Email marketing seems to be the one of the most forgotten aspects when someone creates, runs and maintains a website. Yes, I can understand it is not an essential part to a website. However, considering there are billions of people with active email addresses worldwide, it seems silly to not try and take advantage of that and create a following for your website through this.

Personally, I think the problem website creators have with email marketing is that they do not know where to start with it. For this reason, here are a few tips to help get you started with email marketing. It has worked for me up to now so hopefully it will work for you too!

#1 Use a Email Marketing Tool

The first step to successfully starting email marketing is to choose an online tool that will help you run email marketing campaigns and analyse the performance of them. For me, I found the best of the best was MailChimp since they have a great integration with WordPress and offer a free option with the option to expand when your email follow number increases past the free threshold.

It make take a while to get use to it. However, us website creators are always having to get use to using new software and online platforms so that shouldn’t be too much heart ache!

#2 Set Up a Business Address

As part of the laws against spamming, any email that is used for marketing purposes must include a valid address to contact you by. Obviously you will not want to put your home address as the email could go to anyone! Therefore, put aside some money to either buy a business address or a PO box just so that when you do start sending emails, you have a professional address to stick at the bottom of your marketing emails.

#3 Don’t Over Content

Now that you are all prepared to start sending emails, my biggest tip I can give you is to not put too much content in your emails. On average, I get over 30 emails a day and if each one of them was 500-1000 words long (the marketed emails that is), I would simply un-subscribe as it is not worth my time. With this, stick to short and sweet messages at first and then use your analytics to see how your emails are actually doing.

As a general rule of thumb, 200-300 words for an email that you want to market to an audience is a good word limit to stick to.

Even though this seems both costly and a lot of time to implement, in the long run, email marketing really is worth the time and money spent. You can gain an audience through it and even make money through it by getting companies to sponsor emails if you have a large enough audience!

If you really do not want to do email marketing, at the very minimum set up your website to have a feed burner, which is completely free and at least provides web users the chance to follow your content through email automatically.