email marketing | AltusHost

You’ve probably received more than 50 emails filled with info or promotions from many companies just in the last 24 hours.

And yes, maybe you don’t even remember, but at some point, you have probably voluntarily subscribed to some sort of newsletter.

While online shopping or surfing through a particular website? Maybe to enter a giveaway or to get a special offer? Or just because you’re simply interested in knowing more about company’s services?

Now, let’s imagine this picture.

You have a (online or offline) business and you suddenly realize that you have never considered sending newsletters to your clients.

And, why exactly is that?

It could be the case that you have also received a lot of emails that have nothing to do with you, that you, reasonably, doubt you ever

subscribed to, awfully irritating, and you think… why would I ever do the that to my clients?

Let me tell you an encouraging thing or two.

There is a way of contacting your customers without annoying them and, furthermore — what really counts — engaging them. Email marketing is back in vogue, and has proved to be a super useful way of making contact with customers. Creating the perfect newsletter is possible, and nowadays, with mailing apps that offer amazing email newsletter templates it’s easier than ever.

Hold on! Let’s start from the exact beginning!

What is a newsletter?

A newsletter is basically a document containing information that is sent periodically to a number of clients that have actually agreed to this.

And now we have it, the first important fact about newsletters: it is not spam!

Spam is actually something companies misuse to send us without asking for our permission, and that is why it’s so annoying. We are most likely not interested in what we receive because we never agreed to receive it, and it’s very frustrating because it fills our inbox, 9/10 times, with some pretty useless content.

Why should I use one?

It has so many advantages so that we honestly don’t know where to start! Sending emails has never really gone out of

style because it’s simple, easy and cheap. Now, with email marketing strategy and newsletter campaigns we will add that it’s also incredibly efficient.

One of its first and main advantages, and one of the things that differentiates newsletter from spam, is that it allows you to send personalized emails. Receiving an email that addresses you by your name and sends you content you’re actually interested in is not the same as receiving spam!

The fact that you send quality content to your subscribers (because remember, they have to be subscribed) fosters their loyalty towards your business. You can send them stuff you know they will be happy to read: tips and tricks, info about your services or products, tutorials, discount codes and offers like free shipping, giveaway opportunities… things you would be glad to found in your inbox as well!

This type of communication engages your subscribers and creates a positive atmosphere between your company and them. When they have a nice image of you and they have exclusive privileges such as discounts, they are more likely to become not only subscribers, but loyal clients. Email marketing generates great conversion rates, as it gives subscribers many reasons to actually purchase the product or service.

We’ve mentioned it before; it’s super easy! Sending an email has always been easy, but sending thousands of emails to thousands of contacts can seem a bit overwhelming; so now, we have the amazing mailing apps.

They allow us to design our perfect newsletter without knowing anything about design, because they offer countless email newsletter templates that we can retouch the way we want, so they meet our standards.

Finally, apart from being super easy to design, newsletters save us time and money. Creating an email account is free, that’s should be a pretty known fact to us all, but as we’ve said before, when sending campaigns to thousands of clients, we should use a professional mailing app. Most of them are pretty inexpensive, so you’ll just have to invest a little amount of money.

Moreover, email marketing offers a ROI (return of investment) of 4300%; what this means is that, for every euro invested, we will receive 43; this is awesome!

The Key: mailing apps and email newsletter templates

Once it’s clear that we must send quality content in order to not annoy our subscribers, the next step is the format. Generally, the problems come at this point, where people end up sending messy campaigns because they are not graphic designers.

People sometimes don’t know what a newsletter must include (for example, the mandatory unsubscribe button), or finally figure out a design and successfully send it to a desktop, but when the client checks his email on his smartphone, the format has completely changed and looks awful (if it’s still understandable!).

Mailing apps make sure that you include everything that must be included, and most of them have a responsive format so the campaign looks the same in a smartphone.

1. App as your personal designer

They do not only avoid these problems; we must insist that you take a look at some mailing apps mostly because, as we mentioned above, they offer amazing email newsletter templates that you can adapt to your business and change as you wish. They do not offer only e-commerce newsletter templates, but also transactional ones, event related ones…

2. Personalize it

This makes everything so quick and easy, and the templates can be personalised so they address all of your subscribers by their name. They take into account your preferences and your business’ characteristics so you don’t have to worry about anything; creating your email newsletter template will be as simple as abc.

3. Some extra help with the other apps

This is not the only advantage they offer; some mailing apps include many tools, such as Google Analytics so you can track your success, WordPress so you can directly share your data, API so you can manage your contact list… they generally will take care of your agenda by deleting repeated contacts, automatically correcting any misspelled email address, etc.

4. Everything will be under control

Once you have chosen a mailing app and created a beautiful email newsletter template, it is time to send your campaigns. Rememb

er to always offer your subscribers some quality content that adds value to your newsletter and that can be useful for them.

5. Spice it up and Engage!

Finally, we want to give you some ideas to further engage your subscribers. Do you know that there are also seasonal newsletter templates so you can wish your (hopefully) clients a Happy Halloween, a Merry Christmas and even a Happy birthday? Doing so and sending over some special offer for those special days can have awesome results!

Moreover, offline events are also a great idea, because you get to personally know your subscribers. You can also use email newsletter templates to invite them, offering them to bring a friend to the event you are organizing; this may be a good way of gaining new clients!

6. Get started!

Now that you have all the tips and tricks needed… it’s time for you to step on and join the email marketing world! Let us know in the comments down below if you put these ideas to the test and if they made you succeed – we’re sure they will!

Email marketing is undoubtedly amongst the most cost-effective marketing strategies that you can employ to expand your reach. It’s not hard to manage and it provides you with the ultimate control over the processes. It will also allow you to properly establish direct contact with all of your customers. Of course, there are quite a lot of different things that have to be taken into account when it comes to it.

You need to:

– Grow your email list and acquire contacts which are relevant to what your business covers. You won’t talk about new iPhone 8 with your grandma, who doesn’t even own a smartphone, right?

– On top of all, you need to make sure that your content is flawless.

– Employ some of the best email marketing tools there. And this is where this blogpost truly begins to unravel itself.

With this in mind, we’ve taken the liberty of providing you with some of the best tools available.

1. Constant Contact

Constant Content is the main competitor of MailChimp when it comes to email marketing and both of the solutions offer the highest deliverability rates – 97% for the former and between 96% and 99% for the latter. This is a productive spar as we all get from it is improved and better functioning tools.

This is undoubtedly one of the quickest growing tools on the market. It is also one which is easy to use and comprehensive. One of the things that you will certainly enjoy at least as much as I did was the fact that you can easily track and report with this tool. There are additional perks too. I was happy to see that there are incorporated social media sharing options. There is also an image library as well as 1GB storage for your very own stuff.

This is also a tool which comes with comprehensive support with email, live chat and tremendous community support as well. You can also take advantage of their online training. You don’t need anything to start – it’s easy to use and you will see it’s quite intuitive as well.

2. AWeber

This is another particularly popular email marketing service. They are going to offer you a significantly wide range of tools for medium sized and small businesses. You can easily manage your email marketing on your own.

For starters, I was able to initiate the tool easily without any issues. It connects easily to most of the platforms, I tested it out with Magento and WordPress – there were no problems at all.

You will get access to a lot of list management tools, autoresponders alongside email tracking and email templates with insights which are particularly effective.

3. Convert Kit

This is another robust marketing platform for email which is usually used by professional bloggers, marketers and authors. It is particularly powerful and incredibly easy to use.

There is no one one-size-fits-all solution – that’s their main policy when it comes to email marketing. This is the main reason for which they thrive to make their product better as the trends and tendencies change as we speak. Convert Kit is also one of the not so many solutions which lay a tremendous amount of personal experience in everything they do so their platform is particularly well-thought out and provides quite a few small but notable features.

This is a product which allows you to rely on constant content upgrades as well as incentives which are particularly effective. The auto-responder is also rather easy to manage and you can easily send out drip emails. What is more, you could quickly segment your contacts into ones who are interested to buy and those who are have already bought.

4. MailChimp

MailChimp has been around pretty much since the beginning of 2001. What started as a side-project is currently a platform used by more than 15 million people throughout the entire world. Whoa! This is something absolutely substantial.

Obviously, one of the classics in the industry, MailChimp is a service which has quite a lot to offer. It’s one of the email marke

ting tools which are going to ensure that everything is handled as per the highest standards. Of course, it’s an expensive option but if you want to get things done, you should.

This is a tool which integrates flawlessly with WordPress, Shopify and Magento alongside a range of other platforms as well. It’s something which will allow you to use segmenting apps, autoresponders, email creators and merge tags conveniently and easily. Furthermore, there are simple tracking and analytics capabilities which are going to allow you to keep proper alignment on your processes.

5. Assignment Helper

Here the team of professional writers can help you to find the right words for your email. There are quite a lot of helpful tips about the writing that you can find here.

What is more, you can easily personalize every single message, using the tremendous amount of rich customer information which is available to you.

6. Campaign Monitor

Speaking of popular email marketing solutions, Campaign Monitor is something particularly effective. It will provide you with a way to run smooth email marketing campaigns. Some of the big players using Campaign Monitor include MAHALO Digital, Core77, Big Sea, Epic, The Orchard, Reach Beyond Marketing and others of the kind. As they say, this brand is loved by over 2 million people at 200,000 businesses around the world.

The interface, though, is what truly makes a great impression. They have a very beautiful drag and drop ema

il builder which is particularly convenient. It will allow you to use email templates professionally and make them pretty much your own.

Another quick note here that you should account for – there are certain Campaign Monitor plans which are cheaper in comparison and would still enable you to host the same quantity of emails as some of the more expensive ones. However, they would limit your e-newsletters so it’s a matter of weighing in your preferences when it comes to it.

So, let’s sum up. Email marketing is important. It still rocks the marketing ground. But before you go for it, you need to ensure that you are well aware of how to engage your customer base. This is something absolutely tremendous. If you start sending out blank emails, you will essentially lose a lot of opportunities. Why? Well, people will assume you are spamming them. It’s the same thing that everyone does, so that’s something that you need to account for.

You need to understand that working with clients is individual. Of course, when you have pools of people towards your website in the form of traffic you won’t be able to afford to get to everyone individually, right? Sure, that’s where analytics come. Use scalable analytics in order to ensure that everything is handled as per the highest standards.

Email automation and marketing is something particularly effective but it should be used carefully. You don’t want to end up filtered in the spam folder as this is the end of this customer. With this in mind, make sure to approach the matter particularly carefully and with the proper tools in hand. This is the only way you can actually make the most out of it.

Lucy Benton is a marketing specialist, a business consultant who finds her passion in expressing own thoughts as a blogger, and currently works at Awriter. She is constantly looking for the ways to improve her skills and expertise. If you’re interested in working with Lucy, you can find her on Facebook and Twitter.

Email Newsletter: The Ultimate Guide For SME’s

Tag Archives: email marketing

6 Awesome Email Marketing Tools for Small Business

1. Constant Contact

2. AWeber

3. Convert Kit

4. MailChimp

5. Assignment Helper

6. Campaign Monitor

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