Email Marketing For Beginners
Oct 9th, 2020 by IssuuA lot has changed in the last 20 years. The iPhone was invented, we stopped launching shuttles into space, and we watch everything on our laptops now. But some things stay more or less the same. We still drink coffee in the morning, get in arguments over parking spaces, and listen to the Beatles. Now add to that list email marketing.
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of online marketing. Your parents might have done their fair share of email marketing back in the days of the dotcom bubble. But it’s still one of the most reliable. Nowadays, it’s one of the few forms of marketing where you have near-total control: who sees, what it says, and what it prompts are all up to you. You don’t have to worry about any algorithms tanking your click rates, or banner ads not showing up on people’s screens. It’s just you, the message, and the recipient. Here are some of Issuu’s tips for making the most of this reliable marketing strategy.
Building An Email List
You can’t send an email if you don’t have an address. Making sure the right eyes see your message is half the battle. So collecting them is, in a way, the most important part of email marketing. There are a couple ways to go about this, and we’ve outlined our favorites here.
As important as building an email list is maintaining it. Getting rid of defunct addresses, adding details as they come, and subdividing your list based on different marketing strategies are all smaller actions that, when done over a long period of time, can have an enormous effect on the efficacy of your electronic engagement.
Your recipients don’t owe you anything. They’re grabbing their daily croissant, or working at their desk, or picking up their kids. Why should they open your email? Why shouldn’t they just send it straight to trash?
Make no mistake: the inbox is a battlefield. And the only way to win in this arena is to have the best subject line. Not everyone can come out on top, but have the superior subject line, and you’ll be rewarded with that commodity which we marketing folk covet the most: clicks.
So how do you write a better subject line? There are two things to keep in mind when drafting. First, it has to stand out. You can achieve this by staying relevant, having engaging language, or being unconventional. But second, it has to promise something rewarding from opening the email. The trouble here is achieving these things without seeming cloying or desperate. It’s a thin line to have to toe, but a rewarding one.
Call To Action
Here’s the other half of the battle, though. Once you’ve got people to open your email, you have to get them to engage somehow. Whether it’s routing them to your site via hyperlink, or gauging interest with a survey, there are many ways to drive engagement through email marketing. We’ve outlined good content strategies for email marketing before, and those rules still apply.
Track It
Of course, one of the most useful aspects of email marketing is that, unlike many other forms of marketing, you can see just how well you’re doing by looking and evaluating all the sweet, sweet data that comes with it. There are a ton of email tracking services, such as YesWare and MailChimp that can help you with this.
Furthermore, if you choose to do email campaigns, automation and tracking services can provide you with powerful insights surrounding not only your marketing campaigns but your product as a whole. Finally, the Issuu Story Cloud can greatly help your email marketing efforts by acting as a home base for all of your publication’s marketing needs.
