Your First Steps To Email Marketing And Why You Should Do It

When it comes to email marketing, the most common objection I hear is, “I only have a list of 4 people, I don’t want to look weird emailing out to such a small list”.

The real reason people don’t email out to their list and customers every week is because they don’t know how to. We all use excuses and reasons to not email out and communicate…

• My subscriber list isn’t large enough
• I don’t want to bother my customers
• But what if my subscribers start to unsubscribe?
• Do I have enough content to send out?
• Won’t people to see me as a spammer?

Starting But Not Continuing

The most common issue we see with WordPress consultants and professionals is that they START a newsletter or weekly email, but they don’t keep it up.

They might spend a few hours crafting their first email only to realise how much time it’s taken. Before long, their email marketing plan, along with a content plan, is out the window and the emails are sporadic at best.

“But I’ve only got a little content, I don’t have anything else to say!” is the cry from infrequent emailers. There is a very simple secret to solving that problem.

Find more things to say.

In fact I hear that argument so often that I have a written a canned response for it:

“If you knew how powerful and easy email marketing is, you’d create content every day. It’s the fastest method of nurturing leads and generating sales, on automation, that I know of”.

Believe it or not, you have tons to say, you just need to prioritise what’s more important – finding, creating or re-purposing content that will help your business generate sales, or moaning about not being able to create content.

Over-Complicating It

The barrier to continuing any email marketing strategy, whether it be sales emails, newsletters, curated post round up or email communications, is over-complication. Often WordPress businesses get so wrapped up in the template design and email types that they forget to send any emails at all.

Keep it simple. There’s no need to over complicate your emails. You don’t need separate layouts for all the different types of emails you could be sending. Chances are you’re only going to send one or two types anyway.

Finally, don’t forget that MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor and all the other email providers have loads of templates and drag and drop interfaces for you to use, making it so easy!

Assuming There Is Money In The List

After businesses start email marketing, they can often get frustrated that they’re not getting results immediately. They might have a large list, or have sent a few emails over the past few weeks, but they’re not rolling in money yet. What happened?

Email marketing is like any marketing activity. It requires patience, frequency and consistency. If you’re just sending out sporadic newsletters or sales emails driving people to a product, then of course you’re not going to see a return.

All to often, people assume that an email list is like a pot of money that they can dip into. “I’ll just send a sales email and get some money out of it”.

While that may happen occasionally, it’s not a sustainable model. You need to nurture that list and make sure they know exactly who you are and what you can help with.

The First Email You’re Going To Send

I promised that you’d read this article and send your first email. I wasn’t lying.

The first email you’re going to send is based on a super simple format:

“This is cool, you should read it”.

That’s about as complicated as it gets.

Who do you send it to? Anyone. Anyone that you want to convert into a customer or open a conversation with. It could be a customer that you want to talk to about another product or service. It could be someone you met at a networking event.

You need to know what your goal is when you send an email.

You need to want more leads to talk to you and more customers to engage with you. If you don’t want that, then emailing people isn’t going to be worth it.

1) Find a piece of content – a blog post or an article. Ideally, it’d be your own, something you’ve written. It needs to be something that your recipient will enjoy and value.

Think about how that piece could move a conversation onto another service or sale for you. For example, if you’ve got a website customer, send them a piece on optimising blog posts for Google.

2) Next, use a template to make writing your emails quick and easy. I send close to 50 personalised emails a day, all from my account. But they’re not all written by hand. I have a template and a set of emails that work for my audience.

For example, if they’re a lead or an email address on my list, I’ll think about how they first contacted me. If it was through a worksheet for social media profiles, I’ll send them something related to that worksheet.

Here’s a template I use that you can take away with you. Score!

If you really want to get this done now, you could always just download my “next piece” email series template and just fill in the blanks. Access the email templates here.

You Need To Start Regular Emails Even If Your List Is 4 People

I prefer thinking of email marketing as just talking to a few people. I manage two lists, one of around 25000 people and another around 400. Both have similar engagement rates and both are profitable.

However, I can only manage the larger list because I started on a list of 4 people. 2 of them were customers, 1 was a colleague and another was a lead.

I made sure that I could reliably email those 4 people every week with something useful. Can I send them something that will help their business each week? If I can’t do that for 4 people, why would I do it for 400? Or 4000?

The funny thing is that you make mistakes when you start out (hell, I still make mistakes now). So I’d rather practice and learn while I’m growing my list, rather than getting it wrong on a larger list.

Finally, both of those numbers might seem huge to you. Or they might seem small. When you’re growing your list and database, each step feels like a milestone.

Don’t be put off by the size of your list now. What you’re doing is creating habits that will pay off in spades when you do have a larger list.

The Two Types Of Emails You’ll Send (That Are Super Easy)

Remember when I said people over-complicate it? Here’s how to combat the complicated emails. Below is my entire $000’s marketing plan.

1. Automation emails.
2. Newsletter emails

This is my email marketing strategy. Two types of emails.

First, automation emails are emails sent to people who trigger certain actions.

For example, when someone signs up to one of my downloads or courses, I’ll send them around 10 emails over a period of weeks.

I send more content, related posts and product sales letters. These are written way in advance and sit in my email automation program (I use MailChimp). This way, I KNOW that people who sign up will get related, relevant content every few days for the first few weeks.

Next, my newsletters are crazy simple. I take my latest blog post and send that to my list. Simple as that. I might have an image in the email, but most times not. I write a decent subject line and write a brief introduction to the post. Then I make sure I have a couple of call to action buttons linking to that post.

Occasionally, if I haven’t got a new post or I’m not that keen on what I’ve published, I’ll find a post from another source that I love. Something that's going to help my customers.

If you’re serious about helping your customers, think outside of what you’d usually send them. Don’t just send WordPress news or SEO articles. What about money management? Project management tools? Think about your audience and what you could help them with.

Takeaway

So now you can walk away from this post with confidence to email someone immediately. Remember you can download my emails templates here if you want to write an email super fast. Access the email templates here.

We love the idea of starting emailing as soon as you can. Building the habit of a simple newsletter that gets sent out. Often I hear, “Yeah but I don’t want people to unsubscribe!”. In fact, you do as it tells you – that you need to change your message, and it clears up your database.

If you want more leads for your WordPress business in general; rather, if you’re serious about growing the quality of the leads you generate for your business, you need to read our post on finding better clients for your WordPress business.