Email Marketing Tips for Beginners: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started Right
Everybody begins somewhere with their email marketing, and more often than not, they begin badly. People purchase lists, send out an impersonal mass mailer campaign, receive a 5% open rate, and declare email ineffective.
Email marketing is remarkably effective. However, it demands doing the basics right from the outset.
Here are the most valuable email marketing tips for beginners, presented in the order you will need them.
Tip 1: Start With a Clear Goal
The most frequent mistake made by beginners is creating a list without understanding its purpose. First of all, determine what you would like to achieve through using email marketing:
- To drive online sales?
- To collect leads for a service company?
- To attract subscribers to your blog posts?
- To engage your current clients?
Based on the answer you provide here, everything else will fall into place: which lead magnet to develop, what to write in your emails, what channels to choose, and so on.
Tip 2: Choose the Right Platform, Then Stick With It
The novice tends to worry about the email tool and change it too soon if something doesn’t work out just right. Just choose one and make an effort to learn it well.
Best Beginner Platforms
Mailchimp
500 contacts for free. Drag-and-drop email designer. Enormous database of useful information. Good choice for almost all newbies.
MailerLite
1,000 contacts for free. It’s a bit harder to learn but provides a lot of powerful automation functions for free.
ConvertKit
Unlimited up to 1,000 subscribers. Designed for creators (bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers). High-quality landing pages and sequences.
Don’t use enterprise software like Hubspot or Salesforce right away. These are designed for team users, not starters.
Tip 3: Offer Something Valuable to Get Subscriptions
People will not sign up to your newsletter if they do not like your brand in the first place. You need to have some kind of lead magnet that is of value to you in exchange for an email address.
The Best Beginner Lead Magnets
- Checklist (Specific and actionable right away)
- Template (Saves them time doing something that they often do)
- Mini-guide/Cheat sheet (One idea explained simply)
- Offer/Discount (Most effective if you are in ecommerce)
- Free tool/quiz
- Email course (Series of valuable lessons spread out over 5-7 days)
What to Avoid
Weak lead magnets: Ebooks with generic names, tips and tricks without specificity, whatever requires more than 5 minutes of consumption to get something valuable from it.
The more specific your lead magnet is, the more you will convert your visitors into leads.
Tip 4: Write a Proper Welcome Email (Don’t Skip This)
The welcome email that you will ever write is your most important email. Your welcome email is written at a time of high interest, where people are most interested in hearing back from you. Your open rate for a welcome email averages between 50% and 80%.
Your Welcome Email Should
- Arrive on time (not days after)
- Thank the subscriber enthusiastically
- Provide the lead magnet to the subscriber
- Tell them who you are in 2–3 sentences (not paragraphs)
- Set some expectations (how often will you be emailing, what will they get?)
- Add one next step (read your best article, go to a page, ask you a question)
What to Avoid
Just a confirmation email letting them know they’ve signed up. Not a welcome email at all; just a receipt of sorts.
Tip 5: Write for One Person, Not Everyone
Beginner email writers write like they’re talking to a bunch of people. Great email writers write like they’re talking to a single individual.
Prior to writing an email, imagine one particular person – a person who perfectly matches your product/service. Write your email to that person. Use ‘you’ much more often than ‘we’. Ask questions. Get specific about their situation.
“You are likely using three different marketing tools and none of them can communicate with one another” is better than “Businesses often face issues in integration of marketing tools.”
The more personalized your email copy feels, the higher the open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate will be.
Tip 6: Keep Your Subject Lines Clear and Specific
The subject line decides how far your email goes. And for beginners, the worst error is not to be clear or too clever.
Vague Subject Lines
- “This week’s update”
- “Something exciting is coming”
- “News”
Specific, Clickable Subject Lines
- “Doubling our sales with a 5-step email sequence”
- “Inside you’ll find your free content calendar template”
- “Why 73% of cart abandonments can’t be recovered”
If in doubt, always give more details and tell the reader exactly what he will receive or learn by opening the email.
Bonus Tip
Never forget to include the preview text for each of your emails (the text that appears under the subject line in the inbox).
Tip 7: Don’t Make Every Email a Sales Pitch
This is the quickest route to reduce the length of your list. If all your emails are selling something, then people will unsubscribe and not open anymore.
The 80/20 Rule
80% of the emails should provide something valuable to the subscriber (entertainment, education, knowledge, inspiration). The rest 20% can be promotional emails.
A subscriber that trusts and eagerly anticipates your emails will eventually make a purchase when the time is right. However, a subscriber who feels like he’s being sold something through every email will not read any further.
Tip 8: Send Consistently, Even When You Don’t Feel Ready
The novice usually holds off on delivering the email as they wait for the perfect message or the right timing. The people who just subscribed yesterday aren’t concerned about perfection; they want value.
Recommended Sending Frequency
- Weekly is the sweet spot for most companies
- Bimonthly is okay if weekly feels like too much
- Monthly is the lowest frequency you can go without being forgotten
Add it to your calendar as if it’s a scheduled appointment. Consistency breeds trust, and trust generates sales.
Tip 9: Learn to Read Your Email Metrics
There’s no requirement to hold a degree in data science to evaluate the effectiveness of your emails. It all comes down to three metrics.
Open Rate
The percentage of people who opened your email.
- Good metric to target: 25%-40% for an engaged list
- Low open rates almost always signify ineffective subject lines.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
The percentage that clicked the link in the email.
- Benchmark: 2% to 5%
- Too low CTR indicates that your content or CTA is irrelevant
Unsubscribe Rate
The percentage that unsubscribed from your emails.
- Keep it below 0.5%
- If your unsubscribe rate is too high, it means your emails don’t meet subscribers’ expectations
Do these calculations after every send and soon you’ll see which is working and which is not.
Tip 10: Keep Your List Clean From the Start
Email marketing success doesn’t simply lie in having a large subscriber list; it’s about the engagement level.
From the Beginning
- Bounce those emails right away (this happens automatically by all email service providers)
- Create a re-engagement campaign for those who have not opened for 60-90 days
- Unsubscribe those who do not engage with your content – they are affecting your deliverability
- Never import any contact without their explicit consent
A list that is small but engaged will outperform a big but unengaged list in terms of deliverability, open rates, conversion, and even money.
Tip 11: Set Up Your First Automation Immediately
As a total novice, you should at least have automation for your welcome email.
Once That’s in Place, Add These in Order
- 3-5 email welcome sequence (besides your welcome email)
- Abandoned cart sequence (if you have an e-commerce store)
- Re-engagement sequence (for inactive subscribers)
What makes automated mass mailer emails different from manually intensive mass emails.
Tip 12: Never Buy an Email List
What makes automated mass mailer emails different from manually intensive mass emails.
Buying Email Lists
- Violates CAN-SPAM and GDPR regulations
- Produces extremely high spam complaint rates
- Ruins your sending reputation (so that all your future emails will be considered spam, even when sent to valid subscribers)
- Rarely generates any real income
- Hurts your company’s image
Let your mailing list build up slowly, one subscriber at a time. It takes more time. But it’s worth it.
Tip 13: Mobile-Optimize Everything
Over 60% of all emails are opened via mobile devices. So if your email doesn’t work on mobile phones, you’ve just lost your entire audience.
Mobile Optimization Checklist
- Stick to one-column design
- Keep your subject lines below 40 characters
- Choose font size between 14px and 16px for body text
- CTA buttons should be at least 44 x 44 px large (tappable size)
- Test everything on your actual phone before sending
The majority of modern email software comes with mobile responsive templates, though previewing is still recommended prior to sending the email.
Tip 14: Test Before You Send (Every Time)
Experienced email marketers use a pre-sending checklist. The novice ones just wing it and often end up with a sent email containing faulty links, incorrect merge tags, and ugly design in Gmail.
Build a Simple Pre-Send Checklist
- Send a test email to yourself (on desktop and mobile)
- Make sure all links function properly
- Make sure merge tags (your first name) contain correct information
- Check the unsubscribe link works
- Review the email for any typos
- Make sure the from name and reply-to fields are correct
This 5-minute check will save you from making awkward and difficult-to-fix mistakes.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing is perhaps the most ROI-positive channel that any company can have, but it takes doing things correctly from the very beginning. Start organically, speak to people, be consistent, and track your performance.
An absolutely perfect email should not be your goal before sending the first one. Just do it and keep improving on each subsequent email.
The best email marketers out there were once beginners who just kept going at it.