8 Email Marketing Tips for Beginners You Can Apply Today

Despite being one of the older forms of digital marketing, email marketing still holds its own when it comes to ROI, conversion rates and customer retention.

Since it can be very effective even with a minimal investment, most marketers include this channel in every broader digital strategy they create. However, they sometimes forget that, while not expensive, this kind of promotion requires diligent research, knowing the best marketing tips for beginners, and careful setup if it is to return any results.

If you are thinking about growing your customer base through email marketing, you’ll need to pay due attention to each of the following parts of the process.

Email Marketing Tips for Beginners

1. Creating Your Contacts List

If you want your campaign to achieve decent conversion and click-through rates, you need to:

Clearly define your target audience and get to know them.

Regardless of what type of service or product you are offering, you are catering to different types of people, and even if you weren’t, similar people might be interested in different aspects of your offer.

Related: How to Decide What Product to Build First

Gather leads.

Now you know what your potential customers might want and expect from you, it’s time to give them something useful. If they like it, they can opt-in to receive more of, hopefully, similarly valuable material.

That’s why your lead magnets have to be relevant, honest and engaging.

If you trick someone who has no real interest in providing you with their email, you’ll only waste money by trying to reach them.

To efficiently gather leads, businesses can strategically use Google to tap into its vast resources and search capabilities. Understanding how to scrape Google for lead generation involves employing advanced search operators, exploring niche forums, and utilizing industry-specific keywords to pinpoint potential prospects.

By harnessing the full potential of Google’s search functionality, businesses can streamline their lead generation efforts and connect with relevant audiences, ultimately driving growth and success.

Regardless of the lead gathering method you choose: article expansion; eBook, case study or whitepaper; list of useful resources you’ve compiled; or anything else along those lines, if it doesn’t speak to the actual user’s needs, the contacts you get from it won’t be the ones you’re after.

Segmentation.

Once you know which of your leads came through which opt-in form and you get to learn a bit about their behavior, you can start classifying them into groups and refining the way you approach each of them.

Some people may be more interested in extensive, in-depth industry studies. While others will prefer quick news updates that provide a broader, but less involved overview of the same industry.

Once you start noticing which group prefers which tone of voice, type of content, mailing frequency, etc., you’ll also start noticing which group is the likeliest to be interested in a particular aspect of your offer.

It is when you start combining the content that a certain group likes with offers they have a potential to be interested in, that you really start seeing returns from this marketing channel.

2. Crafting The Message

Now that you’re attracting, classifying and getting to know new contacts, it might be time to start actually contacting them. That’s the next one of the email marketing tips for beginners you need to be aware of.

However, even the tiniest missteps in the way you approach this can lead to people unsubscribing rather than converting. Here are just some of the individual aspects of email campaign setup that you need to pay attention to.

3. Spam Filters

Some words trigger spam filters more often than others, so avoid using them too much in your emails.

Some servers are also more compromised than other, and some mail services less reliable.

Everything else you do will be a completely wasted effort if your emails don’t get delivered.

4. Mailing Frequency and Timing

No general rules here as part of this list of email marketing tips for beginners. Some contacts won’t mind frequent updates. Others just need to hear from you once in a while to keep enjoying the relationship.

However, most of them will appreciate some kind of consistency, so, once you’ve set up a tempo, try not to stray from it too much.  

The exact time of day you’ll choose to reach out to your leads is also somewhat dependent on the group you’re contacting. But the general consensus seems to be that people are most likely to open these emails in the late morning hours, especially on Mondays and Tuesdays.

5. Subject

The subject of your email needs to be clear and concise.

While some branding and personalization is tolerable, it seems that people are getting increasingly frustrated with emails that address them by name in the subject.

If the subject doesn’t properly describe the contents of your message, the recipient will bounce, and possibly decide not to open the next one.

6. Mail Body

This should go without saying, but make sure your mail displays perfectly on mobile devices, which is where a growing percentage of people will be viewing it.

Keep the layout clear, and stay on-message.

If you want to use images, you can. Just be aware that a lot of people won’t be seeing them, as their mail client might be set up to automatically hide them.  

7. Platforms and Autoresponders

Naturally, you won’t be doing this manually. So you need a reliable email marketing platform, that will allow you to execute drip campaigns.

Once you have your autoresponders set up, you can schedule when your contacts in specific segments are to be delivered a particular mail.

You can choose to send everyone a welcome mail as soon as they sign up; then an introductory mail a day later, and so on.

8. Finding Your Way

Discussing email marketing tips for beginners in general, we can’t give you specific advice regarding the tone of voice you should use, email frequency, types of subjects, or other decisions that will depend on your niche, location, audience types, etc.

But once you have a solid list of contacts and a couple of campaigns underway, you won’t need us to tell you these things. You’ll be able to find out on your own.

You can do this by:

• tracking your open and click-through rates;
• taking note of the times your emails are opened;
• and in general, by gathering all the information that is available and creating tests when the answers you’re looking for are not already presenting themselves on their own.

Do you have any other email marketing tips for beginners?