Email marketing is one of the best tools to reach the decision-makers directly, here is an easy guide on how to do email marketing step by step
When we started GreatWorks, my target customers were new to me and we know it’s going to take some time to build the relationship and business
In the first 3 months, I wrote sales blogs, sent them in emails, and words spread, but still, there was no sign-up, and no money is coming inside.
My savings were depleting my family pressure was mounting, The situation is, I can go a maximum of two more months,
I was so frustrated, I came to a point, do I need to continue, or go back to work,
One fine morning I got a reply mail
The message said
That’s the turning point we signed up for our first commercial engagement at a decent rate, not only that, the customer gave me confidence that my service is much needed here
And, after that, there was no looking back
How this has happened
email marketing
For all those who say email marketing is fade, it won’t work, I can prove them wrong, I am a living example, I have got clients, and I am getting clients.
I have sent at least 5 lac emails through campaigns, and with that experience, I can say email marketing gives the best ROI compared to any other marketing channels. I don’t want to boast, we have made crores of rupees through email marketing but for sure it has given its best returns
Email marketing has given me the breakthrough, if we know how to use it wisely,for sure it will give results
So how to start an email campaign, stay with me I will take you step-by-step and guide you
First, let us see for whom email marketing will work:
Predominately email marketing works for B2B companies and in some cases for B2C companies to send promotional offers to known customers
What is the Pros and cons of Email marketing, let us see quickly.
I, love email marketing because we can directly access decision-makers, no other marketing medium can do that for you. Second, email has its reputation, still, emails are used as a serious business tool, third, it is not mixed-up with personal things like Facebook or Twitter.
The negatives are it’s not a viral tool like YouTube, we cannot understand what the other end reaction is like a FB or YouTube comments
Convinced, So how do start and do email marketing
First things First:
Step-1: Set up a corporate domain
To do email marketing you need a business domain or a dedicated email ID. It’s as easy to set up, just ask any of your computer vendors, and they will be able to help you out in setting up an official email ID, if you have a website it’s easy to ask them to set up email IDS.
The email should be like: yourname @yourcompanyname.com
You can sign up with email service providers like Zoho, Rediffmail.com, or Google, and whoever suits your budget, sign up with them.
Wait, don’t jump into sending bulk emails at once
Before doing large email campaigns, start sending in small incremental numbers like 10- 15, 20 -25 emails, and so on, this is to warm up your domain, there are spam filters watching, if is there a flurry of emails coming out from a new domain, if they notice then it will be marked as spam, so to avoid the blacklisting, warm up your email ID and domain
Step 2: Collecting email database:
Consolidate all the email databases in one place in an excel sheet
The email template will look like this
- First Name
- Last Name
- Email ID
- Company Name
- Mobile number
- Tags < Business category, Locations, Business groups > example you can tag all the real estate owners in one place so that when you want to send emails specifically targeting Real Estate owners it will be easy to target them,
Ensure the columns a- d are mandatorily are filled in
Cleaning up the email IDs:
If you get too many bounces, the service provider will block the account, so before start sending the emails, the ids need to be verified.
To verify the quality of emails there are few tools, some of the tools available in the market are
These tools give free options up to a limit, beyond that you need to pay for the subscription.
If you think this is too much of a job then
Here is a tricky way you can try, create a test campaign tool, and send all the emails through tools, the tool will give the bounces, now do an export and bring the valid email to the primary tool. For example in one campaign we used Zoho as the primary tool and created mailchimp account to test the validity of email IDS
Now you have cleaned up email IDs.
Step-3: Choosing the email tool:
Though there are several tools, my recommendations are with Zoho Campaign. I recommend Zoho only for one simple reason; they have a telesupport in Tamil and available in Indian timings.
There are other tools that I used, which are equally good like:
These are top email-sending tools that are similar in user interfaces so you can switch between these tools easily.
All these tools give a free plan up to a certain limit. Zoho gives 2000 email contacts per month, however, the free plan will have their watermark logo, so if you don’t want a watermark to go for the paid plan which starts from Rs.800. We are not an affiliate to any of these companies. So do your research and narrow it down to one tool and also have one more provider as a backup for testing purposes.
Beginning the campaign
Upload all your contacts with tags
Now the system is ready and next, we come to the important stage.
Step -4 Setting up the Objective:
What is your email campaign objective? State that clearly, usually the following 3 objectives work well in email campaigns
- Giving valuable information to your clients
- Scheduling appointments
- Driving Traffic to your site or landing page
Anything else apart from these objectives is not producing good results like sending complete information over email, or product brochures, lengthy emails etc. …
Once you made the objective clear, you can draft the content accordingly, the best-performing email is between 60-80 words with a clear call to action, anything beyond this is not working.
A piece of advice, don’t try to sell over email and don’t give too much information, emails are just for conversation beginners, not a salesman.
Sending out the first email
Choose the template from the campaign tool
My recommendation is always to go for simple text-based templates; the nice-looking graphical templates will get easily caught in the spam filters. If your domain is popular and customers are regularly getting emails from your ID then try graphics, else use plain text, the open rates are better with plain text.
Here is a sample template, please refer to the other blog on how to write effective emails
come let’s analyze why this kind of email works well :
Hi <Customer Name >,
Congratulations on <company name > on your recent win you mentioned on your Facebook page. Your success story is inspiring and shows how focused you are in winning deals.
<Cust name > we GreatWorks help business owners like you to win more deals like that .
I am not sure if you already use email marketing to grow your leads, if not could we set up a brief meeting to discuss how to generate quality leads and grow your business 3x times?
Let me know your suitable date and time
Thanks,
Ramesh. P
Cell :9841052321
What you see within parenthesis < > is the insert tag which the email marketing tool will automatically pick up the details like the name, company, etc from the database.
Now let’s analyze
The above email is around 80 words, which is quick to read, and still conveyed our intent with a clear call to action. (CTA)
Then the next important thing is on the subject line, around 70% of emails get opened based on the subject line
Example of subject line: <Customer name > I saw your success story on Facebook and want to appreciate it.
In the above subject line, you can see the personalization; it is highly targeted to the recipient
Coming to the main body, the first paragraph indicates to your customer that you are personally interested in customer success and connected on a human-to-human level, not like a bot
Second Paragraph: create an interest to the reader by asking whether he would be interested in more sales, who says no
Third Paragraph: “I am not sure”- indicates to the customer that you don’t know everything, and asking for help, this tells the customer that you are not too pushy
Then you move to a clear call to action
Fourth paragraph: a simple CTA for the customer to act. You can go more specific also, like will Thursday between 3-5 PM works for you
Then have your signature with mobile number and email ID.
Some marketers use variations to find out which email get high open rates
Use A/B testing:
The idea is to have two different contents and subject lines and send them to different targets, check which one is gaining traction. Based on the best open rate use the template .
Now the job done,
The campaign tool will give you a report of opens and clicks, I am not a fan of open rates, it’s a vanity metric. The metric I always relay is the reply email from a customer saying I am interested
We talked about the best practices so what are all the Worst Practices:
- Sending email only once and expecting results,
- Using email as a sale tool, sending your company brochure and load of information will not work
- Sending too many links in one email
Hope this article on how to do email marketing step by step is useful.If you follow all the best practices, the results are guaranteed.
Still, you want expert support, no worries GreatWorks consultants are here to help.
Click the contact form and send I am interested
