This is the ultimate guide to email advertising for small and medium-sized companies (SMBs).

Continue reading to learn how to launch email marketing campaigns and impress your top executives.

5 email marketing basics for getting started

This email-marketing guide has a list of five essential tips for email marketing. Skip ahead If you are familiar with email marketing and how it works.

1. Email marketing: What is it?

Email Marketing is a digital marketing strategy that supports every stage of the buying cycle. This includes creating brand awareness, nurturing leads, and driving repeat sales.

2. Email marketing: What is it?

Email marketing is about communicating the right message at the right time to get action. Email marketing can be made more effective by using personalized emails, great content, segmented subscriber lists, and segmented subscribers.

3. What does email marketing cost you?

Email marketing pricing depends on how many subscribers you have, their frequency, and the management choice. 

SMBs who partner with email marketing agencies can invest between $300-$500 per month.

4. Why invest in email marketing

Companies of all sizes love email marketing. There are many reasons why email marketing is so popular:

• Email marketing offers an average Return on Investment (ROI), of $44_$1

• Email marketing allows you to have direct access to your clients, both present and future.

• Email marketing offers personalization at a large scale such as first names and times zones

• Email marketing can be scaled easily, making it easy to automate and improve strategies.

• Email marketing gives immediate feedback via metrics like open rates and clicks hyperlinks

While it may be time-consuming to develop your initial email strategy for your company, it can prove to be a valuable tool in your business’s growth. It is also possible to quantify the impact of email marketing.

5. Who should use email marketing?

Email marketing should be a priority for all businesses. Any company can convert its subscribers into clients using email marketing.

These techniques can be used to grow your email list and increase your email’s value.

• Email Marketing: What is it?

• How Much Does Email Marketing Cost?

• Why Invest in Email Marketing?

Email Marketing 101: The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing

This comprehensive guide on email marketing covers everything you need to know. 

• Setting your email marketing goals
• Choosing your email service provider
• Building your email list
• Segmenting your email list
• Designing your emails
• Creating your email content
• Writing your email subject lines
• Sending your emails
• Testing your emails
• Check your email performance
• Automating your email campaigns
• Maintaining your email list

Set your email marketing goals

Before you start to write your first email, you need to set goals.

These are some tips to help set your email marketing goals:

• Your goals should be specific, measurable, and attainable. Relevant. Timely

• Get to know your audience and understand their needs.

• Get the industry average open and bounce rates.

• Your company’s goals should be aligned with your goals. You could increase lead quality.

• You should have both in-house and freelance marketers

Based on your goals, decide how much of your marketing budget should be spent on email.

Choosing your email service provider

Your email service provider (ESP) or platform will influence your email strategy. These ESPs make it easier to segment, organize and send emails.

ESPs are available in many ways.

• Constant Contact
• Campaign Monitor 

These questions should be asked when selecting an email marketing platform.

• What tools will I need to succeed in the future?
• How many subscribers am I allowed to have?
• What is my budget?
• How do I integrate the platform with another tool, like Salesforce or OptinMonster?

This will help you save time and allow you to focus on the ESPs you need. 

Building your email list

Every email marketing strategy is focused on increasing its subscribers. There are many ways to attract new subscribers, but this email marketing 101 guide will focus on the best strategies for both businesses-to-business (B2B), and companies-to-consumers (B2C).

These are the best ways to create an email list

• Downloadable resources. Ebooks, whitepapers, and other PDFs are available for download to increase subscribers. 

• Discounts: Another effective way to increase your subscriber base. Site visitors often receive a code from ecommerce companies to sign up for their email list. This could result in a high unsubscribe rate.
  
• One-time events. Events like webinars, consultations, and pop-up shops can all lead you to email sign-ups. 

• Interactive features – A simple discount wheel or quiz can get people to sign up for your email list. You can also segment users based on the quiz data and send them relevant emails.

These best practices can help you grow your email lists, no matter how many tactics you use.

• Each offer and resource must be relevant to your audience
• Quickly send the event, coupon code, or resource via email
• A double opt-in will increase the quality and quantity of your email lists.
• Limitation on the fields users can complete to sign up

To grow your opt-in list, you’ll need to create a plan. Next, you will need to brainstorm the opt-in strategies that you will use to grow your list.

You’ll also need to make a decision.

• This offer will appear anywhere it is needed, including on your blog posts or product pages

• This offer specifies whether the customer will receive $10 off either their first or second order.

• An offer will be displayed when the user leaves your website.

• This offer is open to everyone, not just subscribers.

Third-party tools such as OptinMonster are the best for creating a customized solution for customers. OptinMonster can help you gain new subscribers while you create it.

Segmenting your email list

Email list segmentation is an important part of email marketing. This allows you to personalize your messages and not have to address people by their first names.

For example, you can segment subscribers by:

• Localization
• Interests
• Age
• Gender
• Behavior
• Birthday month
• Open rate
• Shopping cart

You don’t have to send an email about the sale. A segmented email with 25% off your next candle can be sent to people who are interested in soaps vs candles. Getting the data is the trick.

Companies often only have the first and last email addresses of subscribers to acquire subscribers. Take a look at

• Which links are clicked in users’ emails?
• Users open your email messages
• Which products are subscribers adding and removing from their cart?

Conversions by email subscribers can help you make better predictions about what type of content and promotions they want to receive. This will help you improve your email marketing results.

Designing your emails

The design of your email will impact whether people respond to your call-to-action (CTA), or if they stay subscribed. 

These best practices can be applied to all routes.

• Use colors that match your brand
• Use only one or two fonts
• Design a mobile-friendly website
• Add visuals to support your email message
• Trust signals may be embedded in your email footer.
• Add an unsubscribe link to your email footer

You can have multiple email templates depending on your email marketing strategy. One email template might be for abandoned shopping cart emails and another one for limited-time promotions.

Creating your email content

Excellent content is vital for all emails, no matter how long they are. 

• What promises were we made to those who signed up for our email list?

• What are our target markets interested in hearing or learning about?

• How do we tailor content for these subscribers?

These answers will help you build a foundation for your emails.

For example, you could create a campaign that promotes advertising and sells limited-time products To keep your subscribers informed about important topics within your industry

These general topics can be used as inspiration:

• Announcements regarding products
• Promotions
• Recaps of Events
• Top social media posts
• Most popular blog posts
• Holidays such as Valentine’s Day shopping guide

Don’t over-plan. This will help you get the best results.

Be flexible with your content. You need to have a solid foundation.

• Break up your text with bullet points, visuals, and paragraphs.

• Include your CTA. Register for your webinar, or view your on-sale products.

• Use images or GIFs to describe your visuals with alt text

• Keep your word count under 400 words. Data can be experimented with as you collect it.

• Proofread your email content with a tool like Grammarly.

It is important to pay attention to your audience when email marketing. They won’t buy from you if they don’t think the same way.

Pay attention to your audience and what they want from your emails.

Write your email subject lines

Subject lines are an important topic in email marketing 101. If you can’t get people to open your emails, your email marketing efforts will suffer.

These best practices can help you get more people to open your email.

• You should have at least 5-10 options
• Subject lines must not exceed 50 characters
• Use proven subject line formats like listicles or how-tos
• Include a coupon code or organizing tips in your email.
• Add time-sensitive phrases like “Today only”
• Personalize your site by adding a user’s name and address

It may be easier to create your subject lines before creating your content. This depends on your workflow. 

Sending your emails

Email sending is an important step in email marketing. Email marketing tools make it simple to: 

• Select which segments should receive your emails 
• Select which segments you don’t want to receive your email
• Choose the time you would like your email to go

Make a list such as this to ensure you get the best email results.

• Make sure the subject line is correct

• Check the content for typos, broken links, and mobile issues

• Make sure the email footer contains a working unsubscribe link

• Send a copy of your test copy to your email and you’ll be able to view it on either your desktop or your mobile device.

Once you’ve completed the checklist, schedule or send your email.

Testing your emails

Email marketing 101 is incomplete without testing your email campaigns. You will eventually have enough subscribers to test your email messages.

Email testing lets you experiment with your:

• Send times
• Subject lines
• Email content
• CTAs
• Landing pages
• Audience segments

These data can help you improve your email marketing campaigns. Many ESPs offer email testing options, such as A/B tests.

You might need to upgrade, depending on which plan you have for email testing.

It is crucial to evaluate the potential benefits of a particular email service provider before you make a decision.

These are the best practices for Email Tests:

• A minimum of 1000 subscribers is needed to create an audience
• For bigger changes, go bold.
• All email campaigns should undergo A/B testing.
• Choose which metric (like opens or clicks) will determine your winner

How do you measure your email performance

An important skill in email marketing is the ability to measure your email performance. This will allow you to show your company decision-makers how your email strategy has affected them.

• Rates open
• Click through rates
• Conversion rates
• Rates for bounce
• Unsubscribe rates
• Spam complaints

These metrics are not only useful for your company’s top executives but also for you. Maybe you will spend more time brainstorming topics or revising your Content Strategy to make your content more interesting for your readers.

These metrics can help you gain a better understanding of how subscribers add value. If you are looking to increase the impact and value of your emails, this is not the way you want.

You should be able to do this with your email marketing platform. Campaign Monitor will provide a summary of each email’s performance which can be used for assessing your performance.

These parameters add tracking information to URLs. Google Analytics, a website analysis tool that allows you to see the impact of emails on websites, can be used as well.

See how much of your website traffic is coming from email. This report can be used to show decision-makers the impact of your work on the environment. 

Automating your email campaigns

What do you do after you’ve learned how to start email marketing? Learn how to automate your email marketing efforts by using user actions. 

• Complete a purchase
• Shopping cart abandoned
• Register for an event
• Click a link

Automatic emails save time and allow you to send the right email at the right time To remind someone who has abandoned their shopping cart,

This task will require you to use your email platform, as well as other email marketing basics.

Automated journeys can be created using many platforms. For example, someone might enter the segment “Closet Organization Webinar”. After they have entered the segment, they start receiving personalized emails.

Revenue recovery is directly affected by automation like abandoned shopping cart reminders.

Maintaining your email list

It is great to reach milestones such as 1000, 10,000, or 100,000 subscribers. Every email marketing guide will tell you the same thing: Get rid of spam emails and inactive subscribers. This will increase your reach.

• Reduce your expenses by investing in your most valuable subscribers to optimize your email costs

• Your company can create an email marketing list that is both high-quality and high-quantity.

• A/B testing can improve your results

• Improving your email deliverability

You can check the activity of inactive subscribers using your email marketing platform. They can be removed from your mailing list if they do not reply to your emails.

Use an email cleaner such as:

• Kickbox
• NeverBounce
• EmailListVerify

It all depends on your business and your email marketing strategy. Most companies should eliminate spam and inactive subscribers every quarter.