Since I\u2019m more of a DIY girl, I decided to refine the search. I really wanted to tap more into creating a successful email marketing plan myself (for now at least). \u00a0It\u2019s not that I want to do it all on my own, but I figure it\u2019s best to start this journey with some sort of understanding of what email marketing is. No, I\u2019m not saying I had no idea what it was prior to this journey\u2026 but as I mentioned, I’m not quite an expert. So, I changed my search and found a few helpful tips to kickstarting our email newsletter.<\/p>\n
Helpful email marketing articles<\/h2>\n
The first thing to catch my eye was an article from CopyBlogger called “37 Tips for Writing Emails that Get Opened, Read, and Clicked<\/a>.” When I start to do any sort of research, I find these types of lists to be helpful, as they usually lead to other more in-depth articles or provoke another search query. Back to the article, it covered a lot of good general information. General information is always helpful to me as it helps in understanding the bigger picture. In this case, email marketing tips that I should be doing regardless of what type of email it is. You know, be it a personal reach out or a mass email. My favorite section of this article was “How to write engaging emails” \u2013 specifically the tidbit on keeping it short. I tend to be a lengthy writer, which turns out isn\u2019t the best idea for email.<\/p>\n Some other great email marketing articles that I found helpful:<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0A Beginner\u2019s Guide to Successful Email Marketing – Kissmetrics<\/a><\/p>\n Kissmetrics is usually always a great source of marketing info. So, obviously, I had to check them out. Biggest take through with this article is to always ask permission. You never want to send someone an email (especially a marketing email) if they did not ask to be sent this info. It\u2019s a quick way to get unsubscribes and you\u2019ll probably get marked as spam!<\/p>\n 2.\u00a015 Email Marketing Tips For Small Businesses – Forbes<\/a><\/p>\n Alright, so this one is similar to the 37 tips article mentioned earlier. But, it does hit on some great points. One of the top tips I\u2019d say is to design your newsletter to fit your brand. I mean sure, you can talk about all sorts of ideas, but if the message doesn\u2019t reflect you or what the business is doing it may confuse the readers.<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0How to Create an Email Newsletter People Actually Read – Hubspot<\/a><\/p>\n I spent quite a bit of time on Hubspot just reading their blog. This particular article really hones in on creating content. The first section it brings up is to think of whether you actually need a newsletter. Why? A newsletter should really be there to help you reach a certain goal – i.e retain customers, close deals, gain leads, etc.<\/p>\n 4. 3 Clever Ways To Drastically Increase Your Cold Email Outreach ROI – GMass<\/a><\/p>\n The author of the article gives a few tips on how to make outreach more efficient. For example, he suggests implementing brand awareness ads and tactics on LinkedIn for top outreach targets. He believes this will help produce brand recognition when it comes time to email them<\/p>\n So after reading a few articles on email marketing, I decided I should look for some sort of class or course to get a more in-depth experience. I really wanted to learn more on the art of email marketing. It didn\u2019t take long… I remembered that Hubspot has a whole slew of free courses. One is actually an email marketing course. The best part is that I would earn a certificate after completing the course and passing the exam.<\/p>\n Before I get into the whole HubSpot course, let me explain the main intent of learning all about email marketing. Referral Rock has decided to start sending a bi-monthly newsletter. I was asked to be the \u2018voice\u2019 of the newsletter. I was pretty stoked since this is right up my alley. Here comes the fun part\u2026 I myself have never written a newsletter. Additionally, Referral Rock has never formally sent out a newsletter. So, here I am trying to start something from scratch. I thought it\u2019d be helpful to post the whole experience, hence this article. Hopefully, this information will be helpful to you whether you simply need a refresher or if you\u2019re just starting out like me.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re like me and email marketing isn\u2019t your strong suite, you need to check out this course offered by Hubspot. The Email Marketing Course <\/a>was pretty eye opening. I had taken a course or two from Hubspot before so I figured that this course would probably be helpful in some way. I must say they did a really great job. The course is made up of 9 sections and in total takes about 4 hours to complete (not including the final exam).<\/p>\n So, I went ahead and started HubSpot Academy’s Email Marketing Course (If I could be a professional student, I would). The course sections cover everything from the email lifecycle, segmentation, deliverability, analytics, and even testing. No, the course wasn’t specifically for email newsletters, but perhaps it will help me on my quest of delivering great emails. Ones that people want to open.<\/p>\n I figured all of this would come in handy when we start rolling out the newsletter. So onward with the email newsletter.<\/p>\n So I had taken the Hubspot course and passed the exam. I earned my little certificate and I was ready to start the newsletter. At this point, \u00a0I already had a few ideas for the newsletter. As far as how often, what content we\u2019re going to cover, and what the goal of the newsletter would be.<\/p>\n The frequency of the newsletter is something that I feel could change later on depending on how much content I’m able to put together. I wanted something that wasn\u2019t too frequent, as I didn\u2019t want to be annoying to subscribers or run out of content. I also wanted to stay relevant so I didn\u2019t want too much time to lapse between newsletters. Which is why I settled for a bi-monthly newsletter, it seems to be a happy medium.<\/p>\n Shall we dive into what our newsletter will cover? Yes, of course. We (the Referral Rock Team) had a few ideas on what we want to cover, but the content will adjust to match what we are doing during that specific time (one may focus on referral tips, the next may focus on email marketing<\/a> techniques, etc.). We really want to be helpful to everyone, and besides, you can only read so much about referral marketing, so we decided that the newsletter will cover marketing. This way, content would be easy to find and it would be useful information for our subscribers.<\/p>\n So here’s an outline of the newsletter.<\/p>\n The plan is simple, I want to cover content that I’ve found helpful or that has helped someone on the Referral Rock team. I also want to keep people informed with what\u2019s going on with Referral Rock as a whole. The goal is to be informative \u2013 to all of our customers. Luckily for us, and well everyone out there. There are plenty of marketing and email automation tools<\/a>\u00a0to help. We’re actually using MailChimp to create the email newsletter template and so far it’s been great for our vision.<\/p>\n Since this is the company’s first newsletter, I had to come up with strategy. Luckily for me, we had already been keeping tabs on who wanted to subscribe for more information (thank you Referral Rock Blog!). One thing I learned is to never buy emails or use random email lists<\/a>. So the plan is to use our current email lists – the one where people have already agreed to receive our emails. This first newsletter will be a formal an opt-in sort of thing.<\/p>\n So, the CTA of the first ever newsletter will be to unsubscribe. I’ll provide the whole spiel, “you received this email because you have previously opted into receiving updates” or something along those lines. On top of using our existing list, I figure a good promotion never hurt. I’ll use some of the promotion techniques that are used for\u00a0promoting a referral program<\/a>\u00a0as those can be pretty universal. I’m sure you’ll be seeing social media posts and other things floating around to subscribe to the email newsletter (on that note, look to the left).<\/p>\n What is an easy way to connect to people? Email. People check their email multiple times a day. Especially since many people check their email with their phones and happen to carry their phones around everywhere. The best part is a newsletter can be either formal or in my case an informal, but an informative thing. I wanted to take a light approach to sharing helpful information. My thinking was that most people already have a lot going on throughout their day, my newsletter would act as a mini break. Short, sweet, possibly a little funny, but most importantly to the point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How we started to refine our marketing email strategy. Plus, an insight into some of the tips we found for creating our first email newsletter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":7546,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2579],"tags":[2587],"class_list":["post-2487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marketing","tag-email"],"acf":[],"modified_by":"Kat Dalao","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2487"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22992,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487\/revisions\/22992"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Taking the Hubspot Email Marketing Course<\/h2>\n
![\"HubSpot's](\"https:\/\/referralrock.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/2017-02-14_13-58-21-205x300.png\" "\\"\\"")
<\/p>\nWhat I learned<\/h2>\n
A few things I learned<\/h4>\n
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Next steps for our email marketing<\/h2>\n
Email newsletter outline<\/h2>\n
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Who to send the newsletter to?<\/h2>\n
Why have a newsletter?<\/h2>\n