So you’ve established your brand, you’ve got a website, and you’re active on social media. You’re making progress! A website is vital to establishing credibility and directing potential buyers to a place to learn about you. Social media is important for engaging in online conversations and spreading the word about your business. But there’s one other thing you must also set up as an online business: an email marketing system.

Like many digital communications, email marketing allows you to communicate directly to your target audience, but in an even more personalized way. Your message goes straight to someone’s inbox. You can provide direct links to products, blog posts, a mix of images, gifs and text. You can further personalize that message by adding the subscriber’s name or referencing their previous purchases from your website. These abilities to personalize and optimize messages along with email’s professional nature makes an incredible tool for growing your business.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is simply a communication channel that involves sending a variety of content to a list of subscribers through email. The content can be anything you want it to be, business updates, discounts and deals, personal stories, etc. I’m sure your inbox is full of promotions from people and places you’ve offered your email to; these are all a part of their email marketing and broader content marketing strategy. 

Why is email marketing important? 

• Email marketing is unique in that it involves sending information directly to a specific person. It also allows you to record personal attributes of a customer, which helps build turst relationships by tracking the customer behaviors and the messages they’ve received. You have their name and email address, maybe even their zip code. And since they signed up for your newsletter, they have opted in to direct communications from your brand. A well-crafted message can go a long way with these potential buyers. Emails go directly to that person, unlike social media where feeds are automated by the apps and people are scrolling through hundreds of messages at a time, potentially never seeing yours or skimming over it. 

• Email marketing is also incredibly efficient. Once you have a subscriber list, you can write one email and share it with the entire list. You can automate them to include their name, and you can send specific emails to people depending on their activity. You can send a general welcome email to those who’ve just joined the email list, or you can send a reminder email to those who’ve signed up for an event or product information. These personalized emails keep your brand in front of people’s minds, and make them feel like you are personally reaching out to them.

• It is the best bet for business growth. When you’re ready to get the word out about an update or product, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to do that. For every $1 spent, email has an average $38 return on investment (ROI). ROI is an important thing to measure, it basically is how you can tell if the effort and money you’re putting into something is coming back to you or even better, earning you more. 

• Email’s professional nature is also something that differentiates it from social media. People who are going through their email are probably more in the mindset to read your blog post or buy your stuff. Everyone is different, but I prefer to use social media for browsing and connecting with others, not so much to buy things. With so many messages on the feed, I might not read every caption fully. 

• Lastly, it has a larger reach than even Facebook, which has 2 billion users. Email accounts are at around 4 billion. 

How do I start email marketing?

Make a plan

Once you’ve defined your brand, style, and audience, plan to set up social media accounts and a website, and then include how email marketing will fit into your content strategy. A content strategy is basically a well thought out, long form plan based on your goals that details what you will communicate to your audience, and when, where and how you will communicate to them.

You should aim for consistency across your communication channels. So along with what you’re going to write, also consider the frequency that you send your emails and overall design of them. You want to create an experience for your customers, and make your social channels, emails, and website all feel connected. Your potential buyers should recognize your brand by its colors, logos, style, etc.

These plans and strategies should also have your goals in mind. Are you looking for more sign-ups? More website traffic? More product sales? Keeping the goal in mind will help you refine your content.

If you’re wondering how to go about creating this plan, do some research, learn and gain inspiration from other peoples’ email marketing examples.

Create a place for sign-ups

Make sure there’s a way for people to easily sign up for your email newsletters. Creating a sign-up page on your website is the easiest way to do this. If you’re doing an online event, (hopefully events will be in person again someday!) make it known or visible somewhere for people to easily find.

Understand communication laws

Because you are collecting personal information and sending messages to people’s inboxes, there actually are laws on what you can and can’t do. While it’s legally required, it’s also best practice so that people feel that your communications are legit and not spammy. It’s important to understand email laws and regulations.

Dive into analytics

Understanding the data available to you will greatly help your marketing efforts. How many people opened the email? How many people clicked on the links in the email? How many people visited my website through this email? Once you get to a point of consistently sending emails, make sure to review and reflect on how they are performing so that you can improve or adjust as needed. 

You can also start segmenting your audience. As mentioned above, you can send different emails to people who have purchased products before than to those who haven’t or are new joiners. With segmentation you can also perform small experiments on emails to see which one performs better. It can be the same email, but change the headline or the lead image or the time you send it at. The different open rates and click through rates can show you what people respond to or are more likely to engage with based on the variables you changed.

Email marketing platforms you can get started with for free

Some of the steps listed above––designing an email, analytics, audience segmentation, automation––would be impossible or extremely time consuming if it weren’t for email marketing platforms. These platforms make it easy for you to put your writing and images in beautiful templates, schedule times for emails to send, analyze data, and more. Here is a breakdown of email marketing platforms that you can use or get started with for free:

Mailchimp: Mailchimp allows you to have a forever free account, although it comes with limitations. They also have tips and articles to read that will help you get started, as well as podcasts and films offering inspirational stories from entrepreneurs. Their paid plans start from $10/month for up to 500 subscribers, and the pricing increases the more subscribers you gain.

Convertkit: Convertkit, where Angel Marie (the owner of this site your on) works, is a robust email platform with a unique feature that allows you to also have a forever free account with limitations, but it also allows you to create content upgrades and incentives to your email list too. They have a blog to get helpful tips, as well as weekly webinars to help entrepreneurs looking to grow their businesses. ConvertKit offers a free plan with basic email marketing tools, but also offers 14-day free trial (no credit card required) if you’d like to experience their paid plan with a bit more advanced tools. After that, pricing starts from $29/month for 1,000 subscribers and increases from there based on subscriber quantity. 

Constant Contact: Constant Contact is one of the largest and easiest to use email marketing services. They have a 60-day free trial, then after that their pricing starts as low as $20/month.

Drip: Drip is a popular option for eCommerce marketing. They offer seamless integration to popular website builders, and they have powerful tools for audience segmentation and automation. Drip offers a 3-week free trial, and then their plans start from $49 / month.

There’s so many more tools than just listed above. Do your research to find out what works best for your goals, style and your budget.

With its massive reach, unique nature, cost effectiveness, flexibility and online tools available for all, email marketing is hands down the best system to implement for your business. When done correctly, email is sure to help you grow your business and build customer relationships like no other. 

Author: Destanie Martin-Johnson

Destanie is a writer from Minnesota and is based in the Twin Cities area. She has a background in journalism, communications and public relations.

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