Long gone are the days when marketers had a simple, straightforward path to a prospect’s inbox. With today’s filtering, sorting and anti-spam technology, it’s harder than ever to send marketing emails, much less hope that they get read.
But if you approach it the right way, you won’t even have to ask “how do you send marketing emails?” because it’s not how you send them, but what you say in them.
In short, you should stop looking at it less as “how to get into my customers’ inboxes” and more “how to write emails they’ll look forward to reading.”
It’s a tall order to fill, but one that, with the right approach, you can tackle easily. Not only will this make sure that more of your marketing emails are read, but it also helps increase the likelihood that a reader will click a link, place an order, sign up for more information or any other action you want them to take.
How to Send Marketing Emails
The first step before you even send out a single message, is to choose an email marketing service. Two of the biggest are AWeber and GetResponse, but there are also several other email marketing platforms worth a look depending on what your marketing needs are.
Step 1: Segment Your List
The very first step in sending marketing emails is to consider your audience. Obviously you want the shortest route between them and a sale. To that end, you’ll want to start off by segmenting your list. All email marketing services let you do this, although to different degrees of depth. If you’re just starting out, it’s a good idea not to go too deep into it until you’re more familiar with the process and working with your email marketing program of choice.
The simplest segmentation is simply who bought from you versus who did not. But that’s not the only way to segment your list! You can also divide it between people that have bought recently, versus those who bought some time ago, people who are repeat customers versus one-off purchases, or even those who spend a lot when they buy, versus those who spend less.
The important thing is that you don’t send the same message to everyone. That’s a sure-fire way to make sure you get marked as spam and never heard from again, even if the user originally opted in to your mailing list.
Step 2: Automate Your Emails
Some email marketing can be automated, saving you time and effort. How much you can automate, on the other hand, varies from service to service. If you only want the basics, such as sending a thank you message when a user signs up, an email marketing service like AWeber will handle that easily.
If you want something with deeper automation, along the lines of “if customer buys product A, send an email recommending product B and if they buy product B, subscribe them to email list B to show them how to use it”, that’s more involved and a more thorough email marketing software like GetResponse will let you do just that.
Step 3: Have Something to Say, Not Just Something to Sell
A core part of how to send marketing emails is having something to say, in addition to something to sell. Your emails should have a goal for you, but should also provide value for your readers. In other words, send the kinds of emails that you’d want to receive!
Step 4: Don’t Stress Too Much about the Design
This isn’t to say that the design of your marketing emails isn’t important. Of course you want to present a unified brand, style and voice. But at the same time, it’s worth realizing that packing an email full of images is also a surefire way annoy customers. Design-heavy emails can be slow to download or eat away at mobile data. Plus, it’s possible that different email programs will display the design differently (and some may not display images at all), so in most cases, to be safe, simpler is better when it comes to email design.
Now, keep in mind that as part of good email marketing, you’ll often be directing users to a landing page, and you’ll have a lot more freedom to design that landing page in a particular way to suit your end goal. So save flexing those design muscles for the page itself. When it comes to email marketing templates: simpler is better.
Step 5: Check Your Analytics
All of the best email marketing companies offer you analytics so that you can see relevant information about how many people opened your message, clicked on the links inside and much more. If your emails are being delivered but aren’t being opened, then there’s a disconnect between your message and your audience — they don’t deem your emails important enough to bother reading, so it’s worth investigating why.
With these points in mind, you’ll be able to not only start sending marketing emails with confidence, but do so knowing that your subscribers are actively looking forward to hearing from you, and what business could ask for more than that from their marketing efforts?
