Day 6 – Email Marketing

As we mentioned in the previous lesson, email marketing is an excellent method for getting visitors back to your blog.

However, email marketing can go even further. Not only can it be used to boost your visitor numbers, it can also be used to establish a relationship and trust with your audience to recommend your products too as the relationship grows.

To do this you need to start building an email list.

What is an email list?

Put simply, an email list is a group of people who have voluntarily signed up to receive your email updates. This is typically grown from an opt-in form on your website.

Special email marketing software like MailChimp is used to send out communications to your email subscribers.

The best thing about your email list is that you own it. Your Facebook page may be owned by Facebook and your Channel followers may be owned by YouTube, but your email list is yours.

How to get started

Hopefully you already have an email opt-in form configured on your website, as suggested in my previous lesson.

To start sending emails using the emails you’ve captured, you need to sign up with an email marketing provider. I recommend MailChimp to get started, as they offer a free plan for a small list.

I always recommend using a specialised provider, since these companies spend a lot of money and resources to make sure your email reaches your subscribers inbox.

They also offer a host of other marketing tools to help make your communications more effective.

Tools provided by Email Marketing Providers

There are many great email marketing companies out there, and they’re all working hard to give you the best service possible. It’s a competitive industry, so companies are fighting hard to keep costs low for their customers while also offering a tonne of features.

Beyond just sending emails, most providers also let you:

• Manage subscribers
• Track emails
• View analytics
• Setup auto-responders
• Create emails from beautiful templates
• Target specific subscribers
• Split test emails to see which is most effective

Most providers also easily integrate easily with WordPress and integrate with the most popular form capture plugins.

How to place subscriber forms

With your email marketing provider setup and opt-in monster or another lead capture plugin installed, let’s discuss where to best place these forms on your website.

These capture plugins can do most things, but sometimes simple is better.

I personally use opt-in monster for:

• pop-ups
• full screen forms
• and before visitor exit’s

But for simple in-line and sidebar forms I like to use WPForms.

It’s very simple to setup. Install the plugin and then head over to WPForms > Add New and select “Newsletter Signup Form”

You’ll see an email form already created and on the next page you can connect to your email marketing provider.

Click save and next you to Confirmations > General and change your confirmation to “We’ll be in touch”.

Save the form when you’re done and you’ll be given a short code.

To add the new subscriber form to your sidebar, go to Appearance > Widgets. You can either add a text widget and paste in the shortcode or use the specific WPForms widget and select your new form. Make sure to add either to the Main Sidebar and click Save.

You can also add your new form anywhere on a page or post by pasting in the short code.

Interacting with your subscribers

When your list starts to grow make sue you regularly engage with your subscribers. If you don’t they’ll forget about you. but if you do you can build a great relationship over time and eventually recommend products that you know will add value to their lives.

I like to send weekly updates through my newsletters.

Remember that not every email needs to be promotional. Newsletters can just show your latest posts, request for feedback on what to write next, or provide helpful subscriber only tips.

It’s all about providing your followers with lots of value. Only then can you suggest something that will provide value in return.