Email Marketing Tips for Beginners

When someone decides to subscribe to your newsletter, celebrate! That person enjoyed and found so much value in your content that they voluntarily provided their personal information (email) to learn more from you! That is a big deal! Now that you have an intrigued audience, I’m here to help ensure that you deliver quality content to your subscribers! Here are some email marketing tips for beginners.

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This post has affiliate links and is sponsored by Constant Contact. This means that, at no extra cost to you, if you so choose to participate in some of the opportunities here, we at Kyrabe Stories may receive a commission as gratitude from the partnering company. We greatly appreciate your support! 

Make sure you are sending emails that benefit your subscribers, not just your business.

Before you send off that new promotion or announcement, ask yourself if it’s relevant to those who have subscribed to your newsletter. Why did these individuals subscribe to you in the first place? What is it that they expect to receive from you?

For example, because the Kyrabe Stories blog focuses on personal and professional development and advocates for affordable educational options, you as my newsletter subscriber can expect me to send you deals on online courses, advice for career exploration, tips for productivity, and so on.

If I started emailing you links to gardening supplies, you’d probably be a bit confused. Know what your subscribers want and meet those expectations. If you’re not sure what they want, just ask! Create a list of ideas or send a poll asking what your audience would like to see next.

Don’t make every email a sales pitch.

As long as there is a disclaimer, it’s okay if most of your emails have an affiliate link at the very bottom or something as long as it’s not the main focus. For example, I sometimes list a few of my favorite book recommendations or software tools at the end of an email, sometimes in the postscript. However, the primary eye-catching message should not always be a sales pitch.

Yes, I know that you want to make a sale. That’s everyone’s goal who has a business. However, if all you are doing is prompting your subscribers to BUY, BUY, BUY, then eventually your emails will come off as just annoying and many will start unsubscribing. Mix it up a bit! Here are a few suggestions:

Helpful articles relating to your niche

• Many of the online learning platforms that I support sometimes offer a list of free courses temporarily available. These brands will create a convenient list of the courses for their own website. These make for quick FYI emails that are super helpful for my audience. Whatever your niche is, find articles that your audience might find beneficial too!

Guest posts and interviews

• It’s cool to see who all you are collaborating with, and it gives you more credibility when your audience can see your involvement in the online community! Give shout-outs to the companies and brands that you collaborate with and link to their content that you helped with. It’s like seeing your favorite actor/actress guess star in a different show! *excited squeals*

Personal stories

• Share your mistakes, challenges, or even just a silly experience! Let your audience get to know you, not just your brand. These personal story emails help to build a connection with your audience so that they know that there’s a relatable human-being behind these messages.

Videos

• I’m sure that I’m not the only one who pays way more attention to watching videos than I do reading a LONG page of text! Say hi or thank you to your audience, or share a YouTube video relating to your niche that your audience would find interesting!

Polls and surveys

• Okay, not everyone likes to take long-winded surveys, but yours doesn’t have to be an hour-long commitment! It could be as simple as asking what recipes your audience would like to see next for cooking/baking niches, what locations they’d like for you to visit next for lifestyle and travel niches, or what book has been the most impactful for them for personal development niches. The options are endless! It’s also a good way to get your subscribers to participate in helping to craft your future content creations (make sure to provide credit).

Choose your subject line carefully.

If you send me an email with a generic subject line like “open this email” or “my new email”, I’m most likely going to scroll right by. I mean why should I give that email any of my time when I have fifty other subject lines that are fighting for my attention too? However, if you send me something like, “Are you making one of these top ten mistakes with your email marketing strategy?” I’m going to be curious about if I am making one of those mistakes! Capture your audience’s attention with relevant subject lines.

Let me repeat that keyword: RELEVANT

If your subject line promised me tips for email marketing tips, and I open it to find deals on laptops, I’m going to be disappointed and annoyed. It won’t matter if I am in the market for a new laptop. I will interpret your email as clickbait. If your audience feels betrayed by opening your emails, the nicest thing they could do is just unsubscribe. What’s worse than that? They report your emails as spam. With enough reports, good luck fixing that reputation.

Check out this Constant Contact article for more tips on crafting subject lines.

Ensure that your emails are mobile-friendly.

Have you ever opened an email from your phone? I have. Have you ever made a purchase from your phone? Once again, I have. A study by Business Insider predicted that mobile purchases would contribute to at least “45% on the total U.S. e-commerce by 2020.“

Do not make the mistake of crafting an email that looks like an episode of Hoarders when viewed from a mobile device! It will get deleted immediately! Make sure your buttons and links are spaced out enough where mobile users can access your external information easily.

Have a reliable email marketing platform set up to collect, organize, and manage your campaigns and subscribers’ emails.

One of the biggest benefits of having your own email marketing platform is that you choose when and how often your subscribers receive your content. If you have 1,000 subscribers, then it’s your choice whether each person receives your new message or just a select few of them. With social media, on the other hand, many platforms are starting to require that the followers also hit a notification button to be alerted of any new material. That’s an additional pain in the butt!

For my emails, I use Constant Contact. When I first began blogging, I didn’t really know what I was doing as far as email marketing goes. But hey, they offered a free 60-day trial with no credit card required for signing up, so who was I to complain about this learning opportunity? After a year, this platform has still been an amazing complimentary resource for my blog. Below are some of the handy tools.

Inside, the dashboard to begin crafting a new email or even a unique landing page for sign-up forms is straight-forward: select a button and get started.

If you wish to create a new email, Constant Contact also provides templated designs to start off with. No need to have a graphic design background or anything. I normally go with blank templates for full control of the look and layout.

And you don’t need any programming skills either to organize your content. All you have to do is drag and drop the feature that you need, whether it’s a video link, social media icons, text boxes, images, and so much more. You can even place buttons that link back to your website.

My favorite part is that I can schedule these emails to go out exactly when I need them to. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to manually plan posts yourself, but I can no longer count how many times I’ve told myself that I’ll post something in thirty minutes then three hours later I’m cursing myself out for forgetting about the darn post!

That’s no longer a problem here. If you want your email to send at 2:00 PM EST next Tuesday, you can schedule that. If you prefer that it be sent immediately, you have that option too. You’re in full control of when your audience receives your new updates.

And this is something I didn’t learn to appreciate until I began studying Digital Marketing half a year later. Constant Contact can also track your campaigns and show you what’s working and which emails didn’t meet your goals. By testing different subject lines with the same email post, you can see which ones appeal to your unique audience more.

It will also provide a custom URL to that email after it sends so that you can share it to friends or even as a portfolio piece if you ever become interested in positions like an Email Marketing Specialist.

Yes, that is an actual position that pays quite well in certain areas. Imagine gaining this type of valuable experience while growing your own brand at the same time! Win-win!

And this perk I haven’t really taken advantage of as much as I should be, but you can also integrate many other platforms into Constant Contact. This is really helpful if you have or plan on opening an eCommerce store. You can also connect your Lead Ads from Facebook, Instagram, and Google to your email marketing account so that you can accept email subscriptions from these social media/search platforms too. There are so many tools to help your brand grow!

Now let’s hear from you!

Have you already begun your subscriber list? What are some email marketing tips that you recommend for someone just starting out? What type of emails do you send to help keep your audience entertained and informed? I’d love to read your tips in the comments below.

If you’d like to try out Constant Contact’s 60-Day Free Trial, click here. There’s absolutely no credit card information needed to get started.

And as always, remember to live and learn from one story at a time! 

Take care, 

Kyndall Bennett from Kyrabe Stories 

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