Automating your email marketing and ruling your online ecosystem

A guest blog by Yellow Tuxedo

As online visibility specialists we help small business owners take control of their online presence. The vast array of marketing tools available is a minefield. Navigating them can be a daunting process when marketing isn’t your specific zone of genius.

When you’re building your online ecosystem, we always advise that as well as growing traffic to your website, you should focus on three core areas:

Your preferred social media platform
Your chosen macro content channel
Your email list

Today we’re going to talk about how automating your email marketing will impact you and your business for the better.

The importance of adding email to your marketing mix

Email marketing is one of the most impactful marketing methods. Why? First, it’s the only true non-algorithmic platform. You always own your list and platforms can’t take it away.

Second, your email list is a warmer audience than the people who follow you on social media. When someone permits you to email them, they are opening up a door to two-way communication that cannot be ignored.

Email also brings opportunities to build community. When you open up your eyes to email marketing automation you begin to see how easy it can be to build an engaged following whilst keeping your life as simple as possible.

Email marketing platforms like MailerLite are paving the way for small business owners to find success with email.

Getting started with email automation

When starting with email automation it is important to find the right platform. MailerLite was an obvious choice for Yellow Tuxedo. We tried other platforms but MailerLite won on both cost and ease of use, the two factors we prioritize.

It’s never too soon to start with email automation. Lots of our clients think their audience isn’t big enough yet but this simply isn’t true. Our advice is to start as soon as you can. The minute you have one subscriber, you have an audience you can directly impact.

As with any marketing channel, be it video, audio, or written word, you should talk directly to one person and one person only. Quality is more important than quantity.

We also suggest thinking carefully about the data you collect from your subscribers. The most impactful data is different for every business. The benefit of using a platform like MailerLite is that it supports you in collecting almost any data type with custom fields.

Collecting a subscriber’s first name and email address is a great start. But getting clever with data collection can open up a world of possibilities. With the right information, you can send targeted offers, content and experiences that result in more sales or conversions.

How email marketing personalization builds trust

The ability to truly personalize your emails within your email automation is another key benefit of using an email marketing platform like MailerLite.

Personalization is essential to building the know, like and trust factor with your audience. When you talk to your subscribers by name you’ll appear more like a friend than a faceless business.

When using a MailerLite form to capture data from our new members to The Digital Circus [our online visibility membership for small business owners], we ask for their date of birth.

That's not because we’re monitoring how old our members are. It’s so we can send happy birthday messages as part of the nurturing process.

E-commerce stores could collect the same data to give birthday discounts or other offers relevant to the customer.

Integrating design tools for visually appealing emails

As small business owners, one of our key priorities is to make our lives as simple as possible, especially since we don’t have a dedicated marketing team. A streamlined marketing approach that doesn’t involve a huge stack of tools is essential to this.

For us, the game changer in our campaigns came when MailerLite introduced its integration with Canva. Visually appealing emails are not just niceties these days, they are essential in connecting with your audience, stopping the scroll, and breaking up large, bulky text-based campaigns.

As with most email marketing platforms, we can customize our emails with our brand identity. However, the Canva integration takes email design to the next level. Canva Pro has been a design tool we have used since we first got started and is a platform we never have a problem paying for. We use it all day, every day to create everything from social media graphics and presentations to animated gifs.

Now, with a click of a button, we can upload these images to MailerLite. We no longer have to download our graphics and re-upload them; everything we ever need is sat there in MailerLite, ready to use. The time savings make our business so much more efficient.

Our emails now incorporate visually appealing headers, animated, Harry Potter-style sign-off footers and branded images that make our emails visually appealing and interactive.

Measuring campaign success over time

In the Yellow Tuxedo online ecosystem model, email sits alongside your social media and macro content creation.

With this approach, it’s important to stop looking at your marketing efforts in silos. Each channel should work together to help you achieve your goal, be it more conversions, sales, or calls.

Although it would be remiss to not track and measure the success of your email campaigns our advice is always to look at the bigger picture when it comes to your numbers.

We all know too well that not everything will hit the spot with your audience. Sometimes that has nothing to do with what you’re doing.

We recommend that you look at your campaign's open and click-through rates. This is important. But not on such a granular level that you feel like you need to go back to the drawing board when one email doesn’t land the way you thought it would.

There are too many things at play that need to be factored in, such as the current political landscape, events, and seasonality. You have to look at it on a broader scale and track metrics over a longer period.

Once you have considered these aspects, think about A/B split testing your titles and send times, and making other incremental tweaks and adjustments.

The role of AI in marketing automation

More and more people are beginning to see the value of AI rather than being afraid of it. You can’t escape it! We’re not self-proclaimed AI experts, but the tools we use have massively impacted and supported our marketing automation in a good way.

MailerLite’s AI subject line generator is a good example. Your subject line has a big impact on your open rate, yet it can be hard to create effective ones when you’re not feeling creative. AI makes the process much more efficient and is a huge time-saver for us.

Nothing can replace your authentic tone of voice. But AI powers tools to help boost your creativity and efficiency in your marketing efforts. It's exciting to think about what could be in store as this continues to grow.

Wrapping up

If it’s not yet a part of your marketing mix, email marketing really should be higher up your priority list. With incredible platforms like MailerLite to support you it's never been simpler to start creating professional, personalized campaigns without making it a full-time job in your business.

Emily and Alan Braithwaite are online visibility specialists and are the dynamic duo behind Yellow Tuxedo, a company dedicated to helping businesses shine online. With a unique blend of creativity and tech expertise, they've built a reputation for turning complex online strategies into simple, actionable steps. Their passion for helping others succeed is matched only by their ability to make the process fun and engaging.

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