Email Marketing Simplified: A 2021 Guide To Sending Campaigns

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Email marketing has been around forever, and for good reason. Going into 2021, it’s still the most effective way to connect with your potential audience. In fact, over 103 billion articles come up when you search on “How To Run Email Marketing Campaigns”! Unfortunately, most of the articles are complex and repetitive.

That’s where we come in. This guide will take the complex world of email marketing and simplify it. Our goal is for you to read this article and launch your first campaign within five business days.

Why Email Marketing

As we mentioned earlier, there are billions of articles on email marketing. Each article will have its own complex research that tells you to start today.

We’ve taken the top 3 reasons from our readings of such articles and laid them out for you here:

1. Easy To Build — Every email marketing service has its own builder for you to use. If you want a template to start they offer those as well.
2. Affordable — With some service providers you won’t have to break the bank. MailChimp currently offers a free plan for $0/month for up to 2,000 contacts!
3. Effective — Email marketing is one of the most influential ways to encourage buying. Fifty nine percent of respondents say marketing emails influence their buy decisions (1).

(1) Survey conducted and documented by Opt In Monster (www.optinmonster.com)

Creating A Successful Email Campaign

Before you send your first campaign you will need a few things:

1. Email Blast Service
2. Email List
3. Email Design

Choosing An Email Blast Service

Researching each email service provider will take some time. If you don’t want to invest a lot of time in finding the right service we have two options for you:

If you’re a beginner…

Start with MailChimp. We’ve been with MailChimp for a long time and it’s a great place to start because of its cost. You can get started with $0 and have the opportunity to email up to 2,000 people on your list.

Once you’ve master MailChimp and ready for the next level…

When you get to the point where you need to grow then take a look at ActiveCampaign. The price is more expensive but you’ll receive advanced features that MailChimp won’t offer.

Build An Email Marketing List

Now that you’ve signed up for a service it’s time to upload your list. It’s important to know that you should ALWAYS use your list compiled of people that opted in.

If you build your list from buying names, you may do more harm than good. If people didn’t sign up for your emails, they may write negative reviews or place your emails in a spam folder. These two actions can hurt your brand in the long term.

So how do you build a list from scratch? There is an easy way to start your list and here is how.

1. Pick up your phone
2. Navigate through each contact you have and give them a call
3. Explain to them what you’re doing and that you would like to add them to your email database
4. If they say yes, add them
5. If they say no, ask for a referral to someone who wants to learn about what you do.

We know what you’re thinking. “This sounds like cold-calling and it also sounds like it will take forever.” Well, to be honest, you can consider it cold calling but we say it’s tapping into your loyal fan base.

Every phone number you have is a fan of yours. If they weren’t a fan then why do they pick up your phone call? They want you to win… and all you have to do is ask them for a few moments of their time. If you only get five emails to add to your list, don’t worry it’s five more than zero! If you get 100 emails or more, even better!

Send Your First Email

So you’ve finished building your list — that’s amazing! Now it’s time to send your first email. If you need help on setting up your first campaign we’ve provided links below:

• MailChimp
• ActiveCampaign

We also wanted to leave you with some simple guidelines to help:

1. A good time to send emails would be 8AM EST or 8PM EST.
2. Make sure your email’s dialogue sits at a business causal level when it comes to presentation.
3. Use 1–2 Call-to-Actions that align with the goal you’re trying to achieve.

Establish A Delivery Schedule

Success in anything comes from consistency. Your email marketing campaign is no different. Make sure you come up with a schedule and stick to it. Your customers will love you for it because they will grow accustomed to looking for your emails.

Here are some tips that should help:

If *you’re a B2C Business…

1. Look to send out emails close to your customer’s payday schedule.
2. Send out, at least, one email a month.

If *you’re a B2B Business…

1. Look to send out emails close to the end of quarters.
2. Send out, at least, one email a quarter.

Next Steps

Your next step should be to look at your calendar and schedule your next three days.

Day One

1. Research and choose your email marketing provider
2. Sign up for your service of choice

Day Two

1. Call every number in your phone book
2. Inform them on what you’re doing and if they want to join your email list
3. Ask for a referral if they say no

Day Three

1. Write your first email
2. Get it proofread by another set of eyes
3. Make sure the article is in business casual tone
4. Set up your email in the template of choice
5. Set up time to send the email out
6. Plan the next email out