Wondering how to do email marketing right? This quick guide will show you how to get started and how to use email marketing to generate leads and drive sales.

The first step is to decide on what you want to accomplish with email marketing in your business.

Are you focused on driving more traffic to your web site? Email marketing can be a great way to increase web traffic. One of the things you will be doing is sending emails with links to articles on your web site or blog.

Maybe you are more focused on sales growth.

Alternate Mode sends out special offers on new musical instruments, seasonal offers, discounts, etc… to bring in new customers and repeat business. When they are presenting a clinic, they send announcements to their readers who live in the area where their clinic will be happening.

Musicians, artists, and entertainers will be interested in building and communicating with their fan base. Houston Jazz Singer, Sheri Lavo  sends out announcements to let her fans know when and where she’ll be singing next.

Restaurants like The Smoke Haus will send special promotional offers to their email subscribers to increase business on otherwise slow evenings.

Giving some thought to how you want to use email marketing will give you a better start at how to do email marketing right from list building to content creation and more.

Your next step will be to begin building your list. If you’ve already got customers, you will want to import them in to your autoresponder campaign so you can begin sending them your messages. If you already have a list of prospects you’ve been talking to, you can also import these in to your autoresponder campaign. Be sure you have permission to add prospects to your list to avoid spam complaints and upsetting potential customers.

Building your list from scratch. If you don’t already have a list started, or you’ve already imported your existing lists, the next step is to get started building your lists with new subscribers. This means you will be setting up your web site or blog to begin collecting email addresses and any other information you need from your web site visitors.

The simplest way to think of this process is:

1) Make them want to join your list with a compelling offer. You may want to offer a free download, a free report, a sample, some incentive. We call these “lead magnets” and they are a great way to build your lists.

2) Make It Easy to join your list. You will do this by adding signup forms to your blog or web site.

As visitors are attracted to your offer, they can fill out the form to get your offer and this is really where the email marketing process starts. Your autoresponder campaign can be set up to send out automated follow up messages, newsletters, special announcements, and more. What you send and when will be influenced by the goals you set in the first part of this article.

These steps are really the basics of how to do email marketing. To learn more, you can check out our article: email marketing basics.

More advanced strategies will include list segmentation and targeting your lists by collecting more detailed data beyond just basic name and email address.

For example, Alternate Mode (the musical instrument manufacturer we mention in the beginning of this article) collects the name, email address, and country information from their subscribers. This lets them promote special events and clinics they conduct in different countries by targeting their message specifically to people from that country.

Measure your results. Track your open rates and click through rates to identify areas where you may be able to make changes to get better results.

Email marketing is a powerful sales tool with an outstanding return rate. The key is to learn the tools and to put them in use to generate new leads, drive sales, and grow your business. That is how to do email marketing right.

Email Marketing Tips