What is Email Marketing?
Email Marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses emails to promote business products or services, Email is a channel where you can engage and motivate your customers.
E-mail marketing often has higher conversion rates than other marketing channels. When executed well, email marketing is very effective. you'll learn how to build a subscriber list for your emails with contact forms, learn what is the double opt-in process and learn how email is regulated.
How do you get customers' email addresses?
How do you get those e-mail addresses? how do you get subscribers?
You ask for them. Imagine you are putting together an e-mail campaign for a specific business and Your business goal is to have at least 2,000 customers click through your email. The more subscribers you have, the easier it is to get to this goal.
If you have a list of 4,000 subscribers, you would need a conversion rate of 50% to get to this goal.
This is a very difficult conversion rate to achieve. But, If you have a list of 100,000 subscribers,
you would need a conversion rate of only 2%. So, having a larger list makes it easier to achieve sales targets, but should you always send your emails to your entire subscriber list?
What about the subscribers who don't click through or don't even open your email in the first place?
If you send relevant engaging e-mails to subscribers who know your brand and are excited to receive emails from you, you have a high likelihood of increasing conversions and engagement.
If you send emails that are misleading, unwanted, or irrelevant, you can irritate your customers. But how can you find the right subscribers for your business?
Many companies achieve this by creating a contact form
Why Contact Forms?
One of the most common means of adding customers to an email list is by having them fill out an email contact form. Customer contact information can be taken in many different ways.
- You can add a contact form to your firm's website so it's the first thing a visitor sees.
- You can collect an email at the time of purchase or even after a sale. To encourage a visitor to complete a contact form,
- you can promise something valuable, like a discount or information about special events in return for information like an email.
- You can also use search, display, or social ads to send customers to your email contact form directly.
The information that customers enter on the contact form should be saved to be used when you send email campaigns in the future.
Most email service providers, like MailChimp, act as both the database of your subscribers and the platform for sending your emails.
Contact form examples
Contact form best practices
When thinking about what fields to include on your contact form you want to think about your overall business objectives. At a minimum, you will need the customer's email address.
Asking for a first and last name is also very good practice.
You can use this information to personalize your e-mails.
You should also clarify that you will be using the customer's e-mail to send marketing communications. Make sure that you don't ask for information you don't need.
The shorter the contact form, the more likely it is that your customer will complete it. If your form is too long, potential customers will get discouraged and may leave the sign-up process.
In general, the contacts form should be short. The longer the form the less likely it is that customers will take the time to enter their information, ask for the customer's name and email address.
Explain what you will do with the information. Have a clear call to action. Instead of a submit button, you may want your button to state something like subscribe or sign up for our weekly newsletter.
Opt-in process
Most companies follow a confirmed opt-in process to add new subscribers to email lists.
This means that customers need to actively confirm that they want to receive e-mails from your business. Make your customers completing a contact form and provide their names and e-mail addresses. Then, you will send an e-mail to confirm the e-mail address used to confirm the subscription By following these steps, they complete a confirmed opt-in or double opt-in process.
After you learn how to create a contact form, we will move to the next step which is how to avoid being spammy. That is a very critical point as it is illegal to send spam in United States, Canada, and the EU.
In the U.S., there is a piece of legislation CAN-SPAM that requires marketers to offer their subscribers a means of removing themselves from e-mail lists or an opt-out link. If a marketing e-mail fails to provide customers with an opt-out link or if a business continues to send e-mails to a customer after that customer unsubscribes, that company may be liable for financial penalties. The law also requires that businesses provide a physical mailing address.
Marketers cannot send emails to people without their consent
you should avoid sending spam for several very important reasons.
- your Internet service provider or ISP can terminate your Internet service.
- your website hosting company can shut down your website.
- you can lose customers.
- you can get blacklisted. This means that the target mail server refuses to accept your messages so they never get delivered.
How to avoid being spammy?
Allow customers to unsubscribe from emails, You must include an “opt-out” link in every marketing email. if customers decide to “opt-out,” you must remove them from your email list within 10 days. customers also need to “opt-in” to emails from you.
- Identify all marketing emails as ads
- Use a subject line that reflects the copy of your email
- Ensure that your email copy contains at least one sentence.
If you look at different marketing emails you've received, you'll see at the bottom of the e-mail in small print the “email footer” Unsubscribe from this list And update subscription preferences.
There's also the physical address of the company. By adding this email footer you give your customers the freedom to opt-out from your subscription list, and that will save you from being spammy
Finally, how to create a contact form by using one of the Email Service Providers (ESP) Like MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue, GetResponse, or any other tools
You can check the full article about the top 10 marketing tools
You can start with a free plan or free trial to get the maximum benefit of this mini-course, sure the UI User Interface varies from one tool to another, but you can still find creating a contact form through all of them. In this article, we are gonna create a contact form on MailChimp for example And you have the freedom to choose another tool.
We first have to create a list before we can build in the contact form.
You can name the list with any name
list your personal e-mail as the from email address., Note that this is bad practice. Normally, you would use a business e-mail, with a company domain name, something like Andro@clothesstore.com
Using personal e-mails can impact your e-mail deliverability.
But, you may not have a business e-mail that you can use at the moment.
So stick with your personal e-mail, for now.
For from the name, You can list the name of any fictional name.
Let's create a contact form, also known as the signup form.
there are a few different form options. You can create a general form, a form that you can embed on a website, a pop-up form, a Facebook form, or something else.
we are going to create a general form.
In the dropdown menu, you can see the various forms, e-mails, and web pages that my new subscribers will encounter as they join my subscriber list. you can customize all of these.
For the moment, focus on the signup form. Right away, MailChimp provides you with the URL.
If you copy and paste that in a separate tab, you can see what my form would look like to customers.
All right. Let's get started with customizing our form. First, type in a brief message to describe the purpose of this form. Namely something like, sign up to receive our newsletter with exercise tips, healthy living ideas, and special events.
The form already has fields for an e-mail address, first name, and last name. You can customize to add or remove any field from the dropdown menu you can change the formatting like the color, the font, the text size, and anything else related to the general format.
Finally, you can test it out
- go to your form URL,
- enter your contact information.
- After you complete the form, you will see an e-mail come through to your inbox asking you to confirm your subscription.
- subscribe
MailChimp has a built-in opt-in process that will trigger an e-mail, asking each new subscriber to verify his or her e-mail address, when the form is submitted. Moving back to MailChimp, you can pull the list associated with the form. Now you can see that you have one subscriber to your list.
0 Comments