Email Marketing 101

Campaign Monitor just published a comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to get started with email marketing. This guide walks you through the process of getting started with your first email campaign to ensure that it’s a successful one. Full of high quality infographics and  featuring a “cheat sheet”, this guide thoroughly covers five core steps needed to achieve success. Authors provide post-campaign bonus tips and conclude the guide with a statement that email marketing has a greater ROI than any other marketing channel available.

Step 1: Establish your goals

It can be tempting to simply sign up for an email marketing tool like Campaign Monitor and start sending your first campaign.

But before jumping in head first, it’s worth taking a minute to think about your goals and what you really want to achieve with email as that will dictate the type of campaigns you send, who you target, the content you include, and how you measure success.

Step 2: Build your email list

Now that you have established your goals and what you want to achieve from email marketing, it’s time to build your email list so you can start sending campaigns that those goals.

There are a couple of different ways you can build your email list, but the right method for each campaign really depends on the goals you establish in Step 1.

Step 3: Select the type of campaigns you want to send

There are a number of different types of email campaigns marketers like you can send to subscribers, and the type you choose really depends on the goals you established in Step 1.

Let’s take a look at the different types of campaigns and how they can help you achieve your email marketing goals.

Step 4: Create your first campaign

Now that you’ve decided on your goals, built a bit of an audience and selected the type of campaign you’re going to send, it’s time to start building your email.

Email tools like Campaign Monitor, with our drag-and-drop email builder, make it incredibly easy to create beautiful email marketing campaigns, but there are some fundamentals that you should know to make sure you get the best results from each campaign.

Step 5: Measure your results

With your first email out the door and starting to get opened and clicked by your subscribers, you’ll be able to start tracking the success of your campaign.

There are two places through which you can track the success of your email marketing campaigns: Your email marketing tool (such as Campaign Monitor) and your website analytics tool (such as Google Analytics).

The reports section of your email marketing tool is the place to go to understand how people interacted with your email campaigns.