If one day your Instagram account got deleted, or your Facebook got hacked (as ours did!), or you get locked out of your TikTok, how would you reach your audience? Way too many brands are dependent on social media as their main marketing channel – but what they fail to realize is that they do not own these platforms, therefore they do not own their data.

There have been many instances over the years where Instagram or Twitter (we refuse to call it “X”) have been down and people are scrambling and in panic mode because they’re launching a new product or have an announcement to make and have no way to get their message across to their customers. This is where email marketing comes into play and why it’s so important.

Many business owners and entrepreneurs get intimidated or overwhelmed by the thought of adding another marketing tool to their list for which they must create content. Still, it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Below we’ll walk you through where to start, how to streamline content development, and how to maximize the ROI of your email campaigns.

How to Get Started with Email Marketing

The key to email marketing that works for your brand is to be consistent, create templates, set-up automations, and drive your audience to sign-up for your email list. So, let’s get started:

CHOOSE AN EMAIL MARKETING PLATFORM

First and foremost, you need to choose an email marketing platform to use. We’ve been using Constant Contact for years and love how easy it is to create, schedule, and track email campaigns. To fully maximize its features, you’ll need to get a paid subscription. You can sign up using our link and set it up yourself or have us manage it for you (note: we are a Constant Contact Partner, and this is an affiliate link).

START BUILDING AN EMAIL LIST

Building an email list is essentially marketing your marketing platform. After you have chosen which platform you want to use, you’ll want to create sign-up forms. The two that we suggest starting with are website sign-up forms that you can embed directly in your website and landing page forms that you can use in social media posts, YouTube videos, etc.

Once you’ve created sign-up forms, you’ll embed the website form into your site either as a pop-up, within whichever site page you choose, or in the footer. If you’re using a website builder like Squarespace or Wix, they’ll have guides available to show you step-by-step how to do this. Now anyone who visits your website will be able to easily join your email list.

With your landing page form, you’ll want to make sure you include a link to it on any other form of content you create (i.e. YouTube videos, podcasts, etc.). Also, make sure you have it linked in your social media ‘link in bio’ and create social media content to drive traffic to the landing page form – make sure that this content doesn’t come off as an ad, and always aim to add some type of value that encourages people to want to sign-up, like a discount code or free resources.

CREATE HIGH-QUALITY CONTENT

After people sign up, you’ll want to keep them engaged and looking forward to receiving your emails. How do you do this? By creating consistent, high-quality content. Your emails should be informative, engaging, and relevant to your target audience.

For example, if you’re a tech startup that’s launching a SAAS product that provides diverse entrepreneurs with a project management tool to streamline launching and raising capital, your target audience will be diverse tech startup entrepreneurs. Your email marketing campaigns should include resources to guide them through the launching process, a list of venture capital funds that invest in founders from diverse backgrounds, and other relevant information.

How to Streamline Content Development for Email Marketing

Now that you have everything set up and you’ve started to build up your email list, it’s time to develop a streamlined process for creating email campaigns so that you’re not spending hours each time you sit down to write an email wondering what to write about, how to format the email, and whether you’re repeating an email about the same topic.

USE TEMPLATES

The number one thing we suggest in your email campaign development is to create easily accessible templates that you can reuse. Templates will save you so much time and help with consistency. Create a template for everything!  

If you need a starting point, we’d suggest first creating a template that serves as a guide for writing newsletters that include best practices for the subject line, pre-header, body, visuals, and CTA (call-to-action).

The second template you create should be a design template within your email marketing platform. You can choose to create your own or use one of the premade ones within the platform. Here is a video to walk you through how to create a master template:

CREATE A CONTENT CALENDAR

A content calendar can be a lifesaver when you’re super busy with the day-to-day work of running your business, but you know you need to write your weekly email newsletter. It can save you from getting decision fatigue when having to decide what to write about and make the process 10x quicker, especially if you have those templates ready.

When creating a content calendar, work in quarters. Schedule a meeting with yourself or with whoever on your team oversees marketing and spend time brainstorming ideas that align your upcoming business goals with your marketing efforts.

For instance, referring to the example of the tech startup, let’s say that the company has just closed its Series A funding round and the Founder wants to announce it in two months. The marketing lead will then go into their content calendar and schedule the announcement email campaign, that way there are no last-minute surprises or confusion when the time comes to make the announcement and the email is (ideally) scheduled and ready to go.

How to Maximize the ROI of Your Email Campaigns

REPURPOSE YOUR EMAIL CONTENT

Work smarter, not harder.

Creating marketing content for all your channels can seem overwhelming, but repurposing it doesn’t have to be. When you’re putting together your content calendar, choose overarching themes for each month, and then from there break them down into four topics within the central theme. If you’re sending out a weekly newsletter (which is ideal), you’ll have a piece of long-form content for each topic that will serve as your main piece of content to pull from for the week.

Each weekly newsletter can then be broken down into various pieces of short-form content such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and/or Tweets. This is a great way to promote your email content and drive traffic to your landing page form to grow your email list – just make sure to include a CTA with the link to the form in each post. Alternatively, if you repurposed your email into a blog (see next paragraph), you could drive traffic to that blog post on your website and include the link to the landing page form with a CTA to sign up at the end of the post – as we did below.

You can also turn your emails into blog posts for your website by expanding on the content and adding more detail. This is a great way to further amplify your content and reach a wider audience. When repurposing for your website, make sure your copy is SEO-optimized to attract more inbound traffic.

The reverse is also true, you can repurpose content from your blog, social media, or other marketing materials for your emails. This will also save a lot of time in the brainstorming phase and ensure that your content is consistent across all customer touchpoints.

TRACK YOUR RESULTS

The email marketing platform that you choose will give you access to your performance metrics. Constant Contact provides a Reporting section where you can review data such as open rates, click rates, bounce rates, whether your email was opened on desktop or mobile, and so many more helpful stats that you can download as reports that will help guide your future content. They also provide you with suggestions to improve your open and click rates.

The reason why it’s so important to track and review the performance of your emails is that this will give you the data you need when you’re planning out your next few emails. Make note of things such as which emails have higher open rates – what was the email about? How was the subject line written? This will inform you of what your readers value most and what other email campaigns you can create that will resonate with them.

In a world where social media is unpredictable and the ever-changing algorithm can make or break an account’s engagement, the effectiveness of email marketing reigns supreme.

According to Statista, “email marketing ROI is expected to reach $42 for every $1 spent in 2024.” In comparison, research from Sprout Social indicates that: “for every $1 invested in organic social media, businesses can expect a $5.60 return.”

That means that the ROI of email marketing is 650% higher than social media marketing.

Now we’re not saying to ditch your social media accounts and hyperfocus on emails, but by prioritizing email marketing and making it work for you with some of the strategies outlined in this blog post, you’ll be maximizing your efforts and ensuring that you have direct access to your customers.

Have we convinced you to get started on your email marketing yet? Great. Sign up with Constant Contact today using this link and set it up yourself or have us fully manage it for you.

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