You’ve got an awesome website sat ready to go, but nobody is visiting yet! Email campaigns are a great way to connect to your customers and direct them to your website. Building an email campaign is free and relatively simple with these quick and easy steps.
Visit MailChimp.com and sign-up for a free account. MailChimp is one of the most popular email campaign providers and has a great set of really powerful, user-friendly tools to build gorgeous email newsletters.
A MailChimp free account provides the ability to manage, send and create email campaigns for up to 2000 email addresses for FREE.
If you pass 2000 subscribers you’re doing great and you can pay to upgrade your account, or you can talk to us at Pixertise about alternative solutions, such as sending email campaigns directly from your WordPress website.
Now you have an account, you now need a list of subscribers/email addresses of the contacts you would like to send your emails to.
A great place to start is your email account, visit your email account and export all your email contacts into a CSV. You can now upload/import this list into MailChimp and manage the contacts here. Go through them and clean up any that are not needed or inappropriate and leave all the good email addresses you would like to mail.
You can also add an email list sign-up form to your website. A great example is PF2 health clubs who offer a free trial via their sign up form on their website www.pf2.co.uk this is a great way of rewarding your visitors for signing up and growing your contact list. Pixertise can add a sign-up form to your website for you!
If you have an existing website with users or customers, you can also export these and add these to your list. There are plenty of other methods of building mail lists including old-fashioned surveys, running competitions and paying for bulk email addresses. Generally, the addresses you accumulate yourself are better quality.
MailChimp campaigns are your emails to a group of subscribers. Start off by selecting create campaign, choosing “Create an Email” and following the easy to use campaign builder in “Regular” mode. We recommend using one of the inbuilt layouts as this makes things much easier.
MailChimp will ask you who you want to send the email to, you can select either a section of your subscriber list or the whole lot. For your first one, you want the whole lot. You may, after you’ve sent your first email, want to send the same email to new subscribers who subscribed/were added after you sent the first email. In this case, you would select all subscribers since the last send, MailChimp gives you an easy to use way of doing this.
Now the fun begins, you can start putting together your email. Great images make for a great looking email, so choose your image wisely. We highly recommend using free stock image provider pexels.com or unplash for some great images. Here at Pixertise, we have access to over 400,000 images so if you can’t find the right image just ask and we’ll let you take a look through ours!
If you’re a customer with Pixertise we will have provided you with at least 2 logos and 2 graphics for marketing purposes. Use these if possible to keep all your branding consistent. If you need more graphics made pop us an email and we’ll whip some up.
Use your website colours to reinforce your branding.
Make sure all images and buttons link back to YOUR website, even if they go somewhere else afterwards, always direct traffic to your website first then provide a link from there to the content referenced. This increases traffic to your website and in turn, will help improve your rankings and site performance in search engines.
Try and make your email INTERESTING, give people a reason to open your email, draw them in with a subject line which includes your location and your market so they can quickly discern if its relevant to them.
Once they are in, give them more to read or see. Link back to articles, blogs, or news on your website. Give them rewards for opening your email, discount codes, promotions or interesting news are always great to include.
Once you’re happy with the design of your email, TRIPLE check all your spelling, grammar and links. Once you click send it’s too late to make a change. Make sure you get everything correct the first time. We highly recommend Grammarly which provides a plug-in for web browsers to spell check all input fields. It really is fantastic.
If you’re active on Social Media make sure your Social links are set-up correctly and linking to the right pages. Send a test email to yourself and a friend to double check it all looks OK, check on both a Desktop PC and Mobile Phone.
Checklist:
Once you’re all checked, you’re ready to go. Send at an appropriate time, when people are likely to open your email and not be disgruntled. Sending 2000 emails at 4 am can get you on the wrong side of your customers. 9.30am, lunchtime, or early evening are good times to send. Don’t send too early in the morning as you’ll get washed out by all the other emails people will be checking when they first sign on. Don’t send too late as people will be switched off, relaxing and more likely to ignore your email.
Sit back and watch you email fly. It will be put into the MailChimp sender and will take around 10 minutes to process. You will often get a few out of office replies straight away, and occasionally some email addresses will bounce, they are either incorrectly typed or no longer exist.
Good luck and have fun sending your email newsletters! Feel free to add us (theteam@pixertise.co.uk) to your list as we’d love to see your designs.
