Learn Email Marketing: Get Started TODAY!

What an incredible response to my recent post about the importance of email marketing and also my free eBook with give away rights. I really love getting feedback from everyone because it tells me what I should  be writing about next. It is obvious from emails and messages I received that you want to know how to learn email marketing.

Just to stress the importance of email marketing again… Think about this, so someone arrives at your website right now and they really enjoy it. They don’t bookmark your website but they intend to come back tomorrow right? But do they come back? Chances are no, they won’t. The reason for this is that we visit so many websites every single day, even if we bookmark a website we often don’t bother going back to it.

How do you ensure that you can keep connecting with people that like your website? Yes they might connect with you on social media, but how can you encourage them to connect you on social media on your website? Not that easy is it?

The answer to this challenge is email marketing, get them to give you their email address and you have a way to connect directly with your readers whenever you want and send them to where you want them to go.

This makes email marketing one of the best tools you have, my advice is get started right now and make use of this powerful medium!

So let’s look at how to start email marketing. Here are the basic first steps

Step 1: Setup Email Autoresponder

Yes the very first thing you will need is an email autoresponder. Trust me on this, you can’t just email them any old way. You need to subscribe to a service.

If you are not sure exactly what an email autoresponder does keep reading and you will find out.

My recommendation here after searching online and checking out numerous services is Aweber  Sendpulse – check out my review here. And yes I changed my recommendation because you get so much more with Sendpulse and for so much less. You can even have a free account up to a 2500 subscribers! Unlike Aweber where the free trial is one month.

Yes you can try and get away with a free service like Mailchimp, however they don’t offer the same powerful features that Aweber does. Remember that the more you can automate this process the more free time you have on your hands to write content and market your business.

Sendpulsee will allow you to automate this process beautifully. They also regularly send training, tips and tools to help you market your business. Check out this training video at the bottom of the post!

Customer support is excellent and they regularly help me out in live chat on their website whenever I get stuck!

Step 2: How to Build an Email Marketing List? Offer a free gift!

So you want to build your list right? What will make someone signup? Yes I have had a few people subscribe without offering anything or even trying to make it look appealing but this will be a very slow process!

Offering your readers something in exchange for their email address is the easiest and most effective way how to build an email marketing list!

The question now is what to offer and how to get this.

My personal opinion is to create your own downloadable product to give away. Of course this can take time and you really want to get started as soon as possible. You can search online for free eBooks with give way rights and use that in the meantime.

If you are in the make money online niche feel free to use my eBook and yes you will need to give your email address, see how easy it is? Not only will you receive my eBook you will receive tips on how to market your online business. Go on I know you want to!

Grab it in the subscribe form in the sidebar!

You can have multiple lists which is great. Perhaps you have a few websites and different niches so you need to have separate lists. You can also have different lists for one website niche.

You want your audience to read your newsletters and to take action on them. You want them to click through to your website, read your content and at some stage convert from being a reader to a paying customer.

If you can send highly relevant information to each reader you will be able to better serve your audience. In this way you can have a number of different lists that target different audiences.

Think about what you can do with this!

Step 4: Setup sign up forms for your lists

You can design multiple sign up forms for use on each list. I suppose now you are wondering why you would want more than one sign up form?

Well here’s the thing, you would want a sign up form that is in a widget on your website so your readers can sign up no matter where they are on your website right? Then you will want to add different forms within some of your posts like I did in this post. Since this post is on a certain topic I can tweak it a bit to make it more appealing to you. You can also make this sign up form for a different list related to the type of content you have written here.

You can also monitor how many times each sign up form has been viewed, how many subscribes and unsubscribes each form has and the conversion rate. This means not only can you see how well a specific sign up form converts, but it can also give you some insight into how relevant you readers find my post. If your readers trust you and find your post valuable they will be more likely to sign up.

You can use the same sign up form on numerous posts and in this way see what content converts into subscribers.

If you don’t know this information already I am sure you are getting quite excited already… keep on reading it gets oh so much better!

Step 5: Set Up a Blog Broadcast

This is a great feature that you can set up. This entails linking your email autoresponder to your website so that every time you publish new content it gets sent straight to your subscribers without you having to do a thing.

You can choose to have your posts sent to your subscribers as soon as they are published, on specific days of the week or month or even when a certain number of new posts have been published.

See what I mean by exciting? How much time and energy will this save you in your marketing efforts already? It only takes a few minutes to set this up and it will keep working for you on autopilot!

Step 6: Set Up Welcome Series Emails

This is the part that I am loving right now and I think this is one of the most valuable part of email marketing! With a little bit of effort using this feature you really have the ability to convert your readers into customers.

Ok so most people don’t buy something the first time they see it right? They need to trust you first. But how can you create trust with a once of visitor? Not easy at all!

BUT with a series of emails you can build a real relationship with your readers, you can engage with them and build trust over a period of time.

So how this feature works is that you set up a series of emails that will be sent in a certain sequence over a period of time. So when they sign up they will for example receive a welcome email, then a few days later they will receive the next email in the series and so it goes on.

This gives you the opportunity to send each reader exactly where you would them to go and when.

Once again this will take some time to set up but once you have put the effort in, this will keep working for you on complete autopilot! Yes remember how you keep seeing all this BS online about make money on complete autopilot? Well this is not BS once your list starts growing and you have set everything up this will really start making you money on autopilot.

This is the reason why I suggest you get started right now! The sooner you get started the sooner this process can begin.

This is one thing I keep kicking myself for, not starting with email marketing years ago!

Step 7: Broadcasts

You can also send broadcasts other than your blog broadcasts and series emails as and when needed. So if you have a special running or maybe it is a certain time of year such as Christmas you might want to send a special broadcast to your readers.

Step 8: Analyze and Tweak your marketing efforts

One of the best things about Aweber is they have great reporting functions as well as testing options. They make it so easy for you to check and see what is working and what is not.

So for example you can analyze your entire email series and see which emails do well and which ones need to be removed because they have too many unsubscribes or are not opened at all.

You can also do split testing to see how different sign up forms compare and tweak them to perfection for the ultimate number of subscribers.

So I will be leaving this topic here for now, there are so many exciting things to share but I don’t want to overload in one post!

What is your experience with email marketing? Please give me some feedback in the comments, as always I would love to hear from you. 

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