The 8 steps to start email marketing

As I already described in an earlier article email marketing should be the foundation of every online business or blog. And I can’t emphasize this enough 🙂

With the help of email marketing, you can promote products or new articles and built a relationship with your leads. Building an email list should be your most important task.

And email marketing isn’t very hard. In this article, I’ll show you how to establish email marketing in eight steps.

Step 1 – The email marketing tool

The email marketing tool is the basic of your email marketing campaign and here you have several opportunities. I use GetResponse and I can totally recommend it to you. An alternative would be Aweber.

There are also tools which are for free but I wouldn’t recommend them. They may be better to start with but with a bigger list, the other tools are better. And then you have a huge effort to change your provider so you better choose the right tool from the beginning.

Step 2 – The optin box tool

An email marketing tool is of course not enough. The people need the opportunity to sign up for your email list. So they need some kind of optin box. You can either build a landing page or place sign-up boxes on the side of your website.

This is easier than it sounds. You need to create a sign-up box within your email marketing tool and paste the resulting code into WordPress in a text widget. Now you have a sign-up box where people could sign up.

Step 3 – The foundation

As basic as it sounds but you need a foundation where you can place your sign-up box.

This is usually a website your visitors can visit. (See here how to create one)

There are several places where you can collect the email address. This can be a landing page or a sign-up box in your blog article.

Step 4 – The freebie

Nobody is giving away his email address for free. So you need to make them an offer they are willing to give their email address for. This is called a “freebie”.

Your freebie can be

• a pdf report
• a coupon
• free video lectures.

or anything your customer is giving his email address for.

Step 5 – The presentation

It doesn’t matter if you have a landing page or a sign-up box on your blog. It is not enough to have a small note referring to your newsletter.

As I said with the help of your email marketing tools you can create sign-up boxes and place them on the right side of your blog.

Of course, it is important that you present them your freebie. A compelling headline, maybe the product cover, and a call-to-action are here the right ingredients.

Step 6 – The first autoresponder

If you collect email addresses you shouldn’t stop there. With the help of autoresponders, you can send out follow emails. So, for example, you can send them out your most read articles which could be helpful to them.

I would suggest to send them around 7 emails in two weeks. That is not too much that they think you are a spammer but enough to build a relationship.

Step 7 – The traffic

The best freebie and the best autoresponder is nothing without leads. And you can’t get leads without traffic. So traffic should be your number one concern if you want to build an email list.

There are many different traffic sources but if you want to know more you can have a look here and here. Of course, you should always get quality traffic which is interested in your freebie.

Step 8 – Sustainability

So that you readers won’t forget you, you need to send out a newsletter regularly.

Newsletters are not the same as autoresponder because newsletters are always sent at a specific time, regardless of the sign-up date.

Even if you think that this is too much work for this small number of leads.

If you are still not using email marketing stop everything you do and work on these 8 steps! Email marketing can make the difference between small money and big money.

Now I want to hear from you!

Are you using email marketing? Is one step missing or too much? I would love to hear your opinion so please leave a comment below 🙂