How to Get Started with Email Marketing Yourself? (First Steps)

Want to learn how to get started with email marketing? If yes, then this guide will help you out.

Email marketing is one of the essential digital marketing strategies for website owners and businesses looking to grow. With this strategy, you can connect with thousands of your audience to increase sales, conversions, and traffic.

If you’re a beginner, then you may not know how to do email marketing. Don’t worry! Here, we’ll explain everything about email marketing from scratch in the easiest way possible.

Moreover, you’ll also know its importance and step-by-step processes from collecting email addresses to analyzing your email campaign results. So, let’s get started.

A. What is Email Marketing? – Definition

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy to promote products and services through emails. The mails are sent in bulk i.e. to several users at once. The process of sending an email can be manual and automated fashion.

Those emails usually contain commercial information about products or services you’re trying to sell. The process is to drive clicks, acquire an audience, and increase sales. So generally, email marketing is a commercial tool that boosts conversions and revenue.

However, the concept of email marketing has come to a broader sense nowadays. Automated emailing is used for conveying a welcome message, referrals, confirmations, announcements, offers, etc.

In brief, the email marketing process involves mainly 2 steps; i.e. collecting the users’ email addresses and sending out emails to them. But, there’s more than that to building a successful email marketing campaign. We’ll talk about all of it below.

Is Email Marketing Still Relevant? Or Is It Dead?

As you might know, email marketing started a long time ago. So, you may be confused if it’s still relevant these days. Some people even question, ‘Is email marketing dead?’. Of course not!

Started back in 1978, email marketing is the most effective marketing channel even today. Some people think it’s outdated, but it’s not. It’s still an effective, easy, and low-investment strategy you can apply and get a better return.

Notably, the returns on investment (ROI) of email marketing exceed other marketing channels like social media marketing, affiliate marketing, and even SEO.

You’ll be surprised to know that email marketing has an average ROI of an astonishing 42000%, according to a recent study. That’s to say, you get a return of about $42 for every dollar spent on it.

Reasons Why Email Marketing is Still Popular

There are an estimated 4.26 billion email users in the world. That’s more than the number of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter users combined. So, it’s no surprise that email marketing is still popular today.

On the other hand, emails create a personal relationship with users. They seem more like personal messages to a friend rather than advertisements. So if written correctly, then emails work like magic in gaining conversions.

Marketing emails are based on a call to action. It’s a text or content that persuades users to act as they want. It encourages users to click links or buttons to visit your site or buy your products. So, your business goes the extra mile with email marketing through call-to-action.

Further, you can use email marketing also for sending newsletters, confirmations, referrals, notifications, etc. In other words, email makes it easy to manage your business and keep up with your customers. Plus, it’s cheaper and easier than other marketing strategies.

Objectives of Email Marketing

The prime goal of businesses is to drive customers through emails and earn revenue. For long-term success, businesses must consider customer relationships, create leads, promote products, reach the audience, etc. And, email marketing is the way to ensure it.

The email marketing objectives on how it helps to achieve the short-term and long-term goals:

• Build Relationships: Emails are a direct way of communicating with your clients. Personalized messages let you connect with your clients and make them feel friendly.
• Brand Awareness: It’s a great way to remind people of your company and services. So when people need a similar product or service, they can choose your company.
• Generate Leads: Lead generation involves obtaining contact information like email addresses from your target audience by providing users useful services for free. The targeted audience can be your potential customers interested in using your service.
• Promote Content/Products: It promotes your products, services, or other content. Plus, share them by highlighting some important points.
• Nurture Leads: Further, it helps to nurture your leads (feeding the leads with suitable emails). This lets you timely notify users about your latest products, offers, and posts.
• Automate Follow-Ups: Also, it lets you automate follow-up with your new email subscribers or customers with confirmation emails or welcome messages.

B. Why is Email Marketing Important?

Above we’ve covered the basic definition of email marketing, its popularity, and objectives. Now, let’s understand why email marketing is important.

There are many modern marketing strategies, like SEO, affiliate marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, advertisements, etc. However, the email marketing strategy is still used a lot, although being a conventional method.

Webmasters have understood the importance, so they make use of email marketing software to their benefit. You might have seen websites with subscriber forms, a part of email marketing.

Certain unique features of email marketing set it apart from other marketing tools. So, let’s talk about its usefulness and features that make email marketing a top priority for your business.

6 Reasons Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore Email Marketing

i. User’s Habits

Your customers are highly habituated to using emails. You’ll be shocked by how many and how frequently people use emails daily. Here are some facts stating users’ habits of using emails.

• 58% of people check their emails first thing in the morning.
• 99% of users check their emails at least once a day.
• 77% of marketers have realized an increase in email engagement last year.
• 72% of people prefer promotional content over emails rather than social media.

[Source: Blog HubSpot]

Looking at these facts, it’s certain that email marketing is the best way to gain people’s reach.

ii. You Own Your Audience

When people sign up or subscribe to your newsletter, you get their email addresses. That’s a direct ticket for you to reach their inbox. So, once you get people to subscribe, you’ll have a solid promotion lead.

In social media, things are a little different showcasing one limitation. You might not have access to direct messages to your followers. Plus, social media accounts are prone to blocks and bans.

While on platforms like YouTube, you don’t get your subscribers’ addresses. Even though a messaging facility is provided, it’s rarely used. So, you can’t personally attend to your subscribers there.

Neither other marketing strategies help you contact the audience like email marketing.

iii. Conversion Rate

We’ve already mentioned that the ROI of email campaigns is 4200% i.e. $42 in return for every dollar you invest. That’s higher than other marketing strategy.

So, you’ll be converting more with email marketing than any other platform. That’s why you might not want to abandon email marketing in your business.

iv. Email Automation

One of the many advantages of email marketing is automation. It sends emails automatically to several people, making it practical for websites with many subscribers.

Email marketing software sets the email format you want to send with automation. You can use the allowed names and other details of individual users. Then, segment the users to whom the email is to be sent. The software then handles sending emails to users at specified times.

Having that lets you reach all the site subscribers while maintaining a personal bond with them.

v. Follow Up

Email marketing allows following up with your subscribers, clients, and customers. Follow-up emails are triggered after certain user actions. You’re in charge of setting when to follow up with an email.

Generally, the typical follow-up emails with related actions are as follows:

• New subscriber: Welcome message
• Abandoned shopping cart: Alert message with a request to continue to checkout
• Products purchased: Confirmation message with shipping message
• Plan expired: Message to upgrade plan

vi. Easy Analysis

Most email marketing services provide tracking and analytics features for your email campaigns. With your campaign data, you can analyze click rates, open rates, number of unsubscribes, etc., and plan for better campaigns in the future.

Moreover, you can keep track of your conversion brought out by those emails. So, ensure your investment is paying off. It’s hard to keep track of ROI and other useful data in social media ads.

C. How to Get Started with Email Marketing?

Email marketing involves many processes working together simultaneously. When you think about it, there are many things to do. Some major tasks are identifying your audience, building lists, sending emails, analyzing results, etc. Further, more sub-tasks come inside each task.

At first, it might look hard. But, various online tools are available that make your task easy. They help you create subscription forms, capture emails, segment them, design a campaign, and send emails. 

Firstly, you need to have a list of users to whom you can send emails. For that, you can work on gaining email addresses through subscription forms, pop-ups, etc. You can use tools like OptinMonster, Thrive Leads, etc., that specifically help in lead generation.

Besides, you can use email marketing tools like Brevo, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, HubSpot, etc. They are some of the renowned tools for running email marketing campaigns with features like automated messaging, list maintenance, segmentation, analysis, and so on.

Now, let’s see the step-by-step process of carrying out your email marketing campaign.

Step 1: Build Your Email List for Marketing

The first thing you need for email marketing is an email list. It’s a list of email contacts to whom you can send emails about relevant information.

The most basic way of collecting people’s email addresses is by getting them to sign up. The signup process involves users entering their email addresses on a subscription form.

The entered email addresses will be stored in the dashboard if you use software like OptinMonster. If you have a WordPress website, then you can use email subscriber WordPress plugins.

People signing up with their wish gives you total permission to send emails. Permission is an important factor that allows you to send marketing messages with their consent.

If people haven’t permitted you to send emails, then they’ll possibly mark your emails as spam. This can lead your campaign emails to the spam section of other users too. So, make sure you have total permission to send emails to your mail list subscribers.

You can also see websites having signup forms with agreement messages. e.g. ‘I’d like to receive emails from this website’ which users can tick. This even makes permission more clear and definitive.

You can also use the email contacts from previous campaigns if it’s not your first time. But make sure that there’s adequate permission. Also, ensure the running campaign is similar to the previous one. That way the users wouldn’t receive irrelevant messages.

Now let’s see some ways you can get people to sign up.

i. Use Lead Magnets

Most website owners keep subscription forms and expect users to sign up. But, it doesn’t work that way. People wouldn’t just give their personal information if they didn’t get any value. So, sign them up with good incentives.

That’s where the lead magnet comes in. As the name sounds, a lead magnet is something that attracts your visitors to sign up. You can provide a free service, giveaways, or offers in exchange for their email addresses. So, it’s a win-win situation for both you and the users.

There are unlimited things you can keep for a lead magnet. Some of the widely used ones are:

• Ebooks
• Multimedia
• Free trials
• Webinars
• Exclusive Deals
• Coupons
• Checklists
• Web Apps
• Web Services
• Premium Content, etc.

Lead magnets have been highly effective in converting visitors into subscribers. Thus, it can be a game-changer for your email campaigns if you aren’t getting as many subscribers.

However, ensure that the lead magnet is useful to the users so that they’ll potentially sign up. 

Here are some other things that make a lead magnet more effective:

1. Easily usable: The lead magnet should provide facilities easily and instantly. If it’s hard to access and takes time to use, the users could lose focus and feel unrewarded. 
2. Relevant: Your site visitors want the services you provide. So, lure them with a relevant service or product. For example, if you sell ebooks, then keep a free ebook at signup.
3. Solution-oriented: The lead magnet should offer something the users need. It should solve some practical problems of users, giving a quick sense of user accomplishment.

ii. Optimize Opt-in Forms in Web Pages

You’ve to optimize your opt-in forms for better conversion. Firstly, you should create it with visitors and prospects in mind. Of course, it has to look attractive and descriptive so that it won’t bore and drive the visitors away.

Here’re a few things to memorize when making a form that converts.

1. Try to keep it simple: You should avoid unnecessary fields in the form. Just the name and email address are fine.
2. Make the headline appealing: The headline should clearly state what signing up offers.
3. Keep an explanatory description: Include a short and straight-to-the-point description.
4. Insert attractive graphics: Add a simple, optimized image if you want. But, it should be relevant to the intent of the form.
5. Use appropriate fonts and colors: Use standard fonts and matching colors. You might want to use a bigger and bold font for the heading. Make sure you don’t use too flashy colors.

A typical optimized subscription form looks like this:

iii. Choose Where to Place the Email Subscription Form

You can place the forms anywhere on your website. But, this doesn’t mean you should keep it everywhere.

Imagine your website visitors encountering a form on every part of web pages. That would be pretty disturbing. And, you might lose your prospects because of it.

So, you should know where to place your opt-in form for better conversion. Also, the place you’ll be placing your form will decide its type, size, etc.

Some of the best positions to place your email subscription forms are:

• About Page
• Header
• Footer
• Sidebar
• End of Posts
• Landing Pages
• Signup Page

iv. Create Pop-Ups

Email popups are also a very useful method for collecting contacts and increasing subscribers. Popup is something that comes up over web pages when you’re browsing through them.

The popups generally contain a call-to-action text and a compelling subscription form. It may contain an attractive offer or lead magnets to maximize the number of sign-ups. Plus, when pop-ups appear on your screen, the rest of the web page fades and emphasizes the subscription form.

Let’s face a fact. Many people find pop-ups annoying and disturbing if they appear randomly blocking the screen. This may work against your will and decrease conversion instead of increase.

To avoid that, you can use a type of email popup called the exit-intent popup. It only appears on the web page when users are about to exit the page. That way, it doesn’t disturb the users and could be the perfect time for users to subscribe.

Find the best WordPress popup plugins here!

v. Additional Methods

The table below includes some more ways to collect an email list:

Step 2: Choose an Email Marketing Platform to Send Emails

After collecting a list of email accounts, the next step is choosing the best email marketing platform. You can’t carry out email marketing by yourself for thousands of contacts. You see, that takes a lot of time and work. That’s why it’s a good to use an Email Service Provider (ESP).

A basic email marketing platform’s function includes sending bulk emails without your direct involvement. Meaning, it automates the email-sending process once you choose the email format and specifies the contact list.

There are a lot of good email marketing platforms available in the market. Mostly having the same basic features as email automation, integration, list management, etc.

But their special features make them different from one another. You just have to make sure that you choose the one that has the features to fulfill the needs of your business.

Also, it allows selecting the appropriate condition for when to invoke the automated message. For example, delivering a confirmation message when customers buy your products or services.

Email marketing platforms are there not only for marketing automation but also to manage your email campaign better. That requires a lot of other features too. Here are some notable features:

Features of an Email Marketing Platform

Audience Maintenance and Segmentation

The email marketing tool should allow you to add or remove contacts manually. Plus, it should automatically detect and remove invalid email addresses.

Most email marketing tools let you segment your email list according to subscription date, location, category, etc. Plus, it should also be able to refine your email list according to customers’ actions and responses from past campaigns.

For example, if a user reports your email or marks it as spam, then you might want to remove the user’s email account from the list. Your marketing tool should be able to detect that.

By doing so, you can target better prospects only for better engagement and conversions.

Mobile Ready Emails

It’s no surprise that the internet is mobile-friendly now. As a fact, more than 42% of emails are opened from mobile. So, mobile-ready emails are a necessity these days.

Most ESPs provide templates with responsive layouts for creating emails that fit mobile devices too. So, choose the one that provides mobile-ready emails.

Analytics and Report

Analytics helps you to keep track of your marketing campaigns. Also, it points out the areas where your campaign is failing. So, you can plan and execute a better strategy in the future.

Your email provider should provide rich analytics and reporting features. You don’t have to go too deep. But, you should look for an email platform that provides basic metrics like:

• Open rate
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Bounce rate
• Number of unsubscribes
• Spam Complaints
• Returns on Investment (ROI)
• Mobile Open Rate

Third-Party Integration

Email marketing is the most effective marketing technique. Its real strength comes from the integration with several other tools and services. So, make sure your ESP permits seamless integration with third parties.

For instance, combining email with social media can help you produce a new marketing strategy involving the strength of both.

Brevo, Mailchimp, HubSpot, etc. are email marketing services that can be integrated into businesses and online stores. Most website-building platforms like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, etc. can successfully integrate those platforms as add-ons to their site.

Popular Email Marketing Platforms:

Here are some of the most popular email marketing platforms with their positives and negatives

i. Brevo (Formely known as Sendinblue)

Brevo is an email marketing service best known for its ease of use. Started as a transactional email service, it’s now one of the best email marketing services. It provides all the marketing facilities like automated messaging, segmentation, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), etc.

It also has a free marketing plan but only allows 300 emails per day. Whereas the paid plan starts at $25 per month for 20,000 emails. The higher plan has more features like advanced stats, dedicated support, removed Brevo branding, etc.

Pros:

• Good value for money
• Landing page editor
• Smart SMS management system
• Powerful automation

Cons:

• Very limited integration
• Basic email templates

Find the best Brevo alternatives in this article.

ii. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is one of the most popular and widely used email services. It’s mainly popular for having a free plan. With the free plan, you can send 1000 emails per month to 500 subscribers. The paid plans let you reach an unlimited audience.

It has powerful and useful features applicable to businesses of all sizes. You can create emails for any purpose with the help of available templates and drag-and-drop email builders.

Besides, you can do several things like tracking social posts, creating landing pages, creating signup forms, managing contacts, and many more.

Pros:

• Integration with lots of platforms
• Advanced Segmentation
• Unmatched analytics and comparative metrics
• Awesome Support
• Comes with a free website builder

Cons:

• Less value for investment
• Limited automation of emails

Learn how to create a newsletter in Mailchimp with this complete guide.

iii. Constant Contact

Constant Contact is the most popular ESP with many excellent email templates. It’s the most beginner-friendly platform. Further, it generates simple customized email format and promotion ideas based on your business type and preferences.

Moreover, you’ll have access to useful features like email automation, coupons, polls, donations, etc. Other features include list management, a social sharing tool, an image library, etc.

A little downside, Constant Contact doesn’t provide a free plan. However, a free trial of 60 days is provided. And, the paid plan starts at $12 a month.

Pros:

• Easy to use
• Huge selection of templates
• Easy to add contacts

Cons:

• No free plan
• Basic automation

iv. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is another best email marketing service for professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. It’s extremely easy to use and an incredibly powerful platform that focuses on engaging your audience and providing them with landing pages, membership sites, etc.

Likewise, it’s a perfect email service for those who’re looking to send personalized, text-based emails that look like they’re coming right from Gmail. Besides, it offers you email-based support and comes with an extensive knowledge base with great learning material.

Pros:

• Simple and easy to use
• Broad integration option available
• Flexible user-subscription management

Cons:

• Pricey in comparison to its competitors
• Poor and basic design options

Here are the best ConvertKit alternatives to choose from.

v. Drip

Drip is an email marketing service best for businesses, merchants, and digital marketers. Not only for email marketing, but it’s also useful for adding pop-ups and opt-in forms to your website.

It includes superior marketing automation, personalization, and segmentation that no other platform comes close to. Besides, it provides features like integration, support, documentation, list management, email templates, etc.

Talking about the pricing, it has a different approach. The monthly bill comes according to the number of subscribers. The price starts at $39 for 2500 subscribers. Also, test the service with a 14-day free trial.

Pros

• Visual email builder
• Excellent customer service
• Tons of features

Cons

• Often misleading reports
• Can be overwhelming to beginners

There are a lot more platforms like these on the web. So, we don’t mean that you must choose any one of these. You can choose something else that you think is best for your enterprise.

Step 3: Create an Effective Email Marketing Campaign

There can be various reasons behind sending emails to your subscribers. That decides the type of email marketing campaign you want to create.

So, before creating an email campaign, you need to know the types of marketing email. It’s because sending the right type of email is vital for a successful campaign and business.

On a basic level, there are 3 types of marketing emails – relational, promotional, and transactional.

Some of the Popular Email Campaigns

Now, let’s look deeper at some of the most popular email campaigns you can adopt to achieve your marketing goals.

i. Welcoming New Subscribers

It’s an automated campaign activated when a new user is subscribing to your email list. When visitors subscribe to your email newsletter, you can send them a welcome message. It falls under both relational and transactional marketing emails.

Welcoming new subscribers can be the triggered action after subscription takes place i.e. you can send an automated message as soon as the subscription takes place.

This campaign has mainly 2 significance. First, it creates a relationship with the user. And second, it can work as a way of introducing your brand to subscribers. Also, you can briefly add information on what they can expect from your company.

ii. Newsletter Campaign

An email newsletter is a type of email that you can use to provide users with information about your company or products. It’s a promotional message that informs the audience about new updates, news, tips & tricks, the launch of products, offers, etc. It’s also called a promotional campaign.

It’s a distributed broadcast campaign, meaning every recipient of your campaign receives the email at the same time. Also, the campaign is carried out manually. You need to allocate the list of subscribers to whom you want to send the newsletter.

Newsletters can be used for various purposes and in different forms. For example, you can send emails with timely updates on content, a broadcast of the announcement, promotion of products or services, notice of new launches, etc. There’s no limit to what you can send with email newsletters.

iii. Addressing First-Time Customers

It’s an automated campaign triggered when a user buys your product for the first time. You can send the customer a thank you message after they purchase your product for the first time. This kind of email is a type of relational email.

The customers find such thanking messages delighting and welcoming. So, they’ll tend to buy more from you in the future. So, this strategy helps you turn your one-time customers into regular customers.

In the mail, you may also include other details like purchase info, address, delivery date, etc. Plus, you can attach a suggestion to purchase a similar product.

iv. Abandoned Cart Notification

Sometimes when people visit your eCommerce store, they add products to the cart and just exit without completing the order. In the marketing term, we call that abandoning a cart. So, you create a campaign that automatically sends the users a reminder about the abandoned cart.

Through email, you can request them to resume shopping and proceed to the checkout point. This process is called abandoned cart recovery.

It’s a good idea to schedule the abandoned cart email after some time of the abandonment, supposedly within 24 hours. Within that time, your product could still be fresh in the users’ minds and they could complete the transaction. 

By all means, your sales increase with the abandoned cart email campaigns.

v. Follow up on Purchases

You can create a campaign to follow up with the purchases that recently took place. This can be in various forms. Suppose, you can send an email with a success message for completed transactions. Also, you ask users to give reviews on the products or services they’ve bought from you.

Also, you can recommend the customer buy other products they might like. You can use the call-to-action buttons for better results.

vi. Date-Based Campaigns

Date-based campaigns are automated email campaigns triggered when a certain date occurs. You can create various types of date-based campaigns.

Some of the common date-based campaigns are:

• Email notifying subscribers’ joining date
• Wishing on Birthday, festivals or any special days
• Appointment Reminder
• A reminder of the end of your subscription
• A reminder of upcoming occasions, etc.

As you can see, date-based campaigns can be both relational and transactional.

vii. Invitation Campaign

An invitation campaign is a campaign you can use to notify people about an event that’s about to happen. The main motive of this campaign is to encourage people to participate in the event.

Events can be seminars, webinars, demonstration events, promotional events, conferences, etc. Importantly, you should include the event time, date, and location in your invitation email.

If you need, then you can add buttons from where users can be directed to a registration form.

Some Trending Email Marketing Tips

Now, you’re familiar with some kinds of email marketing campaigns that help your business grow. However, you’ve to take care of some of the basic things for more conversion and engagement.

So, we’ve listed some of the very important email marketing tips:

• Write a Good Email Copy: Write an engaging and attractive email copy using both text and image. However, focus more on the text so emails won’t end up in the promotion tab.
• Add an Enticing Subject: A great email has a subject related to the email body. Make it clear and attractive so that people likely open your email.
• Apply Call to Action: You should use the call-to-action texts and buttons to lead users to take some actions. For example, click links, buttons, etc.
• Timing: Schedule your promotional emails to be sent at the right time. Your email should land in the customers’ inbox when it’s the probable hour that they check their emails.
• Segment Your List: Partition your email list based on users’ characteristics, interests, and past activities. This targets more specific consumers to improve your marketing results.
• Test the Mail: You might want to test your mail before sending your subscribers. It’s a way of ensuring that everything works fine on your email copy.
• Personalize Your Emails: Your emails will be effective if the receiver feels it’s sent personally. So, personalize the emails based on subscribers’ interests, likes, dislikes, etc.
• Email Sequences: Craft engaging email sequences to guide leads through the customer journey. Plan a series of emails that offer value, build trust, and encourage action.
• Compliance with Privacy Regulations: Stay compliant with privacy regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM to build trust and protect user data. Obtain explicit consent, provide clear opt-out options, and secure personal details to maintain regulatory compliance.
• Optimize Email Deliverability: Implement best practices, like email authentication (DKIM, SPF, DMARC), avoiding spam triggers (e.g., excessive use of caps, misleading subject lines), and maintaining a clean email list (remove inactive or invalid addresses).
• AI-powered Email Marketing: Use AI to personalize email content, predict user behavior, optimize campaign performance, segment your audience, and automate email send times.

Creating a Newsletter Campaign with Brevo

Now, let’s see the step-by-step process of how to start an email marketing campaign. Specifically, we’re creating a newsletter email campaign with the Brevo email tool for demonstration.

So, let’s begin and learn how to start email marketing for beginners!

Step 1: Create and Activate Your Brevo Account

First, go to the Brevo site, and click on the ‘Pricing‘ menu on the navigation. On the next page, find the ‘Free‘ plan for the ‘Marketing Platform‘ option. There, click its ‘Sign Up‘ button.

On the signup page, either use your Google or Apple Account. Otherwise, enter your email and password. Then, click the ‘Create an Account‘ button.

With that, the onboarding process begins. So, first, enter your first name, last name, and company name. Next, press ‘Continue‘.

Following that, enter company details, including address, city, and country. Later, hit ‘Continue‘.

Moving forward, enter more details about your organization, including the team and contact count. Once you’re done, hit ‘Continue‘.

Next, you must validate your mobile number with the verification code. Further, you must confirm your plan. So, let’s go with the free plan by clicking ‘Continue with Free plan‘.

Ultimately, this redirects you to your Brevo account. There, click your company name at the top-right and open ‘SMTP & API‘, followed by ‘API Keys‘.

Afterward, click ‘Generate a new API key‘ and insert the API key name. Later, hit ‘Generate‘.

Now, Brevo auto-generates an API key which you can copy and click ‘OK‘. You need this to connect your website with your Brevo account.

With that, you can use your Brevo account on your website. Here, we’ll use a WordPress website, so know how to do email marketing yourself with the next steps!

Step 2: Install and Activate Brevo

As said before, log into your WordPress dashboard and utilize the Brevo plugin for the integration. To do so, follow the plugin installation steps.

For that, navigate to ‘Plugins > Add New Plugin‘ and search for ‘Brevo‘ in the search bar. Once you find it, click ‘Install Now‘.

Following that, press the ‘Activate‘ button. That’s how your plugin gets ready to use.

Here’s a detailed guide on installing a WordPress plugin.

Moreover, you can find a newly added ‘Brevo‘ menu. So, open ‘Brevo > Home‘ to connect your Brevo account with your website. Just paste the API key that you copied before on the textbox of the 2nd step ‘Activate your account with your API key v3‘. Then, hit ‘Login‘.

Step 3: Import or Create a Contact List on Brevo

Next, you’ll have to make your email list of contacts to whom you can send your emails. Simply, the contacts are the main newsletter subscribers on your website.

Further, you can’t send your newsletter to any random email address. You’ll have to build an email list of users who willingly subscribe to your newsletter through lead magnets, pop-ups, sign-up forms, etc.

To create the email list in Brevo, open your Brevo account and open ‘Contacts‘. Now, you can simply press ‘Import contacts‘ if you already have a list prepared.

Best of all, you can import the contact details by importing a file, copy-paste method, or using a tool. Here, let’s choose ‘Import from a file‘.

Now, you’ll find a space to upload your file. After you drag and drop your file, click ‘Confirm our file‘.

After that, you must click ‘Confirm Mapping‘ so that data gets mapped to the attributes in your Brevo account.

Next, hit ‘Confirm Your List‘ as shown below:

Lastly, finalize your import and confirm your agreement, then hit the ‘Confirm your import‘ button.

Another way is to insert the contacts yourself. Just click ‘Create a contact‘.

Then, enter the details and press ‘Create‘.

Step 4: Creating an Email Campaign

Moving forward, let’s see how you can create a campaign to send to your subscribers. So first, go to ‘Campaigns > Email‘ from the Brevo dashboard. There, click ‘Create an Email Campaign‘.

Now, you can create this campaign as ‘Regular‘ or ‘A/B Test‘. Here, we’ll go with ‘Regular’ and enter the campaign name. After that, press ‘Create campaign‘.

Step 5: Select Sender and Recipients

This redirects to a new page where you can create the newsletter content. So, we’ll click the available buttons to finish the process. But remember to manage the sender and recipients first.

First, click ‘Manage Sender‘. There, manage the email address and sender name that the emails will show. Once you’re done, click ‘Save’.

Similarly, hit the ‘Add recipients‘ button to insert the focused audience. So, choose a list or segment that you want to send the newsletter to. Further, you can select those who you don’t want to send. In addition, you can add a condition for this working functionality.

Later, click the ‘Save‘ button to move forward.

Step 6: Insert the Subject Line

Now, it’s time to customize the subject line. So, click ‘Add subject‘. There, add the ‘Subject line‘ and ‘Preview text‘. Once you’re done, hit ‘Save’.

Guess what? You can also utilize the AI power to write the best subject line. Just click ‘Use AI‘ after adding your subject line version. Now, you’ll get a suggestion and various options to convert the tone and format.

Suppose, we selected ‘Create a sense of urgency‘. Here’s a newer suggestion, which you can utilize by clicking ‘Use it‘. Lastly, hit ‘Save‘.

Step 7: Design Your Email Content

Next up, you can design your email content. So, click ‘Start designing‘ and you’ll get many templates. Here, we’ll go with the ‘Default template‘. For that, hover over it and click ‘Use template‘.

This opens a drag-and-drop interface, where you can edit and customize your email content.

For example, let’s make some edits. First, click the ‘Logo’ block and hit ‘Setup brand‘ on the left-side.

Next, you must enter your website URL and click ‘Fetch brand‘.

Now, Brevo automatically detects your brand assets. If you want to use them, then click ‘Import brand assets‘.

After completing the import process, you get to preview the content matching the brand. So, click ‘Save & apply brand‘ to move forward. Then, hit ‘Continue Editing‘.

Next, change the text of the content including heading, body, and call-to-actions. The best way is to enter the text, click on ‘Use AI Assistant’, and apply the options as you want. The screenshot below shows the use of the ‘Rephrase text’ option. Once the text is suitable, click ‘Replace‘.

Similarly, you’ll find many customization options for them. Just select the text you want to customize and use the respective options on the left.

The image below also shows the easy insertion and stylization of images in the email:

Once you have completed customizing the email content, click ‘Save & Quit‘. This leaves us with the ‘Additional settings‘ option. Find out about it in the Brevo’s guide.

Step 8: Preview and Test

The next step involves clicking the ‘Preview & Test‘ button.

Now, open the ‘Preview as customer‘ tab. There, you can pick a recipient and click ‘Refersh preview‘. This shows your email campaign demo.

Similarly, open the ‘Send test email‘ tab and choose a recipient email. Then, click ‘Send email’.

This sends the email to the entered email so that you can observe if any changes are required.

Step 9: Schedule

Once your email campaign is ready to use, schedule it as you like. For that, click ‘Schedule‘.

Now, you’ll get 3 options:

• Send Now
• Schedule for Later
• Send at Best Time

Here, let’s select the 2nd option and set the date and time for the schedule. Lastly, click ‘Schedule‘.

That’s all! Congrats! You’ve successfully created and scheduled a newsletter campaign in Brevo. You can also track and measure your campaign performance using Brevo’s analytics and reports feature. 

Onto it on the next step!

Step 4: Track Your Email Marketing Analytics

Analyzing your marketing efforts is an essential part of your email marketing campaign. If you want your email marketing to succeed, then monitor your campaign regularly.

Sometimes, your email campaign might not be working well and you can’t figure out what went wrong. So, the analytics help you to identify the mistakes so you can work on improving them.

To be precise, the analytics provides reports and data about your campaign which will be helpful to improve your campaign. So, your campaign will work on conversion and driving sales better.

You shouldn’t worry about how to analyze your email marketing campaign. The email service providers (e.g. Brevo) provide your campaign reports. And, you can easily analyze your campaign success utilizing the reports.

These tools track how people interact with emails sent to the platform. And then, they provide the tracked data based on various metrics.

Now, here are some measures for carrying out your email campaign analysis.

Analyze the Performance Metrics

Here are some useful metrics, you should track as an email marketer.

Above mentioned are the most important and useful metrics that you use to analyze your marketing campaign.

Conduct A/B Test

Another way to analyze your email marketing is by comparing one campaign with others. It is known as the A/B test.

It’s hard to know what kind of email people prefer. So, the best way of checking is by running an A/B test.

It involves running 2 campaigns, suppose campaign A and campaign B. Keep both campaigns the same except for the change in one variable only. For example, Campaign A is delivered at 7:00 am whereas Campaign B is sent at 9:00 pm.

Then, calculate and compare the metrics of both email marketing strategies to analyze which one performed better. After that, you can run more effective email campaigns with the variables that enhance engagement.

Most of the email marketing providers have an in-built A/B testing feature. This makes comparing the campaign results easier. Learn the process for Brevo in this guide.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Conclusion

That’s all! We hope this article helps you to know everything about email marketing. We also hope you understand how to get started with your email campaign to improve your business.

If you have any queries, questions, or confusion about email marketing and how to run the campaign, then leave a comment below. We’ll get back to you.

We suggest you check our detailed guide on content marketing vs SEO. Also, check the best ChatGPT prompts for marketing.

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