Email marketing still remains among the most successful tactics with high ROIs. It allows you to make individualized and custom experiences among your community and also increase user engagement. Anyone employing email marketing has a high chance of broadening brand awareness by means of leads, new clients and returning customers also.
You can also connect your email marketing channels for a consistent and smooth buyer's journey. Email is a fantastic opportunity to receive insights from your community and think of intentional and meaningful customer reference points.
And if you’re considering arranging your first email campaign, WordPress gives you a chance of sending on-brand emails or implementing email marketing tools. Here’s what you can do for it.
Starting your first email campaign: quick notice
Before you begin, keep the following things in mind:
- WordPress does not provide builtin features for email marketing.
- But it offers several integration options with third-party services.
- You can choose between MailChimp, MailerLite, or Revue.
With this said, you can proceed to creating, connecting and launching your first marketing campaign.
Step 1: sign up
Let’s view the process of establishing WordPress mailing on the example of Mailchimp. First of all, establishing, editing, and sending emails is handled on the Mailchimp side. So if you want to use Mailchimp on your WordPress campaign, you need:
- Mailchimp account
- at least one mailing list (called “audience”) created on this account; where you collect your subscriber email addresses
How to subscribe to WordPress Mailchimp Email Campaigns
Mailchimp offers a Free Plan that includes up to 2,000 addresses in the mailing list and 10,000 sends per month with a daily limit of 2,000. This is enough to start and check the functionality of the service to decide whether you need a paid plan. If you don’t feel like needing much volume of mailings, you can keep using the Free Plan instead of paying a monthly recurring charge and pay for applicable charges (buy email credits as needed). It's the best option for seldom senders.
Step 2: set up a profile and mailing lists
Prior to launching a first email campaign, you’ll need to establish at least one mailing list and create a sender profile. Below you’ll find some useful tips on how you can establish your first email list. Implement these strategies for your marketing campaign.
Employ lead generation offers
Add call-to-actions to your WordPress site with texts like “subscribe now” and so on. That’ll help you involve your audience and get first emails for an email list. It’s a great strategy for beginners.
Employ forms
Establish a Mailchimp integrated form and place it on your WordPress site pages for the visitors to submit the demanded information, with email addresses. It’s a great and easy strategy that will demonstrate to you how many people would like to get emails from you.
Employ the potential of social networks
Social networking is great for many tasks. You can apply it to organize some polls, asking people to send their email addresses in exchange for perks.
Ask people
Sometimes asking users directly to share their email addresses with you works great too - particularly in case you’ve got a broad community on the internet.
Attach subscribe button to Facebook Business page
It’s among the easiest options to start collecting email addresses for your list. Adding a signup form will surely result in engaging your followers, including the ones that are not on your mailing list yet.
Ask users to leave comments
Users just enjoy being asked what they think about staff and services and if they’ve met their expectations. Such a request makes customers feel their importance. You can embed a Google Reviews Wordpress plugin with a CTA button to encourage engagement. And there is an option to invite customers to send you their comments by email, and this way you’ll get access to their addresses, also acquiring constructive hints on how you can optimize your work.
Arrange a webinar or hold it
Webinars are still holding their place among the leading trends if we're talking about marketing. This is also a great way to attract new people to your WordPress website, also collecting their contact info.
Collect contact info right from your site
You can also add a contact form on the main page of your WordPress website so that users could move on to browsing it after they submit the info you need. It shows good results if you have loyal audiences willing to interact with the brand.
Form a newsletter
If you have multiple social media accounts, there’s an option to design an attractive newsletter and spread it around them and also place it on your website. This newsletter may present a sign-up form for collecting your first email addresses
How to set up sender integration
To create mailing integration with WordPress website, do the following:
- Create a Mailchimp account and collect a mailing list.
- Connect Mailchimp to your WordPress account. Go to My Site → Tools, then choose Connections at the top.
- You will be asked to input your login and password from the Mailchimp account.
- If integration was successful, you will return to WordPress.com
- When you have established a connection to Mailchimp, choose the audience you want from the dropdown list.
There’s an option to form different mailing lists in Mailchimp for each site. In this case, you can choose a specific list in My Site → Tools → Connections for each website.
Step 3: begin sending blast or automated campaigns
Blast campaigns means that you distribute among one or more mailing lists. You can use the blast campaign to tell your audience about the upcoming events.
Automated campaigns are sent as a reply to some user’s action. For example, the message can be automatically sent when a user submits an order on your online store.
The best time for sending emails
There is much research on email marketing and the best time to send a newsletter. Even though they all provide varied results for various businesses, you still can implement this data to prioritize your sending times:
10 a.m.
Some scientists note that late morning hours is the most popular time period for distributing 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
Email messages also gather a lot of clicks in the early night. Most likely because some users choose to check their email box before going to sleep.
2 p.m.
People at work like to have some distractions. So, 2 p. M. Works great for those website owners who’re searching for a way to make their email campaigns successful.
6 a.m.
According to researchers, half of the users start their morning by checking emails while still in bed. Thus it makes early morning the best time to reach a broader audience.
Step 4: track your results
After you’ve sent your campaign, it’s high time to check your results. WordPress offers some built-in analytics tools for that. There are lots of metrics to track, and the vital ones are - open rate, click-through rate (CTR), click-to-open rate (CTO).
Here are some key figures your emails should be showing:
Average open rate should be about 15-25%.
Average CTR should be higher than 2. 5%.
Average CTO should be about 20-30%.
The mentioned numbers are great for beginners, but some outcomes may differ a lot across industries.