how to start email marketing and make more sales

It can be tempting to simply sign up for an email marketing tool like Campaign Monitor and start sending your first campaign.

But before jumping in head first, it’s worth taking a minute to think about your goals and what you really want to achieve with email, as that will dictate the type of campaigns you send, who you target, the content you include, and how you measure success.

Email should be an important component of every digital marketing plan because of its effectiveness in driving conversions and building brand loyalty.

Marketing Plan Example — Sample Marketing Plan Template

The key to establishing the correct goals for your email marketing initiative is to align them with your company’s wider marketing goals & KPIs. Is the goal to drive new signups for your product? Does New lead for your sales team? More attendees for your event? More donations for your cause?

Email marketing is the single most powerful channel to reach your audience, and it can be used to achieve a number of different objectives, so it’s worth spending some time thinking about what you want to achieve with it before jumping in.

To help you identify what your goals should be, here are some examples of how Campaign Monitor customers use email marketing:

• BuzzFeed — The popular news and entertainment website earns revenue by selling advertisements on their site, so the key objective of their marketing team is to drive more traffic. With that in mind, BuzzFeed sends regular email newsletters containing links to stories on their website with the goal of increasing the number of visits they get each month and increasing the amount of revenue they generate.
• Rip Curl — The global surfing brand generates revenue through the sale of wetsuits, t-shirts, boardshorts, and other surfing goods. The goal of their marketing team is to increase sales, so they use email to promote new products they’re launching to try to drive people to their online or physical stores to purchase those products.
• UNICEF — The global charity organization provides humanitarian aid and assistance to mothers and children in developing nations around the world. Success to their digital marketing team is donations, so they use email marketing to reach out to their donor base, educate them on aid projects UNICEF is undertaking, and ask for donations.
• SXSW, Inc. — This lean organization organizes some of the most well-known events in the world, including the SXSW film, music, and interactive festivals held every year in Austin, Texas. The goal of their marketing team is to increase ticket sales and attendees at these events, so they use email marketing to keep subscribers up to date as new artists and speakers join the lineup.
• Soho House — This prestigious members-only club is a regular hangout for celebrities and media moguls around the world. The goal of their marketing team is to keep their member base engaged in the club and regularly using the facilities, so they use email marketing to keep their members up-to-date on events and functions they can attend.

As you can see from these examples, planning what you want to achieve with email before you start sending makes it much easier to identify what to send and who to send it to, and helps you create focused, high-performing email campaigns that will achieve your marketing goals.

Build your email marketing list

Now that you have established your goals and what you want to achieve from email marketing, it’s time to build your email list so you can start sending campaigns that those goals.

There are a couple of different ways you can build your email list, but the right method for each campaign really depends on the goals you establish in Step 1.

Import a list of known contacts

If you plan to use email to keep in touch with existing customers, then your email list can be built largely by importing your existing customer's details into your chosen email marketing tool.

For Campaign Monitor customers, you can either manually upload an existing list (from an Excel file for instance) or you can connect your Campaign Monitor account to the tool where your customer data lives (such as your CRM, accounting, eCommerce tool, and hundreds of others) and automatically sync your customer information into your Campaign Monitor account.

Before you import any contacts though, ensure you have adequate permission to email these subscribers. If you’re not sure, check out our Permissions guide or contact our support team as they’ll be happy to chat with you about permissions and uploading your list.

Build a new list from scratch

If you plan to use email to communicate with an audience whose email address you might not have yet, then you’ll need to start capturing email addresses and building your list from scratch.

Fortunately for you, there is a 2-part formula for building your email list that is followed by many of the most successful email marketers around. The formula is:

A valuable incentive + simple subscribe opportunities = large email list

While it is a little bit of a simplification, it’s also just logic. Regardless of how many subscribe opportunities you present to a visitor, it’s unlikely they’ll act without a valuable incentive. And no matter how good your incentive is, you still need to make it simple for people to subscribe if you want to get them to join your list.

The real question is, what makes for an amazing incentive? And how can you make subscribing to your list really simple and easy?

While this is covered off in much more detail in our email list building guide, here are some incentives you could use to entice people to join your email list:

• Compelling content — If you have a blog or produce content on your website, then offering to send your best content to subscribers via email is a powerful incentive for them to join your list.
• First-order discounts — If you sell goods through an online store, then offering people a discount on their first order if they subscribe to your email list is an amazing incentive. Not only does it encourage people to subscribe, but gives them an incentive to purchase as well.
• Free or express shipping upgrade — Offering free or upgraded shipping on your customers’ purchases is a great incentive to join your list. Not only is this offer highly relevant — particularly when offered during the checkout process — but being able to get a desirable item into their hands quicker is a powerful motivator for people to subscribe.

Furthermore, the other part of the equation is offering numerous, simple subscribe opportunities as this makes it easy for people to opt in. While the type of subscribe form you use will depend on the incentive you are offering, here are a few ideas:

YOU WANNA START MAKING PROFITS ON YOUR BUSINESS ONLINE CLICK HERE