 Ready to send out that email to your clients? Here on The Journey we'll be telling you the best practices for creating that newsletter. Email is a great and reliable source of marketing and just a way to connect with your audience. People think that everything is social media these days, but the one constant is email. We're constantly in our inboxes. We constantly see those brands that we wanna connect with. And if you're not focusing on your email marketing campaigns, we're gonna lose to your competitors. So with these best practices and you actually focusing on it, you will win and really make those connections with your audience. All right, so we know it's beneficial, but now how do we create it? Yeah, we're gonna take you through using just our program here at GoDaddy, but there are lots of template providers out there for email marketing that you can use such as MailChimp or Clavio to really set up those campaigns. You really wanna focus on something that has an easy drag and drop type of visual editor. All right, so your newsletter is gonna be guided by the type of content that you're creating at the same time. You wanna make sure that you take care of a couple of items on the checklist. One, brand. Use your logo, your color scheme, make sure that your fonts, all of that is included in your newsletter. Yeah, so with the program here, I have my logo right at the top. And then under styles, there's lots of preset styles that the template provider gives me, but say I have a different brand, I can go in here and edit these to my liking. So if there's one that's close, I'd recommend starting with that. So let's go with Reindeer, because I mean, it's a great name. You can click this little pencil icon and edit every aspect of the template, like the background color, the foreground, the button colors, the shapes, text, all of those different things to really make it fit your brand. And when you do this, you can save it as its own style and go back to this each and every time you create an email marketing newsletter. So your audience knows it is from you without even looking at the logo or who it's from. For our next tip, you wanna make sure that you just keep it simple. Clear, concise, easy to read. You may have certain ideas that you wanna draw attention to. You can bold or you can make the font bigger. Draw attention to certain areas or ideas that you really want people to come away with. Right, you don't want just a sandwich wall of text and all the information there because no one's going to read it. Really separate those out with those headers or with images or buttons and things like that. Really allow your user's eyes to breathe, if you will. Like here we have, I just set up a quick little template but I have a summer sale, a short little description, buy one, get one and then options to add images here that really break it up, followed by a button. If I go and add images to this, it would make it all a little bit more clear. I know what I'm trying to focus on. With this particular newsletter, I'm trying to talk about a summer sale. So let's think of a business and really make this as we go through these best practices. Tell me a business that you would love to run one day. Maybe a fashion boutique. Fashion boutique. What type of fashion? Men's fashion, of course. All right, all right. So if we update the actual campaign to be about men's fashion here, we've added a bunch of images and text here to really talk about your fashion line, right? And it's not super complex. We have a couple of images, a button and we'll add some social links here later on, but it's not a ton of information. It's not super overwhelming, but it's crystal clear of what I want them to do. I want them to look at my summer sale or your summer sale rather and then start shopping. At the end of the day, you want them to take some type of action. Now your actual email marketing campaigns, it won't always be a sale and it shouldn't be you trying to sell them something. Should be you trying to add value to their life or just either it's letting them know here's some new stuff that's happening in our business or hey, especially if I'm a men's fashion line, I would say, hey, cool, here's some tips on how to really up your fashion game without having to pay for anything, but we're just some of our tips. Yeah, that makes sense because you actually want to have some kind of call to action letting your readers know what you want them to do. It could be click here, as Nilly said, to go online and buy these items or hey, come on into the in-store only promotion or it could be follow us online for more tips and tricks in men's fashion. And it could be check out your latest blog posts or your video even, it could be anything but with these call to actions, tell them exactly what to do. Don't leave it to chance or interpretation. You might think you're being rude and yelling at them saying, shop now, buy now, check out this post, do this, do that, but it helps us make actions, one less decision that we have to make by just following directions. And the next thing that you want to make sure is that it's mobile responsive. Most people on their mobile phone, I know me, I can't do anything without my mobile phone. So you want to make sure that your email newsletter not only looks good on desktop, but it also fits perfectly on a mobile device. Yeah, and if you use many of the popular email marketing softwares out there, they're going to be more responsive. Like we can check out a preview of this website. I can trick my browser into being a phone. And then this is exactly what it would look like if I were on my phone, it's nice and easy to read images, scale to the actual width though, not how it was before. And also if you have any links, like, you know, those buttons, you want to make sure that they work. All right, so now we want to go into some things that you may want to keep in mind when you're creating your copy for your email newsletter. Most people are going to click on it because of a nice snappy subject line. So think of something really quick, concise, that can catch someone's attention so that they'll be interested in opening up that email. Yeah, you also want to ask yourself, why are you sending this email in the first place? Because we shouldn't be creating email just to create email. We want to be solving a problem. So what problem do you solve? Go ahead and add that to the subject line and let your readers know exactly what this email is going to do for them and their lives. A tip here also, you can recycle content. Do you have a blog that you've written? Could you repurpose that into a newsletter or maybe even point to that blog? Maybe you did a webinar and you can actually mention that in your newsletter and tell people, hey, go check out the rest of this webinar here. Yeah, and with your email marketing, you want to make sure it's shareable. People are three times more likely to share email than from other sources. So having things like forward to a friend right in your email or social links are crucial to the success of your email marketing campaigns. Next, we want to make sure it actually works. Let's test the email. Many email clients will display the email differently. So it's good to keep that in mind and make sure that your email is gonna come up rather easily and also all the links work along with grammar, punctuation. You want to make sure all that's correct. Yeah, and another thing to keep in mind too is how fast is your email load? Especially if you're starting to put in a ton of content and a ton of just visual elements to that email marketing newsletter is if it takes too long to load just like we're not gonna wait for a website, we're not gonna wait for that email to load. So making sure you test that. Again, most email providers or email marketing providers will give you some sort of test option, test out loads on your phone, on your browser, on Outlook, on wherever it is to see what that experience looks like for them. Now this may seem simple. At the same time, you wanna make sure you hit send. It's no point of going through all of this work creating this beautifully crafted, branded to your business email if you don't send it out. And then after you send and after probably a few days, you'll want to crunch the numbers. You wanna see if the things you're doing, all that effort you're putting into this email marketing campaign is working. Most email marketing providers will have statistics for you so you can see things like open rate and what the click through rate on whatever you're trying to get them to is going. How many people have unsubscribed? How many people it just bounced to? Big tip with those bounced emails to get them off your email subscriber list because those email providers will just think that you're sending spam, hitting their inboxes that don't exist anymore. Maybe you just don't have that email active, clean it up, you really want quality subscribers versus quantity. Now, beside the analytics, it's good to give feedback. Make sure that you're asking your customers what do they like about the email newsletter. A lot of these email marketing services will give you the ability to send out a survey and then make it nice and simple. You can say, hey, what did you find helpful? Or what would you add? Things of that nature, just to make sure that your customers are really enjoying what you're sending out. Yeah, a couple of really cool campaigns that I've done in the past with my clients is I'll have a little question of how do you like my emails that I'm sending you? And then just put an image of a smiley face, one of those yellow, like just I'm okay face or the red frowny face. They click the green smiley face. It goes to a GIF of me saying thank you or hooray or something just funny and awkward. And if it's any of the other ones, I send them to a survey and I can track those clicks to those images with these programs to see how many people are clicking on the green smiley face because that's awesome. I don't need them to do more work if they're liking it. Remember that path of least resistance but they're not having a great time. I'd love to know about it which then I send over to that survey so they can give me that honest candid feedback. All right, so you just learned best practices to follow when creating your email newsletter. Be sure to like this video and leave a comment below. Yeah, and hey, if you got some value out of this video subscribe to our channel and ring that bell so that these episodes first, this is the journey. We'll see you next time.