Despite what you may have heard, email marketing remains a crucial tool in the marketing toolbox — especially for local businesses and eCommerce brands. In fact, research shows that the ROI for email marketing is $42 for every dollar a business spends. 

Email marketing is not only a great way to engage an audience with valuable content, but it’s also a way to remind your customer base that you are standing by to help them when the need arises. Even if your audience is too busy to open and read your emails every time, they still get a regular reminder that you and your business are alive and well.

However, for many business owners, getting started can be a daunting task. Let’s look at some of the best ways to launch a regular email marketing campaign…

Organize Your Contacts

You likely already have a large email list of your current customers, prospects, and vendors. Your sales and leadership team probably has a lot of them too. The challenge is to put all of those contacts into one database in order to upload them into an email marketing platform like Constant Contact, Mailchimp, or Active Campaign. It’s best to assign the task of wrangling all of those contacts from your team to one person. But once you have your list, it’s also important to “scrub” it for email addresses that are no longer active.

Scrub Your Email List First

When sending out email blasts, particularly for the first time, it’s very important to limit the number of emails that “bounce” because they are no longer active. Email marketing platform providers like the ones mentioned above are vigilant when it comes to bounce rates because they do not want to appear to be supporting email spammers. You also do not want email providers like Google to flag you as a spammer. So how do you scrub your list? First, never “buy” an email list. It’s more than likely to contain lots of inactive email addresses that will bounce. Next, make sure you clean up your list using a service like zerobounce.net or validity.com. These services, “test” the emails and confirm their validity without actually sending them an email.

Using Website Forms

One of the easiest ways to capture leads for your email list is through a form on your website, but this is also a great strategy for gathering data for future content marketing — like webinars, content downloads, and personalized discounts. There are several types of forms that you can choose to leverage to grow your list; two of the most popular are inline forms and pop-up forms.

Inline forms are embedded in the pages of your website. They can be located anywhere on the page and be on any (or every) page of your website if you choose. Talk to whoever is building or managing your business website about plug-ins that can track the performance of your inline forms.

A great way to use inline forms is by adding a sidebar to every page of your website. No matter which page they’re on, they’ll have a chance to submit their information to your email list. Take things one step further by incentivizing the sign-up process with a free content download or discount at your brick-and-mortar location.

Pop-up forms are exactly what they sound like; they will pop up on the screen when website visitors take a certain action or visit a certain page. While these are a great way to pique the interest of your website traffic, they could impact how well your website performs and need to be designed by professionals. 

Pop-ups can also be time-delayed, giving visitors a few minutes to check out your site without being obstructed by a pop-up. Relate pop-up incentives to the content on the page visitors are viewing and put them on high-traffic pages to increase the odds that it will be seen.