6 Questions to Ask Before Starting Your Email Marketing Newsletter

You keep hearing email marketing is king.

Email is bringing in $40.56 for every dollar spent on it in 2011, compared to catalogs’ ROI of $7.30, search’s return of $22.24, Internet display advertising’s return of $19.72 and mobile’s return of $10.51. – Direct Marketing Association “Power of Direct” (2011)

So you know it’s important, and you want to start one but where do you start? What do you need to know before you know you’re ready?

Here are 6 questions to ask yourself before you start that email marketing campaign:

1 – Do I Have The Time?

Email marketing requires a very CONSISTENT commitment to delivering quality content in order to use it to develop trust relationship with your subscribers. Email marketing is so important that this “do I have the time?” question really becomes “how do I make the time?”

 

So how DO you make the time?

• Have a blog? Make that the base of your weekly (or whatever your schedule) newsletter. A quick update or announcement followed by a description of & link to your blog post.
• Make an editorial calendar (like Monica Crowe’s).
• Ask other people to blog for you (we call this a “guest post”) if your newsletter is blog post-based.
• Write a few posts at once to give yourself a content buffer.
• Hire help – an assistant can help coordinate guest posters or load, format, and schedule your newsletters for you.

2 – Which Email Marketing Service Should I Go With?

There are quite a few choices out there, but the underlying point here is that you should absolutely NOT just email from your own account. That equals putting your everyday email communication at risk for not being delivered if you’re not spam-law compliant. As well as a few other reasons. Email service providers are the way to go.

Who to choose? Right now, I’m using MailChimp. I like it and a lot of people like it because you can start out free. Aweber also has a loyal customer base, but not free to start. Check out this post for a better comparison of the two.

3 – What should I write about?

Anything you want! Or rather, what your prospects want. Or rather, any of the ideas in this post.

4 – Do I have a LEGIT email address?

Okay, I’m sorry to break it to you, but your cute or even pro-ish name email address that has a gmail, aol, yahoo or other personal ending is no good for your email marketing. Get a PRO address that’s @yourdomain.com. Why? We’re talking about using email marketing to build trust to hopefully develop into customers. How much of a pro do you think someone is without one of those email addresses? How much would you pay them? Yep, exactly.

So, how do you do that? Check with your website host (Something like Hostgator or Bluehost) – they should have a walk-through for you.

5 – Do I have a way to COLLECT these things on my site?

Ah, the opt-in. The most beloved and crazy creature on the web. What am I talking about? I’m talking about those sign-up boxes you see on almost every pro’s site. (You can see mine at the top right of this screen – and one at the bottom!) These is how you collect email addresses like a pro. If you have a WordPress site, there are a bunch of plugins for this, but my advice is to check with your email service provider (like MailChimp or Aweber) on this as it’ll be a *slightly* different process for each provider.

Using the opt-in box is an essential part of the double-opt-in-spam-compliant process. When your subscriber enters his or her email address via your form, your email service provider has a data record of them signing up (i.e. PROOF that you aren’t a spammer). This is muy importante for protecting your email marketing delivery ability.

Curious about using an incentive to sign up with your opt-in like I do here? Check out this post.

6 – What am I waiting for?

Seriously! What are you waiting for? Go start your email marketing campaign already! I don’t think you need any more convincing but here are just a few more nuggets about WHY that would be an excellent idea:

• Commercial email is expected to drive $63.1 billion in sales in 2011, compared to $57.8 billion in 2010, according to the study. – Direct Marketing Association “Power of Direct” (2011)
• The DMA projects email to drive $67.8 billion in sales in 2012 and $82.2 billion in sales in 2016. – Direct Marketing Association “Power of Direct” (2011)
• The vast majority of responding companies (72%) rate email as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ for return on investment. – Econsultancy“Email Marketing Census 2011” (2011)

Your Turn

Do you have an email marketing program in place? Any advice for a newbie to the email marketing world? Did you find this post useful? Let me know in the comments!

Looking for more on email marketing? Check out 17 Ways to Get More Subscribers for Your List.

photo credit: ougenweiden via photo pin cc