Email marketing is still among the most effective strategies with high ROIs. It allows you to create personalized and custom experiences among your audience and also uplevel engagement. Anyone adopting email marketing has a great chance of deepening brand awareness by means of leads, new clients and returning clients as well.
You can also connect your email marketing channels for a cohesive and fluid buyer's journey. Email is a great opportunity to get insights from your audience and find intentional and meaningful customer touch points.
And if you’re considering organising an email campaign of your own, Squarespace offers you an opportunity of sending on-brand emails or integrating email marketing features. Here’s how you can do it.
Starting your first email campaign: quick notice
Before you begin, keep the following things in mind:
- Websites on mobile start plans can only use the trial version of Email Campaigns feature.
- Your Squarespace subscription needs to be active so that you could send Email Campaigns.
- In order to avoid spam filters, your website is recommended to have a custom domain and email address.
Knowing this, you can proceed to launching your first marketing campaign.
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Step 1: sign up
First thing you’re up to is to sign up. One important thing: all Squarespace websites start with a free Email Campaigns trial. It includes the following features:
- Infinite list size.
- Three total blast campaigns.
- 50,000 sends per campaign.
The trial is also independent from your Squarespace website’s trial and does not presuppose any time limits. But you can’t send more than three email campaigns during the Free trial period. Also, there’s no option to remove the “Powered by Squarespace” branding. Setting up automated campaigns isn’t available as well. You’ll have to upgrade to paid service to perform these things.
How to subscribe to Squarespace Email Campaigns
Subscribing to Email campaigns, you’re paying in order for your campaigns to be sent. But you are free to build mailing lists, compose drafts and also view past campaigns without active subscription. Remember that only site owners and contributors having Admin billing permissions, are free to purchase an Email Campaigns subscription for a site.
Follow these steps to subscribe to Email campaigns:
- Click Marketing in the Home Menu and then click Email Campaigns.
- Choose the Upgrade Now option.
- Select Monthly or Annual billing cycle.
- Pick the Email campaigns plan that meets your needs.
- Confirm your payment.
- In case your bank is located in the European Economic Area (EEA), you may need to authorize your purchase.
You also should keep in mind that Email Campaigns subscriptions are set to renew automatically. to prevent service interruptions. Users are usually sent email reminders 15 days before the renewal. Usually, it’s enough for them to update their credit card information or turn off the renewal.
Billing for Email marketing campaigns stands separately from the user's site subscription. It means that in case the site subscription is cancelled, the auto-renew for existing Email campaigns won’t be turned off - you are free to use it.
Step 2: set up a profile and mailing lists
Before you launch your first email campaign, you’ll need to form at least one mailing list and a sender profile. Below you’ll find some helpful tips on how you can build your first email list. Adopt these strategies for your marketing campaign.
Apply lead generation offers
Add call-to-actions to your Squarespace website with texts like “subscribe now” and so on. That’ll help you engage your audience and get your first emails. It’s a great strategy for beginners.
Use forms
Embed some fill-in forms to your Squarespace website pages for your visitors to fill out the required information, including their email addresses. It’s a great and simple strategy that will demonstrate to you how many users would like to receive emails from you.
Use the power of social media
Social media is great for many things. You can use it to organize some contests, asking people to send you their emails in exchange for some bonuses.
Ask people
In some cases asking people directly to share their emails with you works great too - especially if you’ve got a community around your business.
Add signup button to your Facebook Business page
It’s among the easiest ways to start collecting emails for your list. Adding a signup button will definitely result in attracting your followers, including the ones that are not on your mailing list yet.
Ask to leave feedback on your business
Users simply love being asked what they think about some products and services and whether they’ve met their expectations. This makes them feel their importance. And you can ask users to send you feedback by email, getting access to their email addresses, and also acquiring helpful tips on how you can improve your work. It's also a good idea to add Squarespace Google Reviews plugin with a CTA button.
Organize a webinar or host it
Webinars are still among the top trends when it comes to marketing. And it’s also a wonderful way to attract new audiences to your Squarespace website, also getting their contact info.
Get contact info directly on your site
You can also add a contact form on the homepage of your Squarespace website so that users could continue browsing it after they fill in the information you need. It works great for those who have loyal audiences willing to interact with the brand.
Create a newsletter
In case you’ve got multiple social media accounts, there’s an opportunity to design a creative newsletter and spread it around them and also on your website. This newsletter can contain a sign-up form using which you’ll collect your first emails.
How to set up sender profile
To create your sender profile, do the following:
- Go to the Home menu, click Marketing and then - Email Campaigns.
- Click Settings, and after - Sender Profiles.
- Add new profile.
- Choose a name for your sender profile. It’s a public name so all people who receive your emails will see it.
- Add the email address your campaigns will be sent from. Squarespace recommends using a custom email here.
- Click Next to verify your email. The verification info will automatically be sent to the email you’ve chosen in the previous step.
- Open the verification email and copy the code.
- Enter the code in the profile setup window.
Keep in mind that there might also be a need to verify your domain in case you’re using a third-party one. Squarespace domains are verified automatically.
Step 3: start sending blast or automated campaigns
Blast campaigns are the ones you send to one or more mailing lists. You can use the blast campaign to inform your subscribers about the upcoming events.
Automated campaigns are sent as a response to some user’s action. For example, the email can be automatically sent when a user buys a product on your website.
When is the best time for sending emails
There are tons of studies on email marketing and the best time to send a newsletter. And as they all demonstrate different results for various industries, you still can use this info to prioritize your send times:
10 a.m.
Some researchers note that late morning is the most popular time period for sending a newsletter, but there are several that tend to mark the 10 a.m. as the best. 11 a.m. is notable as well.
8 p.m.-midnight
Emails also get a lot of clicks later in the evening. Most likely because some people prefer to check their email before going to bed.
2 p.m.
People at work like to have some distractions. So, 2 p.m. works fine for those who’re looking for a way to make their email campaigns work.
6 a.m.
According to studies, 50% of users start their day by emailing in bed. So it makes early morning the best time to reach a wider audience.
Step 4: link your campaigns
Squarespace automatically creates a browser copy of each email marketing campaign. And there are two ways for users to open campaigns in browser:
- You can add a view-in-browser link to the header of every campaign you organize for your Squarespace website.
- Use permalink. As each blast marketing campaign has its own URL, you can share it as any other link.
To attach a view-in-browser link to the header to any blast or automated email, enable it in the header.
Step 5: track your results
After you’ve sent your campaign, it’s time to track your results. Squarespace offers some built-in analytics tools for that. There are lots of metrics to track, and the key ones are - open rate, click-through rate (CTR), click-to-open rate (CTO).
Here are some key numbers your emails should be performing:
- Your average open rate should be around 15-25%.
- Your average CTR should not be lower than 2.5%.
- Your average CTO should be around 20-30%.
These numbers are great for beginners, but some results may vary a lot across industries.