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Email Marketing Made Simple: A Step by Step Guide [+ Examples]

Email marketing has been around forever, and for good reason. It’s the most direct and effective way of connecting with your leads, nurturing them, and turning them into customers, consistently winning out over all other marketing channels.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the entire process of setting up your email marketing funnel so that you can acquire leads and generate sales, 24/7.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the highly effective digital marketing strategy of sending emails to prospects and customers. Effective marketing emails convert prospects into customers, and turn one-time buyers into loyal, raving fans.

This guide is for those who’re ready to commit to email marketing. If you’re unsure, you may want to read our guide on why you need to build an email list RIGHT NOW!

This is a long and detailed guide, so we’ve broken it down into different sections you can get to using the links in the Table of Contents below.

By using this definitive guide, you’ll know:

How to build an email list full of targeted customers.
How to optimize your emails for the highest open rates and click-through rates (CTR).
How to automate the process of nurturing your leads and turning prospects into customers.

Sound good?

Then let’s dive into the most comprehensive guide to email marketing on the entire internet.

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The Importance of Email Marketing

We’ve covered the biggest question, what is email marketing, but haven’t gotten into why email marketing is so very important for your business. Let’s talk about that now.

Despite the rise of social media and unsolicited spam email (which is never a good marketing strategy, by the way), email remains the most effective way to nurture leads and boost customer loyalty.

There are many reasons you should make email marketing one of your top priorities, but here are the top 3:

1. Email is the #1 communication channel. Did you know that at least 99% of consumers check their email on a daily basis? That can’t be said of any other communication channel.

2. You own your list. On any social media platform, your account (along with all your fans and posts) could be suspended or deleted at any time, for any reason, without notice. However, you own your email list. No one can take those leads away from you.

3. Email just converts better. People who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than those who do not receive email offers. In fact, email marketing has an ROI (returns on investment) of 4400%. That’s huge! And if you are wondering if social media converts even better, think again: the average order value of an email is at least three times higher than that of social media.

Email is simply the best way to make sales online. Now that you know the importance of email marketing, let’s learn the best ways to go about it.

How-To: Email Marketing

Wondering how to get started with email marketing? Email marketing is made up of several moving pieces, but that doesn’t mean it has to be complicated. Here’s how it breaks down…

1. Start With Your List: The bottom line is that you can’t send out email marketing campaigns if you have no one to send them to. And the other thing to remember is that email marketing won’t work if you don’t have the right people on your list.

That means you need to capture leads to grow your email list with your target audience. For that, there’s no better tool than OptinMonster:

OptinMonster is the world’s #1 lead generation software. We empower businesses to create stunning optin campaigns in a matter of minutes with zero coding skills required.

Then, using our highly advanced targeting rules, you can display these campaigns to the right people at just the right time in their customer journey.

As a result, you can drastically grow your list with quality leads and see huge increases in your company’s profits. Plus, OptinMonster integrates with over 30 of the most popular email service providers.Grow Your List With Better Leads Today!BONUS: Done-For-You Campaign Setup ($297 value) Our conversion experts will design 1 free campaign for you to get maximum results – absolutely FREE! Click here to get started →

This leads us to our next step…

2. Add an Email Service Provider: An email service provider (ESP) lets you segment your audience, organize your list, and distribute email campaigns to your audience. You can also track the results to improve future campaigns.

A good ESP should integrate with your other marketing tools so you can turn everything on autopilot as you grow your leads.

There are a ton of email service providers out there, but we take the guesswork out and make it really easy to choose the right one for you and your goals. A big later in this guide, we’ll list out our favorite ESPs that you can choose from.

After those two steps, it’s just a matter of refining your lists and your messaging so you’re reaching your audience and really connecting with them. Plus, you’ll be able to set up some automation in your email service which will make things much easier for you.

Ready to jump in? Let do it!

Growing Your Email List

What most people do when they want to build an email list is to put an optin form on their website and hope that people sign up. Unfortunately, this strategy usually doesn’t work very well.

To grow your email list, you need to attract people with a compelling offer. You need a lead magnet.

What is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet (a.k.a. an optin bribe) is something awesome that you give away for free in exchange for an email address. It doesn’t have to cost you anything to create; most lead magnets are digital materials like PDFs, MP3 audio files, or videos that you can create yourself at minimal or no cost.

It can be absolutely anything you want, so long as it provides value to your visitors for free.

Some popular lead magnet examples are:

ebooks
A cheat sheet of tips or resources
White papers or case studies
A webinar
Free trials or samples
A free quote or consultation
Quizzes or a self-assessment
A coupon

The possibilities are endless!

For even more lead magnet ideas, check out our list of lead magnet ideas to grow your email list.

What Makes a Good Lead Magnet?

You already know that a lead magnet needs to provide value for free. But if you want your lead magnet to be highly effective, here are 5 criteria for you to consider:

1. Easily consumed: Lead magnets are only effective when the audience uses them, so if you deliver a 300-page manifesto, you won’t gain traction.

2. Actionable: Lead magnets need to provide an actionable tool, skillset, or useful information that your audience can apply.

3. Creates noticeable improvement: People continue to buy products and services if they work well. Your lead magnet will become successful if it’s as valuable as your products and services.

4. Relevant: If you’ve done your homework about your prospects, you’ll have no trouble coming up with a lead magnet subject that solves problems.

5. Immediately available: People love instant gratification, so give it to them right then and there. Check out 4 Ways to Deliver a Lead Magnet to see how easy it is to get your lead magnet out there using OptinMonster.

Let’s take a look at a few of the best email marketing lead magnet examples from real-life campaigns.

At OptinMonster, we share a list of 12 proven strategies for converting abandoning visitors into subscribers.

Syed Balkhi offers a list of tools and resources for growing a small business.

Here’s another example of a lead magnet we used as a content upgrade to a specific blog post.

Now that you know what a lead magnet is and know how to create a highly-effective one, you’ll need to create your optin form.

How to Create an Optin Form that Converts

The purpose of your optin form is to convey the big benefit of your lead magnet, so your website visitors subscribe to your email newsletters in exchange for getting the lead magnet.

To create an optin form that converts, it needs to have the following components:

1. Enticing headline: Make sure your headline clearly describes the big benefit of your lead magnet

2. Helpful description: Is your description brief, clear and to the point? Use bullet points to help the reader’s eye quickly scan what they will get.

3. Attractive visuals: Include an image of the lead magnet if you can (like a mockup of your eBook). A photo of a person looking towards the optin form is also a great way to boost conversions. We’ve got a great list of visual content creation tools that can help you create amazing visuals.

4. Simple form: Don’t try to ask for more than a first name and email address. Asking for too much information too soon will kill your conversions.

5. Compelling subscribe button: Make sure to use a contrasting color for your subscribe button, so that it really pops out on the page. Also, use non-generic email copy that compels people to click right away (“Send me the 7 steps!“).

For even more tips on creating a high-converting optin form, check out our checklist for creating the ultimate optin form.

Once you’ve created your optin form, you’ll need to install it on your site. There are 14 high-converting places to put your optin form:

Splash page
Welcome gate
Floating bar
Your site’s header
Blog archive page
Within your blog posts
Your sidebar
In a timed lightbox popup
In a scroll box
Your footer
Your About page
Resource pages
On a designated sign-up page
In an exit-intent® popup

One of these is absolutely mandatory if you want to get as many subscribers as possible. That’s the exit-intent® popup.

An exit-intent® popup shows up at the precise moment the user is about to leave your website. This popup doesn’t interrupt the reading experience and only triggers when the user is leaving. This is the perfect time for asking them to subscribe because likely they’ve read your content and found your site helpful.

Optinmonster exit intent campaign trigger

Using an exit popup works amazingly well, and in fact, our customers consistently see significant results using exit-intent. For example, Neil Strauss was able to increase conversions 125% with exit intent!

To learn more about exit-intent® popups, read our post on 40 Exit Popup Hacks That Will Grow Your Subscribers and Revenue.

Also, check out our gallery to see real-life exit-intent® popup examples.

Choosing The Best Email Marketing Service

Before you email anyone, you need 2 things:

Their permission
A business email set up

If you started with an optin, you got that permission, so hooray! If you didn’t use an optin, we don’t recommend sending marketing emails to them unless you have their permission.

You risk them flagging your emails as spam. So not only will they not buy from you, but you can also face negative consequences.

Instead, you can use a tool like OptinMonster to create smarter optin forms. You can collect leads and subscribers who want to get your marketing emails.

Then, you need to select an email service provider. These providers give you the right infrastructure to send broadcasts and bulk business emails.

If you send bulk emails without this, it will be flagged as spam. Your subscribers won’t receive your emails, and what’s worse is that your regular emails to your team and clients will also be affected.

That means you won’t be able to email clients as consistently as you should be to get the highest conversions/sales as possible.

Conclusion

Email Marketing has become a more powerful tool in your business arsenal. A major reason for that power is that anyone can do it, free or not. Whether you’re dealing with a small local business, a large multi-state corporation, or anything in between, email marketing can prove to be an incredibly effective way to get results.

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