Email Marketing, without a doubt, comes as an old-but-gold marketing channel contributing to the success of every business. This digital communication allows you to effectively market and sell your products.
Email Marketing benefits you in many ways. You can develop a close relationship with your audience and at the same time turn prospects into customers, one-time customers into loyal customers. It also generates the top ROI compared to other strategies.
The challenge lies in how to get started with a new email marketing channel, especially for beginners. Besides the right tools, you need a solid strategy to make the most of your emails.
Now, sit back, relax, and let’s dig into the best email marketing roadmap for WordPress site owners.
- Email Marketing Statistics
- #1 Identify Your Goals
- #2 Create Relevant Content
- #3 Choose an Email Marketing Platform
- #4 Design Your Opt-In Form and Build Your List
- #5 Create an Email Sequence and Send Emails Automatically
- #6 Review Data & Scale Your Growth
Email Marketing Statistics
Many reasons motivate you to use email marketing to promote your products and businesses. 7 following figures already prove the importance of emails.
- There are nearly 4 billion email users worldwide, equal to one second of the world population.
- Users spend 2.5 hours daily checking their personal emails.
- 42.3% of Americans want to receive savings and discounts via email subscriptions.
- For every $1 spent on email marketing, you’ll receive $44 ROI.
- 89% of marketers trust emails to be an initial lead generation channel.
- 69% of online customers buy an item from their phones through an email campaign.
- When it comes to ways to acquire customers, emails are 40 times more effective than other methods.
#1 Identify Your Goals
The first question that would come into mind is “Why should I start email marketing?” You may expect a growth in sales, or you want more members for your membership site. Whatever your goals are, jot them down. Strong goals encourage you to draw a picture of what you should do next.
Your goals should be SMART that can work with clear intentions. In other words, they should stay Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
- Specific – I want to boost the number of email blog subscribers by increasing our Facebook advertising budget on blog posts that historically acquire the most email subscribers.
- Measurable – My goal is a 50% rise in subscribers, or 20% in the open rate.
- Attainable – We used to try blog email marketing before, reaching 35%.
- Relevant – The boost in newsletter signups or blog subscribers drives more traffic to my site, increases brand awareness, and helps the business get more sales.
- Time-bound – The estimated time to achieve the goal. 1 month, 3 months, or 6 months.
#2 Create Relevant Content
Visitors never give their email addresses if they don’t receive something valuable in exchange. You must create marketing assets as lead magnets to attract subscribers and build your email list.
Common types of lead magnets include white papers, checklists, reports, ebooks, etc. You can offer them along with your blog, under a relevant article. To take one example, after reading a post explaining SEO factors, visitors would be grateful if the site owner provides them with an ebook about the ultimate guide to improving SEO for their sites.
Bear in mind that different content requires different lead magnet forms. Make sure your lead magnet is related to your business and content.
#3 Choose an Email Marketing Platform
An email marketing service makes your email marketing a breeze. It has everything you need to kick up your business: building and organizing lists, storing emails, sending emails and automation, engaging subscribers, and tons more.
However, deciding which one to go for is not an easy task, especially when there are so many options available.
List out all features you want to have in an email marketing platform: the number of contacts it can handle, your budget, scale capability, A/B testing, personalized content, segmentation, etc.
MailChimp and ActiveCampaign stand out from the crowd thanks to their excellent features and ease of use. You can use email design templates, run your campaign on multiple platforms, and analyze data.
On top of that, these platforms seamlessly integrate with WordPress, which means you’re able to connect it with your WordPress site with a plugin.
#4 Design Your Opt-In Form and Build Your List
Your form is where visitors start to become your future customers. It should be attractive enough to spark visitors’ interest. Not only is the form design important but the headline and descriptions are also taken into account.
Although you can create a form manually in WordPress, it’s better to make use of a plugin to design an eye-catching one. They enable you to drag and drop the form fields to minimize the hassle. You can apply existing form templates to simplify the process too.
The form should be placed somewhere prominent on your site, for instance, on your home page or in your sidebar. Forms that pop up when visitors are about to leave your site often get good results. Consider bringing the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) feeling if they don’t take your offer.
#5 Create an Email Sequence and Send Emails Automatically
Email sequence refers to a series of emails sent based on a time set. It can be one day, 10 days, or even a month, depending on your target customers, product types, and the funnel.
Just send emails to users daily in case you want prospects to unsubscribe after a few days they sign up for your list. That’s so annoying. You can’t deliver one email every month either. Users may forget who you are or whether your email campaign is active.
It’s evident that companies that send out 2 emails per month will receive the highest open rates.
We highly recommend building a specific sales funnel for your email that explores their interest. This makes it easier for you to filter subscribers and turn them into real customers.
You can start the sequences with a welcome email that offers a giveaway. It decides if subscribers stay interested in your product/service and wait for the upcoming emails, or if they won’t bother to open any others.
The next emails should nurture the leads with useful articles and case studies to prove that you’re the authority in this niche. The topic must be relevant and be an upgrade of the magnet content. Last but not least, don’t forget to present them a sales copy and a call to action.
#6 Review Data & Scale Your Growth
Some marketers fail to run an effective email campaign since they don’t review the progress and results until the campaign ends.
You have to track the outcome and take notes a few days after the first email. Compare it with the campaign objectives to make sure you can reach the goals. In this way, you can see the situation and expect what will happen next to adjust the campaign or take suitable actions.
There are multiple things you can look at in your email campaign, from subject lines, and landing pages to email content, or the way you insert links.
After the campaign finishes, check out the open rate, click rate, which emails are performing well, and which don’t work. Then discard all the elements that affect your campaign and keep going with what’s doing well.
Ready for Your Email Marketing Roadmap?
Email marketing has never been an obsolete method to boost sales and grow your business. However, not all business owners can apply it in the proper way. You need a right email marketing roadmap and excellent tools to achieve the targets.
We’ve walked you through 6 steps to build an effective email marketing campaign. Set clear goals, create relevant lead magnet content, pick an email campaign service, design your form, schedule and automate emails, and review your data.
If you still have any questions about your email marketing roadmap, leave your thoughts in the comment section below. Check out our article if you are interested in how to send WordPress posts to MailChimp automatically.
