In this post, we're going to be looking at email marketing for beginners. This post will cover the meaning of EM, how it can be done, the tips you need to follow to make it effective, and how AI plays a role in email automation.

Let's get started.

What is the meaning of email marketing?

Email marketing is a type of digital marketing in which emails are sent to people in order to promote a business or the products/services it sells.

Another way to define email marketing is: the type of marketing in which the promotional content is distributed via emails to the recipients.

There are other definitions available on the Internet as well, such as this one by MailChimp:

Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel, a form of direct marketing as well as digital marketing, that uses email to promote your business’s products or services.

Although the concept is quite simple and straightforward, there are different types of messages that it can be used to send. We will talk about those in one of the next headings.

What is the purpose of email marketing?

The purpose of email marketing is to let the recipients know about the offerings of your brand along with any news or information that can be useful for them. It is done for the same reasons that other types of digital marketing is done.

To mention a few of them, here are some of the purposes for which EM can be done:

• To inform your customers about a new product launch
• To announce a sale or a discount in the existing offerings
• To get feedback from your customers

And so on.

What are the types of messages sent in email marketing?

Now let’s move on to the types of messages that are usually sent in these campaigns. This is an important concept to learn in email marketing for beginners.

• New product or service release messages: These are the types of messages that are sent to announce a new offering
• Transactional emails: These types of emails are sent to recipients in order to provide them information about their transactional activity. While it is not technically “promotion,” it does provide helpful info to the recipients
• Newsletters: Newsletters are essentially emails that are written to inform recipients about the recent happenings and updates at a business. As the name indicates, newsletters are for providing news to the reader.
• Blog promotion: Another type of email that can be sent in an email marketing campaign is for promoting a blog post. This is something a lot of sites do. For example, Neil Patel often sends emails to subscribers to inform them of posts that they have published on their website.
• Abandoned cart emails: This is a special type of email that is sent to people who come to an online store, put things in the cart but leave without checking then out. An abandoned cart email reminds these people about the things that they have left in their carts and can reclaim.

What are the steps of email marketing?

How to do email marketing?

Now that we've looked at all the surrounding concepts, let's move on to the main part of our email marketing for beginners guide: the steps you can follow to actually do it.

1. Perform audience research:The first thing that you need to do is perform audience research. You essentially have to determine what people you’re reaching out and what sort of messages will appeal to them. Conducting audience research is important since it lets you determine things like the tone you need to keep in your messages, the subject, as well as the length of the overall email.
2. Plan your messages:After that, you have to plan your messages. You essentially have to create a blueprint of the email that you’re going to send. In this plan, you have to include how long the message will be, how many visuals or images it will contain, as well as the formatting and arrangement of the text, etc. Creating a plan beforehand essentially helps you get a clear direction of how to proceed during the writing process.
3. Write your messages with readability:Moving on, when the plan is all made out, you have to start writing the message itself. You have to maintain a tone as per the findings of your audience research, as well as other similar factors such as the length and style. One important thing to keep in mind when composing the messages is to make them readable and easy to understand. You should do this by using easy and casual words in the content, and by making the sentences as simple as you can.
4. Add visuals:Adding visuals is not a vital step of the process, per se, but it does make the email messages a lot better to look at. Visuals add color to the messages and make them enjoyable to peruse. You can add different types of images and graphics to your messages, such as a decorative banner or just some small icon-size images in between the paragraphs. If the image is informative and carries some actual data, it is even better.
5. Fix errors and mistakes:Once you write the email message, you should make sure that it does not contain any errors or mistakes of any kind whatsoever. Errors and mistakes, such as grammar and spelling issues, can make the message look amateurish. Your recipients will be picking out the mistakes rather than paying attention to the actual message.

Tips for email marketing

We’ve looked at the basic steps that you can follow for email marketing. But before we move on, we also want to look at some helpful tips that you can follow to make the most out of those steps.

1. Don’t use the same email for everyone: personalize them

This is something that you can probably understand from your own experience.

When you get email from a brand, you first look at the subject line, right? In that subject line, if your name is mentioned, you will automatically be intrigued and interested into what the message has to say.

On the other hand, if it starts with just some random statement or tagline, you’ll get a feeling of something along the lines of “I’m just one of the thousands that this message has been sent to.”

You have to avoid making the recipient feel like they are just one part of a huge marketing machine. Rather, you have to make them special so that they can understand the effort that you’re putting into specifically reaching out to them.

2. Be very specific about the subject line

The subject line is the first impression of your email. If the subject line is nicely written, it can get your recipient to open the actual message and read it through. The opposite happens if the subject line is poorly written or worse, shadily written.

Some marketers think it is a good idea to write “You’ll regret if you don’t read this message right now” or something in the subject line. In a less innocent world, this would be a great way to get a click but if you do something like this now, it would make you look like a scammer.

So don’t do that.

Focus on making your subject line informative, descriptive, and concise at the same time.

3. Perform A/B testing

This is also an important tip that you should keep in mind when it comes to email marketing for beginners.

A/B testing is basically a way to experiment with different email messages and sending routines to see which one works better.

In A/B testing, a small segment of recipients is taken to represent your overall audience. Then, you can these send recipients different types of the same messages to see which one of them is the most engaging.

Doing this type of testing allows you to get insights on how effective your different emailing approaches are so that you can employ them correctly.

What the benefits of email marketing?

Email marketing has many different benefits. A lot of companies use it as their main marketing method thanks to those benefits. Let’s take a look at some of the upsides of this type of marketing before moving on.

It is a way to directly interact with your audience

One benefit of email marketing is that it allows you to directly get in touch with your audience. In methods like blogging, you basically put out content but the onus is on the readers to visit your site and read it.

But in email marketing, you bring the marketing content right to the inbox of your readers. This saves the recipients from making any effort on their own. All they have to do is read the message that you send them and take action.

It is affordable

Email marketing, thanks to the modern solutions, is not that financially demanding. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on it since there are free tools and software available on the Internet that can help you out.

For example, MailChimp is a popular email marketing platform that allows users to create recipient lists, craft engaging messages, schedule their emails, and manage the whole customer journey. There are different plans available on MailChimp, and there is also one that caters for free users.

It is scalable

Another benefit of email marketing is that it is scalable. In other words, just as email marketing can be used for an audience of a couple hundred people, it can be used for a few million users as well.

By spending money and by choosing the right resources, you can scale email marketing to meet your requirements.

What is AI email automation?

AI email automation is basically the process through which the process of sending email messages is set up to be done automatically without requiring human intervention. You can use email automation to send messages to your recipients at the right time, even if you don’t happen to be there yourself.

You can also use it to send automated replies to anyone who sends you a message.

The role of email automation in marketing is that it helps in saving a lot of time and it helps you work ahead of time. You can make messages at a certain date, and then set them up to be delivered a few days later.

In email marketing for beginners, automation can be a useful tool since it allows you to spend your time elsewhere while your messages are sent automatically.

Is email marketing effective?

Email marketing is very effective. Here are a few statistics to help you understand just how well this type of marketing can work. We have taken our information from HubSpot.

• The number of daily email users is 4,000,000,000 (four billion). This stat highlights the potential of email marketing and how it performed on a platform that is full of potential clients and leads.
• 37% of brands surveyed by the study are increasing their email budget. This also shows how people realize the efficacy of this marketing and are willing to spend more on it.
• Most marketers are in the practice of sending one or two emails a day. A percentage of 12% send one email per week.

Conclusion

That is all that we're going to include in our email marketing for beginners guide.

Email marketing is a useful marketing technique that has a lot of potential, provided that it is done right. In this post, we've looked at some tips that you can follow to perform it well as well as the raw steps that you need to stick to.

Using AI solutions for email automation is a smart way to be more productive in your campaign. We have also mentioned how you can do that in the post above.

If you liked this post, be sure to check out the other blogs that we've published, such as this "What is content marketing" article.

Frequently asked questions about email marketing for beginners