How to built an email marketing database

If there’s one thing I hang my hat on, it’s email marketing. It’s the cornerstone of a well-rounded inbound marketing strategy. I grew a subscriber list from 0 to 40,000 leads organically during the first year I launched BARTable. That’s because email is one the most effective marketing channels to drive website traffic, leads and sales (yes, beating out social media, SEO and content marketing).

Why? Because most people have email, and more than half of cell phone users access their email on the phone. The average person checks their email 15 times a day (guilty). And if there’s a subject line stating I can get 40% off my next clothing purchase, I’m guaranteed to open it and will probably look around. And it’s not just me — 86% of people would like to receive promo emails from companies they like.

Personally, I love how versatile email marketing is — it’s customization, easy to integrate with your other marketing tactics and cheap. But let’s be real — a lot of those emails feel spammy, and we’re inundated with them. The average office worker receives 121 emails per day. That’s a lot of noise to cut through.

Today, I want to walk you through how to build an email marketing database and tips for sending your very first campaign.

Step 1: Build a quality email database

Repeat after me: “I will not buy or rent an email list.”

I’ve encountered more than a few people who’ve bragged about their large subscriber list (“I have more than 100,000 email contacts!”), but when I quizzed them about open rates, click rates and sales, those numbers are dismal. Why? Because they purchased an email list based on a desired demographic (e.g., single people who live in San Francisco) and spammed them with content they did not solicit.

What are the chances you will open an email from an unfamiliar brand or business? None. And if you do, it’s to immediately unsubscribe and block the sender.

It may be tempting to buy an email list, but there are other reasons why it’s frowned upon:

• You’ll violate the General Data Protection Regulation, a European data privacy act that states you must have explicit consent to send your contacts emails.

• Email marketing software doesn’t allow you to send to lists that you purchased. I mostly use MailChimp to send marketing campaigns, and they insist on opt-ins to build your email list.

• You’ll harm your reputation score. Did you know that there are systems that track spam complaints, hard bounces and other metrics that can impact your “reputation”? Yup. I had a colleague who asked me to send a campaign to an email list she created. When I sent it, my reputation score got a ding because it hard bounced to more than 25% of the subscribers on the list. Why? Because the email addresses were gleaned from a survey from 5 years ago.

• It’s annoying! Nuff said.

So how DO you build a marketing database? Here are some proven ideas …

• Create an opt-in box on your website. You may find those pop-ups annoying, but they’re effective.

• Leverage your social media. Use your social media accounts to ask people to sign-up. You’ll see greater success if you add an incentive (e.g., 10% your first purchase, or a free consultation). This brings me to the next point …

• Use prizes or discounts as an incentive. For BART, I grew the marketing database by asking venues to donate prizes. I would create a viral sweepstakes requiring them to sign up for the newsletter (e.g., sign up to win a pair of tickets to see “Hamilton”), and then segment them in the database by interests. A word of warning for this technique: You don’t want your subscribers just to come for the freebies. Be sure to include valuable content as well (more on that in Step 2).

• Physical sign-up: If you have a brick-and-mortar business, host a booth at a festival or conduct outreach events, ask them to sign up to stay in the loop.

• Add subscribe link in your email signature. This takes little effort, and you can get quality leads from people you interact with online.

Step 2: Send great content

After you pulled together your database, you have an email to write.

Like I mentioned before, I like MailChimp for its ease of use, knowledge base and third-party integration. It’s free to use if you have less than 2,000 subscribers. You can also go beyond email to create ads, landing pages and sign-up forms.

Once you have secured an email marketing tool to send your messages, it’s time to put together a compelling email.

Go beyond your subscriber’s expectations and send them information that is relevant to them. If you are a business, your customers expect to receive emails that contain a sales pitch, order confirmation or tracking code. But if you also add relevant and valuable information, you more likely to keep people engaged. For example, if you are a company that sells mattresses, include a link to a blog post about how to properly take care of it. If you are a health coach, send a PDF with a 7-day nutrition guide.

People will engage with content that is:

• Relevant: Send information that the subscriber wants to read. You can really hone in on this through segmentation.

• Timely: I received a “Happy New Year” email in February. It felt stale and I couldn’t understand why I was receiving it.

• Consistent: Decide on how often you want to send content. Weekly? Monthly? Whatever you decide on, be consistent about it.

• Personalized: The inbox is used for personal conversation, and your email is going to be competing with a lot of other noise.

• Well written: Your email needs to be easy to read and grammatically correct. Sending an email with a lot of typos will make you lose credibility. Hire a professional if you need help.

• Aesthetically pleasing: You only have a few seconds to grab a reader’s attention. If your email is filled with images that are not sized properly, it’s laid out in a way that’s confusing to read or doesn’t look professional, it’ll land in the trash.

• Not so sales-y: People can tell when they are being pitched. Be human in your emails. Care about the person you are selling to, and understand their needs and challenges. Your email has to add value to your subscriber’s life, and if it’s a generic message of “buy my product,” they’ll tune out.

Step 3: Segment, segment, segment

As a savvy marketer, you know the importance of creating an avatar. And if you just read the previous sentence and have no idea what I’m talking about, that’s OK too. (An avatar, aka buyer persona, is a fictional character that represents distinct consumers of your product).

When writing an email, you shouldn’t think that it’s for everybody. You should have a specific target (or avatar) in mind. This is where segmentation comes to play. If you are able to segment your subscribed audience by their interests, communication preferences, demographics, etc., you can deliver an email that’s relevant to them. The more personalized the email is, the more likely someone will open it and make a purchase.

You can begin segmenting your list at the moment they subscribe to it. Ask questions like: How often do you want to hear from us? What are you interested in knowing? What kinds of emails do you want to receive?

With this information, you can start personalizing emails to your subscriber list. You can further survey your segments down the road to find out more about them. Factor in purchase history, engagement rates and downloads to add further relevancy to your emails.

Step 4: Analytics

Now that your email database is up and running, you’re ready to dive a little deeper and take a look at the analytics. Check your dashboard to see your open rate, click through rate and unsubscribes. Each of these are very important when you send future campaigns.

Your open rate tells how many people opened the email you sent. To me, it’s a clue to how effective your subject line and how credible your relationship is to your subscriber. A low open rate means your subscribers are not engaged. This would be a time to evaluate the content you are sending (go through the checklist in Step 2) and to tweak your emails accordingly.

Your click through rate tells how many people clicked on a link inside of your email. This is a clue to how engaging your copy is and if it is compelling enough for your subscriber to take action.

The unsubscribe rate tells you how many people opted out of your email list. If you’re losing more people than you’re adding to your database, you should re-evaluate your email marketing strategy. Take a look at when people are unsubscribing to your list and take action accordingly. If you notice that people are unsubscribing after they received a sales-y email, you want to retool how you pitch your product.

Bottom Line

With its huge ROI and relevancy, you can’t ignore email marketing. Once you mastered these basics, you move on to creating automated emails, A/B test, dig deeper into analytics and continue to segment.

How do you use email marketing for your client or business?

5 social media mistakes to avoid

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Even though social media is one of the most important tools in a digital marketer’s toolkit, there are a lot of misconceptions about it. The industry has grown from a place where people share their food photos to a powerful resource that can help any business or brand grow exponentially.

Social media has the power to help you discover your target market, engage with your audience, drive awareness of your products and convert leads into sales.

Here are some interesting facts about social media:

• There are more than 3 billion people using social media, and 11 new people start using social media every second.

• The average person spends two hours per day on social media.

• 88% of companies use social media for marketing (the number is probably higher since this study was conducted in 2014).

• 81% of consumers are likely to purchase an item if it was shared by a friend on social media. And social media influencers are getting brands more sales than celebrities.

• The majority of customers expect they’re tweet to be answered within one hour. When companies don’t meet those expectations, 38% of people feel more negative toward the brand.

However, there are a lot of myths when it comes to social media marketing. I’ve compiled some of the biggies.

Social media is free

Ok, yes, technically it’s free to create a social media profile or a Facebook business page. But organic social reach can only get you so far. You have to create a budget for a paid social media strategy. Paid strategies help you target customers, expand your reach, boost brand awareness, drive engagement, increase clicks to your website, and help you gather insight on your audience. All the social media platforms have dashboards so you can see how your ad performed, and help you refine them for future campaigns.

My son/daughter/intern can do it

This is one of the most common mistakes I see (and really can’t believe people still have this mindset). Just because someone grew up in the age of Facebook doesn’t mean he or she is equipped to manage your business’ social media profile. Besides the obvious problems (grammar mistakes, combative responses to negative feedback, publishing posts because they forgot to switch from the business profile to personal account), managing a social media account requires total understanding of your brand and business. If you do have an intern manage your social media profile, keep a careful eye to make sure they answer questions correctly and are portraying your brand in a positive light.

Being on only 1 network

You’re probably more than familiar with the most popular social media networks — such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. These social networks have huge audiences, and it’s important to stay active on them. But there are a lot of niche social media sites where you could be missing leads from. Don’t discount the power of Pinterest, Reddit or Tumblr. But you can even get more granular. Did you know there’s a social media networks for dog lovers? Or young Lego builders?

If you’re going at it alone (meaning there’s no extra help when it comes to social media management), a good rule of thumb is that one person can manage 1 to 2 social media networks at a time. Maybe 3. Anything beyond that the quality of your posts will suffer because you’ll bet stretched too thin.

Final thought: please, please, please don’t “auto-post” your Facebook post across multiple networks. It’s obvious when a post from Facebook it sent to Twitter, etc., and it looks amateur.

Turning every post into a sales pitch

Social media pages shouldn’t be just about selling a product to a customer. It is a “social” media, so engage with your audience instead of shouting at them. Until you get a feel for your audience and the balance of content you should post to maximize engagement, try following the 4-1-1- Rule when creating your publishing schedule. The 4-1-1 Rule suggests that you should post four pieces of new content, one re-post and one self-serving post.

Lack of consistency / no game plan

Your social media pages don’t run on it’s own. When you don’t post regularly, your audience will move on. It takes consistent action to get consistent results. By spending a few hours every week working on your social media strategy, you’ll be more likely stick to your plan. I like to spend Friday afternoons putting together a social media calendar for the following week. I use a Google Sheets template to write my posts create trackable links and curate images. I also set goals, which makes me measure my results and tweak campaigns to achieve the results I want.

It’s OK to make mistakes. The key is to learn from them and move forward to ensure you are meeting your broader business goals.

Digital marketing for beginners (aka, where the #$!@ do I even start?)

Since completing my MBA, I suddenly found that I have a lot of free time on my hands. No more spending long nights and weekends studying at the campus library (hurray!).

I want to fill my free time combining one of my earliest passions (writing) with my current passion (marketing).

Over the past few years I’ve learned how to strategize, implement, monitor and report across multiple digital platforms. I know from personal experience it can be daunting task.

As I pivoted from my job as a newspaper editor to marketing, I remember thinking what does CPC, CPM, CTR and CPA even mean?

There was a lot of Googling involved. I found a ton of information on the subject, but often I had to give my email address in exchange to download a PDF (which, by the way, is a highly effective tactic to build your email database!) or found the information was too high-level without addressing my needs.

I also have friends and family members who started their own businesses and turned to me to find out how they can use digital marketing to attract new customers and gain visibility online.

I wanted to put together a guide for people who wanted to learn the basics of digital marketing while providing actionable advice to get your campaign off the ground. So without further ado, here is my first post in my “Digital marketing for beginners (aka, where the #$!@ do I even start?)”

I’ll start with the basics.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is exactly what it sounds like — marketing (or promoting) a product/business/service online.

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(Okay, okay. I promise to keep the gifs to a minimum).

In all seriousness, have you ever saw a pair of shoes online and they started stalking you across the internet? Or have you Googled something, like “How to build a terrarium,” and the first search result is a blog post on a flower store’s website? That’s all digital marketing.

You can use paid tactics (such as purchasing ads through Facebook or Google), or you can use unpaid tactics (like creating compelling content on your website people want to consume).

While there’s a lot of hype about the latest and greatest digital marketing techniques, keep in mind the goal is always the same — marketing is used to promote a product or service to potential customers.

What are the different types of digital marketing techniques?

People consume content online in different ways. The biggest categories of online marketing are:

1. Social Media Marketing: Social media has been growing like gangbusters (there are 2 billion+ active Facebook users!), and there’s no sign of slowdown. Marketers use social media (and not just Facebook) to drive user engagement and share their content. People are more likely to trust a brand or purchase a product from them if their friends like or promote a product.

2. Email Marketing: We’re all familiar with email marketing. Email marketing helps you connect with your audience and promote your brand or product. But let’s be real -- a lot of those emails feel spammy, and we’re inundated with them. The average office worker receives 121 emails per day. That’s a lot of noise to cut through. But email continues to be the number one digital channel for ROI. To the tune of $40 for every $1 spent.

3. SEO and SEM: The difference between search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) can be confusing to understand. They work hand-in-hand with each other. SEM refers to paid search (paid search advertising, pay-per-click, cost-per-impressions). SEO refers to the practice of driving traffic to your website using organic (unpaid) tactics.

4. Content Marketing: If you are familiar with my background, you could probably guess this is my favorite type of marketing. Content marketing is educational. It’s not about selling or pushing a service on them. It’s about connecting with your audience, and providing information they care about. The goal is to build trust with your audience and to stimulate interest in your business. So when the time comes that someone is interested in purchasing a product, they think of you first.

5. Pay-per-click: This is a type of digital advertising where you only pay when your ad is clicked by an online user. You bid on certain keywords users type into search engines to have your ad displayed to those users.The goal is to draw the users to your website.

I’ll go over each of these more in depth in future posts.

Until then, you find me on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn.