As a marketer, you want to ensure you’re always reaching your audience with the right message and offer. But, how can you do this if you don’t have time to manage your campaigns manually? You can use email automation for this purpose; there are various tools that can help you design and execute email marketing campaigns effectively. If you’re interested in adding an email marketing component to your website or blog, you can follow these guidelines to help you get started.
1. Create a plan
The first step to planning an automated email campaign is to create a plan. This is especially important if you’re using email marketing to drive sales, because you don’t want to end up with an unorganized email list. To create a plan, sit down with a marketing manager or an experienced in-house counsel and have them help you create a list of all the things you need to include in your plan. Make sure you have a clear idea of what you’re supposed to achieve and set reasonable goals for yourself.
2. Find the best email marketing tool
Now that you have a plan in place, you can start looking for a solution to implement your email marketing strategy. There are various tools that can help you design and execute email marketing campaigns, so you want to make sure you’re choosing the right one for your needs. First, consider the following:
- Cost – While there are free email marketing tools out there, most of them have limited functionality and impose a cost on you if you want to use their services.
- Capability – One of the most important things to consider when choosing an email marketing tool is whether or not it has all the necessary features you need to successfully run your campaigns. Without these features, you might end up wasting a lot of time.
- Ease of Use – You also want to make sure you’re choosing an email marketing tool that’s user-friendly and doesn’t require extensive training to get started.
- Design – Are you planning to use a CMS (content management system) to create content for your website? If so, you want to choose an email marketing tool that has a slick, clean design that suits the content you’re creating.
- Features – One of the greatest things about automated email marketing is the fact that it saves you time. The right tool should have all the necessary features to make your life much easier. This includes things like importing contacts from your existing phone or address book, generating auto-replies to email addresses, and setting up automated email campaigns with multiple variations.
- User-friendly – Finally, make sure you’re choosing an email marketing tool that’s easy to use. Even if you’re a techie, you might not have the time to get frustrated with a program that’s difficult to use.
- Security – Your email marketing tool should also be secure enough so that none of your subscribers’ information is leaked. You don’t want to keep having to explain to your customers why their personal information is unsafe with you.
- Access to Expert Support – Since you’ll be running a lot of automated email campaigns, it’s essential that the program has excellent support available. If you’re ever stuck or curious about what a certain button does, having a guide available is invaluable.
3. Determine when to send the emails
Once you’ve found a tool that suits your needs and is reliable, you can move on to the next step – determining when to send the emails. You don’t want to send out the same email to all of your subscribers at the same time, as this will result in duplicate emails and a lot of wasted bandwidth. To solve this, you can use an email marketing tool that allows you to create and send out email campaigns at your leisure. This way, you can target specific groups of people based on their interests and attributes. For example, you can send an email to all of your subscribers who are in the UK with this line:
- Buy This Product Using This Coupon Code: UK)
- Learn How to Create the Perfect Cocktail Station Using This Blue Ribbon Method
- Receive Discounts & Exclusive Offers Right on Your Mobile Phone
- Get Inspired By These Design Ideas and More…
…and so on. Once you’ve created and sent the email campaign, the tool will continue to send out similar emails to any new subscribers until you tell it to stop.
4. Customize the emails
After you’ve sent the emails to your audience, you want to make sure you’ve given them the content they needed. One of the great things about email marketing is that you can customize the emails to suit your needs. You can add in images, change the text color, and even add links to social media accounts. You can use a tool like MailChimp to easily add in images and other elements to your email marketing.
5. Measure the success of your email marketing
If you want to know how effective your email marketing is, it’s important to measure the results. Just like with any other marketing strategy, you’ll want to track the number of leads you’re generating and the amount of revenue you’re driving. To start measuring the success of your email marketing, you can use a tool like Radian 6 to pull analytics from all of your campaigns and accounts. With this tool, you can track open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates – as well as how much money you’re spending on each campaign. If you’re interested in a tool like this, make sure to reach out to your account manager today!
6. Find the best landing page for your downloads
After you’ve sent the emails, you can use the same tool to create a landing page for your downloads. A landing page is a page on your website that you click on after reading an email. It usually redirects the visitor to a different page – usually a product page or a purchase page – but it can also be a confirmation page that they’ve received the email or a simple thank you page.
Creating a landing page for your downloads is a great way to increase the chance of a sale. For example, if you’re selling a digital product that requires the user to input their email address to access the content, you can put up a simple landing page that has a form where they can enter their email address. After they input their email address, you can send them a confirmation email with a link to the download. The goal is to get them to click on the link in the email and then be redirected to the download page – wherever that may be.
7. Make sure to have a clear call-to-action
Last but not least, we want to ensure you’ve got a clear call-to-action (CTA) at the end of your emails. In other words, you want to make sure that your email content ends with something that will make the reader want to take action. Usually, this is some sort of offer or discount that you can give the reader – but it can also be a link to a product or page that further explains the offer or contains additional information about the product.
Whatever it may be, make sure your CTA is clear and simple so that even the people who didn’t click on the hyperlink in the email will understand what actions to take. You can also add a phone number at the end of the email to help direct the interested parties to your website or shop and so they can get in touch if they have any queries.
Hopefully, this post gave you enough information to get you started with email marketing for your Joomla site. If you want to learn more, here are a few great books that you can read to better understand the industry:
The Perfect Marketing Mix: How to Build a Marketing Plan That Works
Marketing plans are essential for any business, but they’re especially important for digital marketers who want to build a solid foundation for their campaigns. This book will help you create a plan for your marketing efforts and provide you with clear benchmarks to measure your progress. If you’re looking for guidance on how to build a marketing plan, this is the book for you.
Marketing Plan Template: How to Write a Marketing Plan That Will Help You Grow Your Business
Writing a marketing plan doesn’t have to be complicated – or, at least, it shouldn’t be. This plan template will help you write a marketing plan that’s easy to understand and implement. You’ll learn how to set up a calendar, populate it with all the relevant dates, and organize your thoughts and plan of action – all while making sure you have all the necessary details.