Email Marketing for Beginners:
Your Online Guide to Success - Part 3

Email Marketing for Beginners Online Guide

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Success Step 7
Send Regularly and Consistently

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Congratulations! You’ve made it this far and by doing so, you will set yourself up to automatically and legitimately build your email list with qualified subscribers who will be eager to hear from you.

The exciting world of sending emails to your subscribers is about to start. 

*NOTE: Understand that anytime you send email to your subscribers it is very likely you will have those who will unsubscribe. 

Based on my experience and calculations only 0.01-0.05% or less of your list will unsubscribe each time you send.

I don’t think I’ve ever sent an email without having at least one person unsubscribe.

Having said that, if you are consistently getting 1-10% or more of your list unsubscribing each time you send, consider reevaluating the type of content you are sending and the rate at which you are sending it. 

Things happen in your subscribers lives.

They may forget they signed up, they switch jobs, move, or have life events that cause their interest in your content to change.

Don’t let it bother you, it's normal and…it’s not personal. 

Keep moving forward building value for your subscribers. 

We’ll talk more about what to do about subscribers who stop engaging with your emails in Success Step 10. 

Let’s get to the part you probably wanted to learn about from the beginning: sending to your subscribers. 

With the right email service, sending isn’t the hard part, the hard part is determining what to send, when to send, and how often.

This is something you will refine through sending to and getting to know your audience.

However, by considering and implementing the information I’m going to share, you will shave many hours off of the “beginning sending” phase.

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What to Send

First let’s talk about what to send.

There are 3 types of email:

Transactional

• Order confirmations
• Purchase receipts
• Shipping notifications
• Account creation
• Return confirmations
• Support tickets
• Password reminders
• Unsubscribe confirmation

Relational

• New subscriber welcome
• Lead magnet delivery
• Newsletter/blog article
• Webinar confirmation
• Surveys and review requests
• Social updates
• Contest announcements
• Referral requests

Promotional

• Promotional content
• New lead magnets
• Sale announcements
• New product release
• Webinar announcements
• Event announcements
• Trial offers
• Upgrade offers

Email can be leveraged in many different ways which is cool, but overwhelming.

I have great news, most of these uses can (and should) be automated.

To do this, you need to have a plan.

Look at the list above and write down on a sheet of paper which ones you will use for your business and then brainstorm some ideas of how you will use each. 

If you are not selling a product yet some will be irrelevant to you at this point but refer back to them if that changes.

The amazing thing about having a list is that you can drive traffic to anything...

...instantly.

Personally, I have used my email list to “promote”:

• Articles/content on my site
• Videos I’ve created
• Product sales (obviously)
• A Kickstarter campaign
• A new Forum
• Social media contests
• Social media channels
• Surveys
• iPhone apps
• Fundraiser (I did 2 for hurricane relief in TX and FL)

A few other ideas include:

• Books
• Courses
• Conferences
• Affiliate products
• Podcast Episodes
• Other peoples content
• Software
• Reports
• Content/Product reviews or reactions
• Live events on Social Media (Facebook, YouTube)
• Webinars

Even though I used the word “promote”, notice that not everything in that list is “promotional”, meaning many of them weren’t trying to sell anything.

Hopefully, all of this gets your wheels turning and helps you generate some ideas.

If you are just starting with this (like I was in April of 2012), all you may have to send is an email to your subscribers once or twice a month that alerts them to a new page of content you created.

I would have l-o-v-e-d to have the information I’m giving you now, 10 years ago.

The saying goes, "With great power comes great responsibility", so I have high expectations that you will drop these ideas into your creation engine and take off with them.

How fantastic will it be to have your content instantly seen by small to large groups of your readers (depending on the size of your list) vs. waiting for it to be indexed by Google and hopefully shown in search results?

Having instant access to communicate with your Tribe members on demand, compared to being at the mercy of search engines, social media, or sites you guest post for is incredibly powerful…

…and will completely transform your business.

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When to Send

Making a strategy of what to send won’t matter…if no one sees it.

I could just tell you that multiple studies have shown that the best days to send email are:

• Tuesdays
• Thursdays
• Wednesdays

And the best times to send email are:

• 10 a.m.
• 8 p.m.
• 2 p.m.
• 6 a.m.

…in that order.

While this can be a great starting point, these days and times may not be the best for your subscribers. Determining when to send to your list is something you will have to figure out with time and testing.

You can figure this out in a few different ways.

1. Use your own reasoning (after all you are probably a member of your own tribe) to think through when you take time to check your email.
2. Send email on different days and at different times and measure which emails get the most engagement.
3. If you have a Facebook business page or use Google Analytics you can check the insights to see when your followers are viewing the content you post.
4. Survey your subscribers and ask them what are the best days and times to send to them (Google Forms and SurveyMonkey are great tools for this)

Once you get an idea of good days and times to send, set up a calendar to consistently send and keep track of what you send to your subscribers.

A Google Spreadsheet can suffice for this in the beginning or if you really want to get organized, try CoSchedule’s free marketing calendar tool.

People are typically creatures of habit.

Consistently sending certain content to your list at the same day and time on a regular basis will improve your chances of engagement because your subscribers will start expecting to hear from you.

A quick example:

My first website catered to Speech Language Pathologists (SLPs). As a Speech Pathologist myself, I understood the job and its expectations.

One huge job of SLPs is to create fun therapy plans that help students work on their speech and language goals.

As a result I wrote and sent articles about different types of therapy ideas to therapists on Monday nights to give therapists a few ideas that they could use throughout the week in therapy.

If there was an upcoming holiday, I would send ideas based around that holiday the week before so they could be used on or before the holiday.

Doing this got my subscribers used to receiving, opening, and finding value, and clicking in the emails I would send.

Sending them value built trust and increased email engagement, which in turn increased sales.

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How Often to Send

This is probably the question that gets asked the most.

And the short answer is similar to others…

…you have to think about your subscriber and test things out.

There are, however, factors you can consider to make the most educated decision about how much to send to your subscribers.

This can be boiled down to what type of content (transactional, promotional, relational) you are sending and thinking about why a person subscribed to your list in the first place.

Regardless of how much you decide to send to your subscribers, remember this…

…sending to your subscribers keeps you in their mind.

With all the distractions in the world, sending one or two times per month probably isn’t going to keep you in their mind when they have a problem that you can solve with either your product or content.

I suggest sending at least one time per week. I typically send 2-5.

Here are a few examples to help you gauge how often you should send to your subscribers.

Example #1 - An e-Commerce Business

People come to your site to buy things.

It is likely you get their email address when they make a purchase, unless you are publishing content related to your product (which is a perfect strategy, keep it up).

How often you send will depend on how many products you have and how often your subscriber needs those products.

When people buy a product online, they are used to receiving emails about buying more, especially if you sell consumable products (like food, personal care items [soap, shampoo, toothpaste etc.], or cleaning supplies).

If you are selling these types of products you might consider setting up a subscription for your customer to pay monthly to receive the product(s) automatically each month.

If you have many products, you could send on a daily basis as you can create a variety of offerings and combinations of those offerings.

If you only have a few products you might send a promotional email two times per month and send content a few times a month.

Example #2 - A Content Website

People come to your site to consume your content.

If you are a solopreneur writing one keyword focused content article per week, send once or twice a week, and don’t be afraid to send past content.

Just because a subscriber has seen one or a few of your articles doesn’t mean they’ve seen all of them.

Additionally, a certain percentage of your subscribers will open and click through to your content, but that means those who didn’t never saw it, so why not resend it to those who didn’t open a week later?

If you are producing more content regularly (especially content that “expires” in time) and you are monetizing traffic through ad sales/views, it will be more beneficial for you to send to your subscribers daily.

Example #3 - A Local Business (Restaurant)

People may come to your website to check out your menu, order online, map your location, or find out when you’re open (unless they find it on Google first, you have claimed your Google Map listing I hope!)

Depending on how active you want to be in your subscribers/customers inbox, you could send to your customer daily about deals, coupons, or special events that might be happening at your location.

You might send less often if you only serve breakfast and brunch, run a high end restaurant, or only have a few types of food you make (ex. hamburgers, fries, and milkshakes). 

Sending your customers an email with an offer for a free dessert on their birthday each year would definitely be a strategy I would use if I ran a restaurant.

But again, if you ONLY send to them once a year, they may or may not care if you aren’t sending to them throughout the year and staying forefront in their mind.

Like them or not, Chili’s is a great example of email marketing for a local restaurant to follow.

They send me different offers and specials multiple times per week PLUS a birthday gift.

So as you can see, the content, timing, and volume of the email you send varies greatly depending on what industry you are in, the people who are in your Tribe, and what your goals and purposes are.

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Email Marketing for Beginners Online Guide

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