What to Expect from This Book
For the foreseeable future for your company, no other Internet marketing medium can match the numbers of email marketing. For this and all the reasons baked into statistics we’ve shared in the preceding pages, we want to take you on a helpful journey throughout the world of email marketing. Our hope is that by book’s end, you’ll be prepared to not only select an email service provider and start crafting that first email, but also build and continually grow your list, implement email marketing campaigns and strategies, and get your piece of that $40.56.
Here’s how we’ll get you there:
- Part I, “The Secret to Email Marketing: List Growth”: When we say it’s the secret, we mean it’s the secret. Through this section, you’ll learn why growing your list is the secret to email marketing; how to make it easy and obvious for your customers and prospects to join; and how to grow your list using technology, social media, and offline channels. These chapters explain the intricacies of the sign-up process, walk you through important setup decisions, and help you complete the process of signing folks up by sending a killer welcome email.
- Part II, “The Anatomy of an Email”: In this part, you’ll learn what makes an outstanding email marketing message. We’ll dive into details such as subject lines, From names, preheaders, and headers. We’ll show you the importance of having a table of contents, main calls to action, and secondary and even tertiary calls to action to make that email deliver results for your business. We’ll talk about buttons, links, images, social sharing...even how to craft an effective page footer. We then discuss the all-important unsubscribe links and process, which can help you maintain compliance with email marketing legislation and keep your customers happy, even when they want to opt out.
- Part III, “Breaking the Rules”: This part is where we throw out convention and start going through all the “rules” and “best practices” of email marketing you might have heard over the years. It’s not that we think they’re all bunk, but within each one we can illustrate examples of being successful while breaking those rules. We’ll discuss the practice of sending one big image in your emails. We’ll slice and dice the nit-picky orders you might have heard about subject lines, ALL CAPS, the word free, pop-up collection forms, text versus HTML formatting, and “rules” about opting in and opting out. We’ll also address the issue of buying lists, having good graphic design, and even some misconceptions about your ability to send unsolicited (non-permission) emails to people. By the end of this section of the book, we hope to give you the confidence to establish a set of rules and best practices that work for you.
- Part IV, “Batman (Email Marketing) and Robin (Social Media)”: Email marketing alone is pretty powerful, but combine its forces with the mass appeal and power of social media and social networking and you have yourself a marketing juggernaut, much like the crime-fighting one of Batman and Robin. This part shows you how social sharing and connectivity can drastically ramp up your email marketing and how email marketing can, in turn, ramp up your social media efforts. We’ll discuss the commonalities in approaching content creation for social media and email marketing and give you some great ideas and direction to light a fire under your customer engagement and conversion.
- Part V, “The Future of Email Marketing”: In the final section, we attempt to look into the coming years to see what email marketing will look like in the short-term and long-term. Although it is true that Internet and digital technologies change in the amount of time it takes to publish most books, we want you to feel confident and assured that you can apply your newfound email marketing wisdom both now and down the road. Your business’s future might well depend on email marketing. So we want you to have one eye on that future while the other is kicking ass and taking names in the present.
By the time you finish this book, you will have the knowledge you need to tackle email marketing with gusto. You’ll be ready to grow your list, develop your email marketing content, and drive business with your Send button.
But first things are always first: You have to grow your list.