Email marketing tip #2: The 6 basic steps of a simplified email marketing process

So ...

Basically, any email marketing process involves the following 6 steps (on your side):

1. Getting subscribers (building a list)

There is no such thing as email marketing without a clean, constantly growing email list. The very first – mandatory – step in any email marketing process is to continuously enroll new customers, prospects, clients, leads, etc, who will give you the permission to email them because they want to get helpful and useful information from you. They are your subscribers.

I won’t lie to you: building a big and responsive list of subscribers can be very time-intensive … But, this is how email marketing works and trust me, if you can master it, your efforts will be rewarded tenfold. The bottom line: you are going to need a high-quality opt-in list to create a solid ground for your email marketing efforts.

One more thing … Due to the time-intensive nature of these list-building strategies more and more marketers tend to rely on bought email lists and list exchange practices, but I strongly recommend you to avoid using these methods in your email marketing. Sending cold emails to thousands or millions of of people using large bought email lists, will have only one guaranteed result: eventually you’ll be flagged as a spammer. The list exchange – your partners (another marketers or companies) will send an email on your behalf to their email list, and you’ll send an email on their behalf to your own list – could work, but it’s hard to find valuable non-competing partners and many people won’t do it because in most cases they have already promised to keep those emails private.

2. Organizing and segmenting your list(s)

In order to maximize the efficiency of your email campaigns you are going to categorize your subscribers based on various well-defined factors, such as demographics, geographical areas, spending patterns, etc.

3. Creating content

Once you have an efficiently segmented list, you’ll have to create the proper content for your emails in accordance with your goals and strategies (irresistible newsletters, lead-magnet emails, sales letters, etc).

4. Scheduling delivery

The very essence of your email marketing efforts is this: to deliver the perfect content to the ideal list segment at the right time. This is why email automation is literally crucial for the success of your email marketing.

A few words about the ideal frequency of your marketing emails …

I am going to start by saying that there is no such thing as golden rule for an ideal frequency. Why? Because it depends on (too) many factors:

• The industry.

• The type of your business.

• What are you looking to achieve from your marketing … If you have a news blog you are going to give daily updates to your readers, if you are an running email campaign the timing will be defined by the campaign rules, etc.

• The expectations you’ve set with your subscribers.

• The subscribers’ personal preferences.

Your email marketing – and your business – will be successful if you can make your customers happy, and for that you must regularly engage with them to keep them satisfied without becoming annoying or irritating. Needless to say, sending out your messages randomly will never work for your benefit, so you’ll have to find the optimal frequency that works well for you and your business. One final tip: the vast majority of companies are usually sending one or two emails per week, but again, there is no magic formula here. In general, your subscribers will probably “tolerate” and accept any frequency as long as your content is valuable, helpful and relevant.

5. Tracking your results

Measuring the results is a very important step in any marketing method. You are going to need an efficient tracking system in order to monitor the most important indicators and metrics that will help you to evaluate your overall email marketing. Relax, any professional mailing platform or automation software has simple and efficient in-built tracking solutions …

6. Optimizing the whole process

The optimization is another – continuous – step that is part of any marketing method or strategy. With an efficient tracking system in place you’ll be able to gather a bunch of useful information that will help you to refine or to re-define any element or method used in the above described email marketing process.