Email marketing is a form of direct digital marketing that involves sending emails to a group of people with the aim of promoting products, and services, building relationships, and engaging a target audience. It is a direct line of communication between a business and its customers or potential customers. It is also a cost-effective channel for maintaining ongoing communication.

Deciding what types of people you want to send out your emails to is the first stage of developing an email marketing strategy. Relevance in email marketing is key, and knowing your audience before you begin to build and segment your list will enable you to tailor your email content to their specific interests, needs, and preferences. If you are sending emails that are relevant, interesting, and engaging, your audience will be more likely to take the desired actions, such as making a purchase or clicking a link to your website.

By understanding your audience, you will also be able to personalise your emails by adding their names in subject lines, recommending products or services based on their past behaviour, and deliver content at the right time, which will build a stronger connection to your brand.

Knowing your audience and their needs will also reduce the amount of people who unsubscribe to your email. If you are sending emails out to people who are not interested in your content then they will unsubscribe, which can potentially harm your email address reputation making your emails land in junk.

The next stage of email marketing is to build a mailing list of email addresses of customers and potential customers you want to receive your emails. Once you understand the types of people you want to send your email out to, you can add a sign-up form to your website which allows people to enter their email addresses and sign up for your newsletter.

A great tip for this is to use incentives, such as website pop-ups and slide-in forms which allow users to receive a discount code, download an e-book, or get exclusive access to valuable content in return for signing up for your newsletter. You can also add a simple strip to the top of your website which grabs users' attention and encourages them to subscribe.

Some other ways to grow your list are to use social media to promote your email sign-up forms, create high-quality blog posts and videos that include opportunities for readers or viewers to subscribe to your email list, run contests and giveaways to collect email addresses, and encourage your current subscribers to refer friends and colleagues.

Coming up with engaging topics for a newsletter is crucial to its success as it keeps your audience interested. One of the best ways to stay consistent with sending out newsletters to your audience is to leverage blog content. This will not only save you time as the content is already written, but it also keeps your email list better informed with any new content on your website that they may not check for regularly.

Once you have sent out a few newsletters, you can analyse their performance and identify topics or types of newsletters that performed the best. To identify these newsletters, look for high open rates, click-through rates, and social media shares.

You should also keep your content timely and relevant to current events, industry trends, or seasonal themes. If there are any emerging trends or hot topics in your field, consider choosing these as a topic for your newsletter to inform your audience before they get this information anywhere else. This is also a great way to educate and inform your audience in good time, and a great way to share new insights, expert opinions, and educational content.

Choosing the right email marketing tool is another important part of your strategy as it will directly impact your ability to reach and engage your target audience. Once you have clearly defined what you want to achieve with email marketing, you can start looking for the right tool that includes features that will benefit you and your audience.

Ensure that you consider your audience size, as this is usually what impacts the price of the email marketing platform subscription. You should also consider possible growth of your email list in the future and check to see how much of a price increase adding new subscribers will incur.

Some great email marketing platforms that we recommend at East Coast Design Studio are:

-      Mailerlite (the one we use in-house)

-      Campaign Monitor

-      Mailchimp

-      Klaviyo

Designing your newsletter will be the next step in your email marketing journey. The visual design of the email should reflect your brand, and be easy to read and navigate. You should always keep the newsletter’s branding consistent by referring to your brand guidelines as it will be an extension of your brand and needs to look professional. This includes keeping the logo, colours, fonts, and imagery the same as on your website and social media profiles so that the newsletter is easily identifiable.

You should create a clear hierarchy within the newsletter design, ensuring that important information, headlines, and call-to-actions& buttons stand out and are easily identifiable. The typography should be clear and easy to read with legible font sizes - try to avoid decorative or complex typefaces so that your text is easy to read, even on smaller screens.

Another tip is to make use of white space to provide a clean and uncluttered look. This will also help to improve the overall readability of the newsletter and guide the reader’s eyes. Another important note is to keep image sizes to a minimal without compromising too much quality, as if your email has lots of large images on it, it may take a while to open!

Many email marketing platforms such as Mailerlite and Mailchimp have easy to use drag and drop email builders. They also ensure that your email will be mobile-friendly as many your email recipients may open the email on their mobile device.

Many email marketers choose to automate their campaigns. For example, businesses can set up automated welcome emails for new subscribers, abandoned cart emails for users who have left items in their basket, or drip campaigns that nurture leads over different timescales.

Email automation is a great way to save time as it allows you to schedule and send emails at specific times or in response to users' actions, which will free up time and resources. This is particularly helpful for small businesses, as they may not have much time to create newsletters regularly. Email automation is also great for staying consistent and allows youto reach your audience at the right times. Many subscribers come to expect regular updates which can therefore lead to better engagement!

In summary, email marketing is a great, cost-effective form of marketing that your audience are sure to love! It also allows you to save time through using automation and can help you increase your brand awareness.

At East Coast Design Studio, we have helped many businesses reach their target audience and reach out to possible clients with our email marketing service. To find out more about this, click here. Alternatively, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us to find out more.