry.

The day with the best open rate globally is Tuesday for all industries.

Getting your emails opened doesn't have to depend on luck, having good deliverability can make all the difference.

High email deliverability (95% and over) is important because it means that almost all of your emails are not just arriving at the correct server but also in the intended inbox.

Your engagement with leads and viewers can directly affect this, because, without engagement, your messages are likely to be marked as spam.

No one opens messages in the spam folder — you’ll want to do everything you can to avoid it because it negatively affects your open rate.

Here are some of the ways in which you can get yourself a better opening rate.

Sending emails to your subscribers at the right time has a huge impact on whether it gets opened.

If you’ve chosen a good email marketing service then you can perform A/B tests to determine which time frames work best for your audience.

Or, better yet, check out our post on the perfect time to send an email.

What makes it effective?

Most people check their emails on mobile phones, tablets, or other devices — 55% of all traffic online is from mobile devices.

Optimizing your target audience’s experience is a sure way of increasing your opening rates.

Some alterations such as using a larger font and shorter subject lines will make your content easier to read on smaller screens.

Once you’ve made sure your formatting is perfect, it’s time to turn your marketing efforts to your email’s content.

The email is seriously effective because:

These email marketers went so far as to use humor throughout a successful email marketing campaign, even in the delicious and spooky images they used.

By making your readers smile or even laugh, you’ll convert a few out of sheer enjoyment and build a stronger relationship with them overall.

This greeting is full of familiarity and fun — a surefire way to get people reading.

Keeping a charming tone does half of the marketing work for you and establishes a relationship with your audience.

This kind of email makes readers feel like they are important and special, as well as targets their love of nostalgia.

Personalized experiences make people 90% more likely to follow through with a purchase — you want that positive effect on your online sales.

Take this one step further by offering a coupon to new followers when they follow that link — you’ll boost your online sales and see an increased click-through rate (CTR).

Depending on the email marketing platform you choose, you can add your affiliate program into the mix to maximize your email marketing efforts.

Creating the perfect email is in your hands now, but there are other snags that might negatively affect your deliverability.

Remember, your delivery rate is the number of emails that successfully make it to an email server divided by the number of emails you’ve sent.

Deliverability takes this one step further by measuring your email sends against how many actually make it into inboxes.

Some platforms have better delivery rates than others, so it’s important to take these metrics into consideration when choosing one.

For example, at systeme.io we promise excellent deliverability if your email marketing practises are compliant.

Here’s what the systeme.io support team advise to improve your email deliverability:

Avoiding spam filters might seem like a no-brainer, but there are also some requirements you need to fulfill on your end.

Depending on where you live, and what email service you use, you might need to follow the CAN-SPAM act rules.

Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) is a law that sets out the rules for commercial emails.

These are:

Checking your emails before you send them seems like an obvious step, but we couldn’t leave it out.

If you let small mistakes slip through the cracks, your brand image could be harmed.

Here are a couple of ways to make sure your brand stays spotless and error-free.

Now that you’ve implemented these email marketing strategies, you’ll want to measure your email campaigns’ success.

Check these metrics regularly to see whether your marketing messages are doing their job.

This is the percentage of people that clicked a link in your email.

This metric is one to watch because you could be losing out on converting leads if your click-through rate (CTR) is below average (7.45%).

If the link to your online store is broken or your ecommerce store is not well optimized for mobile devices, it will affect your click-throughs and conversions.

A low CTR could also indicate that your CTA buttons are ineffective and need to be reworked.

Email marketing is a powerful tool in your marketing toolbox.

While there are tons of email marketing platforms to choose from, it’s easy to see who the front-runner is.

Systeme.io really is the best email marketing service available.

Once you’ve opted in with our Freemium plan, use this guide to help you set up your email campaigns and increase your conversion rates.

Sign-up for free today — here’s to the success of your future email campaigns!