- Ready to send out that email to your clients?
Here on the Journey, we'll be telling you the best practices
for creating that newsletter.
- Email is a great and reliable source of marketing
and just a way to really connect with your audience.
People will think that everything is social media these days
but the one constant is email.
We're constantly in our inboxes, we constantly see
those brands that we want to connect with,
and if you're not focusing on your email
marketing campaigns, you're gonna lose to your competitors.
So with these best practices and you actually focusing
on it, you will win and really make those connections
with your audience.
- All right, so we know it's beneficial,
but now how do we create it?
- Yeah, we're gonna take you through using just
our program here at GoDaddy, but there are lots
of template providers out there for email marketing
that you can use such as MailChimp or Klaviyo
to really set up those campaigns, but you really want
to focus on something that has an easy,
drag-and-drop type of visual editor.
- All right, so your newsletter is gonna be guided
by the type of content that you're creating.
At the same time, you want to make sure that you take care
of a couple of items on the checklist.
One, brand.
Use your logo, your color scheme, make sure that your fonts,
all of that is included in your newsletter.
- Yeah, so with the program here, I have my logo right
at the top, and then under styles, there's lots
of preset styles that the template provider gives me,
but say I have a different brand.
I can go in here and edit these to my liking.
So if there's one that's close,
I'd recommend starting with that.
So let's go with reindeer 'cause it's a great name.
Now, you can click this little pencil icon
and edit every aspect of the template
like the background color, the foreground,
the button colors, the shapes, the text,
all those different things to really make it fit your brand,
and when you do this, you can save it as its own style
and go back to this each and every time you create
an email marketing newsletter so your audience knows it is
from you without even looking at the logo or who it's from.
- For our next tip, you want to make sure
that you just keep it simple.
You know, clear, concise, easy to read.
You may have certain ideas that you want to draw attention
to, you can bold or you can make the font bigger.
Draw attention to certain areas or ideas
that you really want people to come away with.
- Right, you don't want just a massive wall of text
and all the information there
'cause no one's going to read it.
Really separate those out with those headers or with images
or buttons, things like that to really allow
your users' eyes to breathe, if you will.
Like here we have, I just set up a quick little template,
but I have a summer sale, a short little description,
buy one, get one, and then options to add images here
that really break it up followed by a button.
If I go and add images to this,
it would make it all a little bit more clear.
I know what I'm trying to focus on.
With this particular newsletter,
I'm trying to talk about this summer sale.
So let's think of a business and really make this
as we go through these best practices.
Tell me a business that you would love to run one day.
- Maybe a fashion boutique.
- Fashion boutique.
What type of fashion?
- Men's fashion, of course.
- All right, all right.
So if we update the actual campaign to be
about men's fashion here, we've added a bunch of images
and text here to really talk about your fashion line, right?
And it's not super complex.
We have a couple of images, a button,
and we'll add some social links here later on,
but it's not a ton of information.
It's not super overwhelming, but it's crystal clear
of what I want them to do.
I want them to look at my summer sale or your summer sale,
rather, and then start shopping.
At the end of the day, you want them
to take some type of action.
Now, your actual email marketing campaigns,
it won't always be a sale and it shouldn't be you trying
to sell them something.
It should be you trying to add value to their life
or either it's letting them know here's some new stuff
that's happening in our business or, hey,
especially if I'm a men's fashion line, I would say, hey,
cool, here's some tips on how to really up your fashion game
without having to pay for anything,
but here are just some of our tips.
- Yeah, that makes sense because you actually want
to have some kind of call to action
letting your readers know what you want them to do.
It could be click here, as Nealey said, to go online
and buy these items or, hey, come on into the in-store
only promotion or it could be follow us online for more tips
and tricks in men's fashion.
- Yeah, it could be check out your latest blog post
or your video even.
It could be anything, but with these call to actions,
tell them exactly what to do.
Don't leave it to chance or interpretation.
You might think you're being rude and yelling
at them saying, shop now, buy now, check out this post,
do this, do that, but it helps us make actions.
It's one less decision that we have
to make by just following directions.
- And the next thing that you want
to make sure is that it's mobile responsive.
Most people are on their mobile phone.
I know me, I can't do anything without my mobile phone.
- Right.
- So you want to make sure that your email newsletter
not only looks good on desktop, but it also fits perfectly
on a mobile device.
- Yeah, and if you use many of the popular email marketing
softwares out there, they're going to be mobile responsive.
Like we can check out a preview of this website,
I can trick my browser into being a phone,
and then this is exactly what it would look like
if I were on my phone and it's nice and easy to read,
the images scale to the actual width now
and not how it was before.
- And also if you have any links like, you know,
those buttons, you want to make sure that they work.
All right, so now we want to go into some things
that you may want to keep in mind
when you're creating your copy for your email newsletter.
Most people are gonna click on it
because of a nice, snappy subject line.
So think of something really quick, concise
that can catch someone's attention
so that they'll be interested in opening up that email.
- Yeah, you also want to ask yourself,
why are you sending this email in the first place?
Because we shouldn't be creating email to just create email.
We want to be solving a problem.
So what problem do you solve?
Go ahead and add that to the subject line
and let your readers know exactly
what this email's gonna do for them and their lives.
- A tip here also, you can recycle content.
Do you have a blog that you've written?
Could you repurpose that into a newsletter
or maybe even point to that blog?
Maybe you did a webinar and you can actually mention that
in your newsletter and tell people, hey,
go check out the rest of this webinar here.
- Yeah, and with your email marketing,
you want to make sure it's shareable.
People are three times more likely
to share email than from other sources.
So having things like forward to a friend right
in your email or social links are crucial
for the success of your email marketing campaigns.
- Next, we want to make sure it actually works.
Let's test the email.
Many email clients will display the email differently,
so it's good to keep that in mind and make sure
that your email is gonna come up rather easily
and also all the links work along with grammar, punctuation.
You want to make sure all of that's correct.
- Yeah, and another thing to keep in mind too
is how fast does your email load?
Especially if you're starting to put in a ton of content
and a ton of visual elements
to that email marketing newsletter, if it takes too long
to load, just like we're not gonna wait for a website,
we're not gonna wait for that email to load.
So make sure you test that.
Again, most email providers or email marketing providers
will give you some sort of test option.
Test how it loads on your phone, on your browser,
on Outlook, on wherever it is to see
what that experience looks like for them.
- Now, this may seem simple.
At the same time, you want to make sure you hit send.
It's no point in going through all of this work
creating this beautifully crafted,
branded to your business email if you don't send it out.
- And then after you send and after probably a few days,
you'll want to crunch the numbers.
You want to see if the things you're doing,
all the effort you're putting
into this email marketing campaign is working.
Most email marketing providers will have statistics for you
so you can see things like open rate
and what the click-through rate on whatever you're trying
to get them to is going, how many people have unsubscribed,
how many people who it just bounced to.
Big tip with those bounced emails to get them
off your email subscriber list 'cause those email providers
will just think that you're sending spam,
hitting their inboxes that don't exist anymore.
Maybe they just don't have that email active.
Clean it up.
You really want quality subscribers versus quantity.
- Now, beside the analytics, it's good to get feedback.
Make sure that you're asking your customers
what do they like about the email newsletter?
A lot of these email marketing services will give you
the ability to send out a survey, and then make it nice
and simple, you could say, hey, what did you find helpful?
Or what would you add?
Things of that nature just to make sure that your customers
are really enjoying what you're sending them.
- Yeah, I had a couple of really cool campaigns
that I've done in the past with my clients
is I'll have a little question
of how do you like my emails that I'm sending you?
And then just put an image of a smiley face,
one of those yellow, like just,
I'm okay face, or the red frowny face.
They click the green smiley face, it goes to a GIF
of me saying, thank you, or hooray or something just funny
and awkward, and if it's any of the other ones, I send them
to a survey, and I can track those clicks to those images
with these programs to see how many people are clicking
on the green smiley face 'cause that's awesome.
I don't need them to do more work if they're liking it.
Remember that path of least resistance,
but if they're not having a great time, I'd love to know
about it, which then I send them over to that survey
so they can give me that honest, candid feedback.
- All right, so you just learned best practices
to follow when creating your email newsletter.
Be sure to like this video and leave a comment below.
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This is the Journey, we'll see you next time.