How Do I Get Started with Email Marketing? Beginner's Guide

Are you overwhelmed by the idea of email marketing? Do you have questions like how do you do email marketing without coming off as spam? How do you use email to get new customers or members? How do you create emails that people actually want to read? Email marketing is a powerful way to build relationships, nurture leads, and turn your subscribers into loyal customers. So if you haven't been able to wrap your head around how to do email marketing, this video is for you. In this video guide, we'll be breaking down how to get started with email marketing, including creating a mailing list, getting people to join your mailing list, and writing emails that people are excited to open. So with that said, let's get started. The first step is to create a mailing list, which is a collection of email addresses of people who have opted in to receive notifications from you. This could be your customers, potential customers, your community members, or your followers. And there are two main reasons for creating a mailing list. The first is that having a mailing list allows you to have direct communication with the people on your list. Unlike social media, there's no guarantee that your post will be shown to everyone in your group or everyone who follows your page. But if someone signs up for your mailing list and you send out an email, your email goes straight to their inbox. And the second is that you own your mailing list. If Instagram went down or if YouTube decided to close up shop, there'd be no way for you to connect with your followers or subscribers. But with a mailing list, you decide what to send, how often to communicate, and you can even decide to move to a different platform and use your mailing list there instead. Now, to actually create your mailing list, you'll need to choose an email marketing platform. And there are several solutions available for every kind of budget, including several free options. Usually, the cost of an email marketing platform depends on the features available or the number of people that are on your mailing list. Most email marketing platforms will come with these basic features. List management, signup forms, email creation, and analytics. Additional features include automation, customer segmentation, A B testing, and integration with other tools. Personally, I've been using ConvertKit for years. I think it's the easiest to use, but also has a lot of robust features that'll really help you make the most of your mailing list, no matter the size. The next step is to grow your mailing list. You've probably signed up for a mailing list before. Basically, it's a form where you provide your email address, maybe your name and then you agree to receive communications from the owner of that form. Whether it's a company, organization, a brand, a content creator, et cetera, this kind of basic form will work great for people who are already familiar with you and your content. I have a form that's specifically to send out notifications about my live stream podcast. The people who join this list already tune into the live stream. They already listen to the podcast, and they're voluntarily opting in to get the reminders for when we go live. Or maybe there's a clothing brand you like. You shop from them before and it'll be nice to know when they have sales going on so you sign up for their mailing list. However, this kind of form doesn't work for people who have no idea who you are and what you're about because they have no reason to join. They don't know what to expect, they don't know how you fit into their lives. And nowadays it's very easy for emails from unknown senders to immediately come off as spam. So how do we fix this? By offering an incentive. And an incentive can come in many forms. As a YouTube coach, one of my incentives was access to my free webinar, five steps to jumpstart your YouTube channel. People can sign up with their email and they would immediately get a link to watch the webinar. If you're a product based business, a popular incentive is a discount. And you've probably seen this before. When you visit a company's website, you'll see a form that'll pop up that says something like join our mailing list to get 10% off your first purchase. Another incentive could be exclusive content. So maybe you have an Instagram feed or YouTube channel and in some of your posts you can say something like, for more content like this delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for my mailing list Now. Another way to make your mailing list more effective is to make sure it looks great on all devices. This may not seem like a big deal, but people are using their computer, tablets, phones, or whatever Internet devices to be online. And if your form looks weird or it doesn't load right, it'll just be a hurdle to anyone trying to join your list. So two things to address this. First, check for this when you're browsing for an email marketing platform. ConvertKit's templates are specifically designed to be responsive to any platform, so you can rest easy knowing that regardless of the form that you'll create, it'll look right for every device. And the second Thing is to double check after you create your form, check your links, check your form, and sign up for your own list with a test account so you can double check that the customer experience is exactly how you designed it to be. Now that we've created a mailing list and we have a signup form collecting email addresses, the next step is to actually send out emails. But how do we create emails that people are excited to open? Two things right off the bat. First, no one wants to subscribe to a mailing list of commercials. And second, no one will willingly open any kind of email that looks, feels, sounds like spam. Doesn't matter how pretty your emails are or how valuable you think your emails are, if your content or even the subject lines of your email feel like a sell, they will remain unread. At the end of the day, though, you do have a product and or service that can be an extremely valuable solution to the right people. You do have something that can make a positive impact on people's lives. How can we design emails that highlight the value we provide while also being something that people want to read? So the first step to writing and sending emails that people are excited to open is to talk to them about what they care about, not what you want to tell them. And the way to do this is to get crystal clear about who your ideal member or customer is and what they care about. Who are they? What are their hopes and dreams? What are their fears and misconceptions? What are they hungry to achieve or solve? Where are they getting stuck? What do they want to be able to do a year from now that they aren't able to do today? And use the words that they use. You use the words they use to describe the results that they're trying to achieve, the obstacles that they anticipate, what they're most excited about, or where they're starting from. This simple reframing from what you want to say to what your ideal member is most interested in is the key to moving from emails that stay unread to emails that are opened or maybe even saved or shared. When I first started my mailing list, I initially sent out weekly newsletters, and they typically included industry news and updates about my business. I figured that if people were signing up for my mailing list, that's what they wanted to hear about, which wasn't wrong. But I started to notice that whenever I received an email that had the word newsletter in the subject line, I would leave it unread and save it for later. And it's not that I wasn't interested in reading these newsletters. They just felt like chores, something to do when I had more dedicated time to do it. Fast forward to now. One of my most popular emails is this one. The subject line says how I made $17,000 from one YouTube video and the first three lines are what if your YouTube channel never gets noticed? What if you end up looking stupid? What if you fail and everything was a waste? Now for my audience that is looking to create their corner of the Internet on YouTube, this language really spoke to them. And I knew this because these are the exact questions I had when I was starting my YouTube journey. So there are many types of emails you can send Newsletters nurturing or cultivating emails that include tips, resources or other educational content, promotional emails, event invitations or announcements. The two things to keep in mind are first, reframing how you connect with your mailing list from focusing on what you want to say to what your ideal member wants to hear and applying this reframing to both the content in your emails and the subject lines. And second, it does take multiple touch points to take a new email subscriber who just signed up for your list because of your valuable incentive to to a loyal paying customer. So inspire the people on your mailing list. Motivate them. Make them feel like they could do something they didn't think they could do. Make them feel seen or heard. Speak their language. You could even use tools like ChatGPT as a starting point to help you overcome blank page overwhelm. And this is how you can get started with email marketing. From here, you can take it to the next level by checking the analytics in your email marketing software to find out data points like which subject lines get the most opens, which which of your emails get the most clicks, and what gets the most engagement. Then you can use this data to send out more effective emails that really speak to the people on your mailing list and continue to build the connection between you and your members. Now, if you want to learn more about unlocking membership and course revenue with email, check out this video next.