Email marketing is one of the best money-making models known to humankind; think about this: how many persons do you know who have an email address? For me, everyone I know has at least two of them.
Everyone is competing for your email. Do you want to sign up for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or other social media? They want your email; if you want to find a job, they will ask you to provide your email address.
In this post, I will explain why you need to do email marketing and the seven steps to start email marketing for beginners.
Before we move on, let me answer some of your questions. If I didn’t answer your question in particular, let me know in the comment section below.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing sends a commercial message using email, typically to a group of people. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing.
What are the best email marketing services?
This is not a simple question to answer. There are a lot of good email marketing services out there, from high-end ones like Infusionsoft or Consfusionsoft, as I like to call them.
They are very good but very complicated to understand and very expensive. You must hire somebody to do it for you or dedicate much time to learning how to use them.
Also, there are lower-end email marketing services, like MailChimp, which are free to start but have a very complex design.
So, if we consider the service’s price and how easy it is to use them, ConvertKit and Aweber are the best email marketing services for me.
How can I email marketing for free?
Yes, you can start email marketing for free. ConvertKit offers a free two-week trial (also, they have a free all you need is to register using your email. No credit card is required; you can get your ConvertKit free account.
Aweber offers a free account, and You can get your Aweber free account here.
What is an email marketing strategy?
Email marketing is part of your overall marketing strategy and business plan. It helps you market your products and services using the email channel with the best chances of making a profit and reaching your goals.
What is the best email marketing platform?
I have tried almost every email marketing platform on the market, and I will confidently tell you that Covertkit is the best.
Convertkit is the best autoresponder for content creators who want simple yet effective software to communicate with their followers.
They have a straightforward design and simple yet very powerful automation, and you can integrate them with most of the other tools you need to run your business and the feature.
What I like the most is their tagging feature. You can tag people on your list according to the products they bought from you, how they joined your newsletter, the lead magnet they used to opt-in, the links they clicked, etc; your imagination is the limit.
You can read more about the best autoresponder according to what you do.
Why email marketing
There are many reasons to start email marketing, and here I will list and discuss a few of them.
You have more control.
There are many ways to build a list online. You can start a YouTube channel, and your subscribers are your list.
You can build Instagram followers, and you can do the same with Facebook and many other social media platforms, but there is one major problem with those: you don’t control them.
A policy change or an algorithm change can wipe out all your following on the brink of an eye.
When you have your email list, you have more control, and for any reason, if the autoresponder company wants to shut you down, they will let you download your list.
There is no limit to how many of your subscribers you can reach
Most social media platforms will limit your organic reach. Even if you have 10,000 YouTube subscribers, publishing a new video will not reach all of them.
They want you to pay to reach more people, but if you have 10,000 email subscribers and send an email, all of them will get it.
Higher return on investment
Research concluded that you will earn around $40 for every $1 you invest in email marketing. This is a very lucrative business, so every company is after your email address; you should do the same.
Ability to print money
This is one of the most powerful aspects of email marketing: you can print money from thin air.
Imagine you have 10,000 persons on your mailing list, wake up in the morning, and realize that you need $ 5,000 ASAP because of an emergency.
You sit down, and in 20 minutes, you find a product that costs $100, and they pay you 50% in commissions. You study the products and are convinced it will help your audience. You write an email and send it to your list, recommending that affiliate product.
If only 2000 people open your email and out of those 1000 click your affiliate link, that is 1000 clicks to the offer.
If just 100 of them buy, you will have enough money to pay for your emergency (it could be more if you have a good relationship with your audience and the offer has some upsells).
I am not saying you will be able to do this from day one; that would be stupid, but with time, if you learn how to do email marketing correctly, you will be able to do this regularly.
Forget about $ 5,000 days; you can do this and pull a lot of $100 days, and in my opinion, this is enough to have a good life in most parts of the world.
The difference between list building and email marketing
Many people get confused when they see the terms list building and email marketing, and sometimes they interchange them. Here is the difference between them.
List building adds prospects to your email list (I will write a guide about this in a few days).
This includes picking the market in which you want to build your list, creating a lead magnet or a freebie to give away as an incentive for people to join your email list, creating a landing page or a squeeze page, choosing your autoresponder service, and deciding your traffic strategy.
Email marketing is sending emails to your list, such as promotional emails, educational emails, or a combination.
The primary purpose of email marketing is to build a relationship between you and your prospects, and you need to write those emails as if you’re writing them to your friend.
You see, people tend to buy from people they trust. If you can earn the trust of a group of people, they can buy most of the things you will recommend to them, and this will make you money in the process.
In a few words, list building happens before your prospects give you their email address and email marketing happens afterward.
Seven steps to start email marketing for beginners
So these are the seven steps to start email marketing, especially if you’re a beginner.
Step 1: Pick an email marketing platform
Earlier in this post, I discussed the best email marketing platform, ConvertKit. This is it if you want a simple design, powerful automation, and a modern email marketing platform for content creators.
Convetkit has a 14-day trial and then $ 15 per month for up to 300 subscribers; remember, the cost increases as your number of subscribers increases.
If you do not have money for now, you can use a free option of up to 300 subscribers.
Step 2: Set up a website and a professional email address
It does not matter if you use YouTube, Podcast, Facebook, or any other marketing channel. You need a website as the central hub of your online business.
To create a website, you need a domain name. The easiest domain name you can get is your name; go to namecheap.com and buy a domain name for less than $10.
Also, you will need a hosting service. If you are starting, I recommend that you get started with Cloudways. They are fast, reliable, and relatively cheap.
You can install WordPress on your domain name. If you can’t do this, let me know, and I will help you install a WordPress site for free.
Also, you will need to set up a professional email address, and this is because when you use a free email address like gmail.com or hotmail.com, there is a big chance that your emails will end up in a spam box.
Having an email address like yourname@yourname.com will increase trust, and it is more professional.
You can use Google Work Space to create your professional email address.
Step 3: Create a lead magnet
The third step is building a lead magnet; this is a part that most people ignore but is very important.
You need to bribe your prospects to join your list ethically, and you need to find your audience’s main problem and offer them something that will help them solve this problem in exchange for their email list.
A lead magnet does not have to be complicated, and you can create a one-page PDF checklist on foods you never eat to lose weight or a PDF on five steps to build your email list.
The main thing about this is that your lead magnet should be practical, easy to consume, and directly to the point.
Also, you can use a video, audio, or even an article as your lead magnet, and you don’t need to overcomplicate this. Just do it.
Step 4: Build a Squeeze page or Opt-in Form
So now you have an email marketing platform and a lead magnet ready, the next step is to create an opt-in form to give away your lead magnet. You will need to connect your opt-in form to your email marketing platform.
I always recommend just asking for an email address for exchange with a lead magnet, but if you want to add personalization, you can ask for a name, too. Please don’t ask for their phone number or zip code; remember, less is more.
This works: prospects visit your website and find a landing page offering a lead magnet. He/She thinks that it is exactly what he/she needs.
They give you an email address and get added to your email marketing platform, which instantly gives them a thank you message with a download link.
You can build your squeeze page using WordPress plugins; if you can code, you can build one coding from scratch. In my case, I use Clickfunnels to build my squeeze pages.
Step 5: Create the main email list
When you’re new, you need to create one email list or sequence, and you can name it according to your lead magnet(I will discuss this in the next step).
If you are using ConvertKit, they call them a sequence, and you need to go and create a sequence and follow the instructions (again, there is a lot of information about this on the ConvertKit website).
Click Send > Sequences in the top navigation to find the Sequences page.
Step 6: Create a Welcome message and a Soap Opera Email Sequence
After your prospects opt-in, you must send them a thank you message. This message aims to introduce yourself to your prospects, thank them for getting your lead magnet, tell them what they can do with it, give them the download link, and tell them what to expect from you in the future. That is the main purpose of your first email.
After creating a thank you email, you must create and set up a Soap Opera Sequence.
In a few words, a Soap Opera Sequence (SOS for short) is a sequence of emails that move subscribers through a serialized narrative, like this: In the example above, SOS #1 is a sequence of 4 to 5 emails. … The main aim of this sequence is to introduce you and your services/products to your prospects
This is the method I learned from Russell Brunson in his famous book DotcomSecrets, and you can get it here for free.
Step 7: Send Seinfeld emails
Do you remember the famous sitcom Seinfeld? It was a comedy sitcom about nothing, and there was no pre-written script. All they used to do was make episodes about their daily life.
For example, if they went to the coffee shop, whatever happened there was an episode, the same thing if they go to a restaurant or hospital, they made a whole series about nothing.
Seinfeld emails are emails about nothing—oddly enough, they’re effective. When writing a Seinfeld email, connect with people in your writing while subtly leading them to your products and services, too.
These can be your content, conversation with people on social media or daily life, or trending news of the day. It can be anything.
The main thing here is that in each of these emails, you need to connect them to the product you are promoting. This is like making money without being too pushy.
People will be entertained, and they will buy through your link, and you will make much more money.
I also learned this from Russell Brunson’s famous book DotcomSecrets, which you can get here for free.
Final words
Those are the seven steps to start email marketing for beginners; if you need assistance, let me know and see how I can help you. Thank you for reading.