Ep 55: Email Marketing for Noobs

I don't believe I've ever talked about email marketing on this show. So we're changing that today.

Hey everybody, Jim Lastinger here. Welcome to this week's episode of Marketing In 10. Hope you're doing well, hope the weather's great where you are.

So this show is nearly two years old now, but this is going to be the first time that I've actually talked about email marketing. Email marketing is a hugely important piece of your digital marketing strategy, and a lot of companies aren't doing anything at all with it. So today I want to talk about some of the very basic email marketing strategies for newbies.

So at a very high level, email marketing campaigns are all about keeping your current customers, leads, and prospects interested in your brand. If someone was a customer of yours three years ago, bought something and never heard from you again, it's very unlikely they'll even remember you. But if you email them consistently, then your brand is still going to be top of mind for them, and they are much more likely to make a repeat purchase from you. The ROI on email marketing is still much higher than any other marketing channel, and that's precisely the reason for it. It's absolutely free to market to people who are already on your list.

Now let's talk about some of the best practices. These are very high level, very beginner oriented best practices. So the first thing is you want to actually send emails to the people on your list. That seems kind of obvious, but lots of companies I've worked with have extensive email lists that they never send anything to. It's such a wasted opportunity. You want your contacts to be conditioned to get emails from you, so that when you send an important email with a call to action, or you're trying to sell something, they'll actually look at it. Sending more emails also helps with delivery. What happens is, when you rarely send emails, you'll likely have a lot more emails that are undeliverable to. And that can lead to your email getting flagged as spam, and less people actually seeing your content over time.

Another best practice is to segment your audience. I like to do this with tags in your email software. Most email providers will let you apply tags to a contact so that you can kind of keep them organized. Tags that I use all the time are things like current customer, former customer, free account. Various tags about certain topics; so you're interested in SEO or interested in Google Ads, bought this course, downloaded this ebook. All these are examples of good tags that you could use depending on what your business needs are. And when you have your audience segmented, you can send them much more relevant emails, which helps your engagement and deliverability. For example, if you want to offer a discount to former customers so that they come back and sign up again or make another purchase, you wouldn't want that discount being emailed to your current customers, for example.

And the last best practice I wanted to talk about today is testing. I always talk about testing. I think anytime in marketing that you're doing anything, you need to be testing it to see if you can improve, and you can do extensive testing in email marketing as well. My favorite thing to test, and the one that has the most impact, is the subject line, because you never know exactly what is going to get the most opens. I've sent emails where you would have one subject line with literally a 50% greater open rate than the other one.

Most of the email providers out there offer A/B testing built into the product, which is super helpful. When you're creating the email campaign, you specify that you want to try multiple subject lines, and the software will do the rest. It typically sends emails to a smaller segment of your contacts at first, and then it waits a few hours, and then it sends the winning subject line to the rest of the contacts. It's really simple, it's really effective, and you should probably do that with literally every single email that you send. If you have a very large list, say something like more than 20,000 contacts, you can even try sending more than two subject lines at a time and learn even quicker.

Next up, I want to talk about a few of the email marketing providers that I recommend. My all time favorite email software is MailChimp, of course. It works well for just about everybody. I also like Klaviyo; that one's K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, for e-commerce stores, and ConvertKit for course creators. I use all of those. If you need recommendations for your specific use case, then feel free to reach out to me, send me a DM, and I'll give you my recommendations. You can reach me at @JimLast, J-I-M-L-A-S-T, on social.

That's it for this newbie email marketer episode. I'll cover a lot more email marketing topics in the future, so if you have any specific questions that you would like for me to cover, just let me know. And I'll have show notes and a transcript available at jimlastinger.com/55. And if you would please take a couple of seconds to rate and review the show, so I can help grow the show and reach a few more people.

As a thank you for listening, I've created a free guide that shows you exactly how to manage your Google Ads accounts in 30 minutes a week. This is the exact process that I teach all of my coaching students, and includes everything you need to be able to run a profitable ad account for yourself. You can download this for free at jimlastinger.com/guide, that's jimlastinger.com/guide. And I'll have a link to this in the show notes.

That's all for this week's episode. I'll be back next week with another episode of Marketing in 10. Until then, take care. Have a great day. Bye.