 These are yours emails everybody sends them As a word press site that you're almost certainly be sending some kind of emails But the problem is that a lot of people don't know how to do them properly and it can be We have broken another one We were joking about this earlier, and I just can't believe it had happened. I'll just continue doing it like this It's fine Yes, so people don't know how to kind of do them properly And I wanted to talk about it, you know, if you're a word press agency Perhaps you might want to help someone get started It's a way of earning a little bit of extra revenue and helping people To get started and understand where they're going with email marketing or It's a small business. You can take tips away from this as well. So it's it's to help everyone The problem is that people say We should send emails and I'll say Great. Why? Because people start this sort of scattergun approach They'll be wanting to do, you know, if they're a new website they'll be wanting to do social media and they want to do emails and they try and do it all at once and They'll do it all badly Because they'll start off with the best of intentions but, you know, they'll eventually kind of Lose the will to do it and then they'll just almost, you know, in some cases stop doing it all together so I've developed a three-point plan to Help people strategize and plan their email marketing so that they can do it successfully The first stage is to really do your research and information gathering and it's worth spending a lot of time doing this because it's the sort of Ground on which you're There is my dog scamper by the way So doing the research and information gathering is worth spending some time on Some things that you need to consider Who is the person that's going to be sending these emails and how much do they know about email marketing? What is their skill level? Because if you you're expecting them to be able to code HTML emails But they just don't know how to run a website or do any of that kind of stuff Then they're gonna get stuck and they're gonna lose like not want to do it anymore then This is a bit of a side note to doing emails, but if you run on a shared server All of your WordPress emails might Suffer deliverability issues if you're sending them directly from the site and you might need to consider using a sending service Like mail gun or send grid or elastic email or another similar service So that's something to bear in mind if you're on a shared server There's also the standard WordPress emails, which are sent some of those you can customize a little bit you can get a bit hacky with them and But you can also replace them I'm gonna be talking about this in a bit because there's the standard jet pack Emails that are sent for blog post notifications, but you might wish to send them from another Ascent email service provider instead Then you might want to look for a source of People to send to and a good place to start is any registered users on the site That's a good grounding for your email list because they'll have shown interest in your site at some point and Then there's also the content on your site You need to have a look at what what you're doing on there So are you sharing pictures? Are you sharing blog posts? Do you run a WooCommerce site that you're selling products on? All of those could be a good source of content for your newsletters So you need to decide what you think is important and what is worth sharing The next stage is to do a little bit of research. Oh That's interesting Apologies the next stage is to and do do the research aspect and I like to go away and sign up to a lot of newsletters and Get some ideas about the designs and the types of content that they're sharing And this means that you will be able to perhaps take some ideas away from them, but also kind of look at the designs and the layout the pictures and see if there's something that you could be using and perhaps Something that they're not doing that you feel that you could be doing better Then we move on to step two, which is to develop the strategy I'm one of the key things about an email strategy is to set some goals now Those goals could be anything it might be that you want to grow your list and you might say well by next year I want to grow my list by 2003,000 people or it might be that I want to get more people reading my content So I'm going to send out newsletters about my blog post content but having some goals in mind and then really thinking about What you're sharing and what you're going to be sending and even how often you're going to be sending will help you to Focus on those goals Here's an example of the standard jetpack email now. I'm going to be honest. I don't think these are particularly pretty Sorry jetpack people but But these are you know for a person who doesn't have any understanding about email marketing This could be enough and it allows people to be able to Send out content and and this email is done automatically. There's no in No need to intervene in the whole process it it just works and that's great for some users This is an example from my own blog and I actually use RSS to email via MailChimp Which just plugs into my WordPress feed and with a little bit of Customization and a bit of thought about the design. I'm able to completely Customize the look and feel and make it nicer for the M recipient I Like the way that I've used you know like the buttons and I've really made images part of the whole email and It just I as an email marketer. I mean, it's obviously what what I do. So I wanted to make it look nice for The strategy you also as I mentioned earlier people kind of start off doing it and they have all the best will in the world to do Emails all the time, but without preparing a plan for your content You kind of end up Not not being able to think about what you're gonna write next you might be sat in front of the computer saying oh I don't know what I'm gonna send today I'm feeling an obligation to send because you haven't sent an email for a while So having a calendar and thinking about planning around Certain holidays or times when you perhaps if you ran a plug-in when you're going to do a release Those things are really important to keep emailing regularly my ideal way of doing it is to Plan emails for say three months up to three months in advance with some fixed content But then after that you might have sort of some vague ideas about what you're going to do but Not necessarily having it fixed in and then perhaps if something comes along and you Need to change out the content you can just keep some of the other content For later and you can plan in for another time And then you don't have to kind of sit there like I said staring at the computer the problem a lot of Problems with people creating emails that as I said people don't know what to say I Would say that you shouldn't always be promoting yourself. I mean yeah, it's great you obviously you know want to perhaps sell a product or That kind of thing but It's good to share other people's content as well and it keeps people interested in what you're saying You should also be reactive. So perhaps if something's happened that's related to your industry you can really Like ride on the wave of that by Sorry, I need some water you can really ride on the on the wave of that by Using the news or other stories to Keep keep people interested and especially if you mention it in the subject line as well That's really useful. You should also keep something unique for your news. That is now when I worked at mail poet. I used to Send out blog posts in our newsletters, but I didn't feel that that was enough I felt that we should be offering more because we had a very loyal Blog post reading group but They so if that's if we're sending them the newsletters, they're probably not going to be as engaged because they've already We've already shared those blog posts on Facebook or on Twitter or somewhere else where they've they've already consumed it So keeping something unique and having like a tip or Another news article that hasn't been shared anyone else will ensure that you'll have an active and engaged subscriber group You should also be relevant and when I mean be relevant I Mean thinking about your subscriber group as a whole and understanding at what type of people they are so if you have Very technical group of subscribers then it's probably best to send them more technical content But if you send technical content to non-technical users, then they might switch off and Therefore become disengaged with your content The third step is to design and grow and I like the kiss method of keep it simple stupid Having a newsletter with many bits of content Often means that you're sharing content needlessly and sometimes it's better to break those pieces of content up into maybe a couple of newsletters Why well people actually as they go down the newsletter will be less interested in the content further down So I like to keep newsletters to maybe three or four different messages and If you do have more than that and you're gonna split it down into maybe a few more newsletters Because people read in an F shape I'm sure you know on the web and it's the same for email as well Your content at the top will be most important and more likely to be read and the content lower down will be less likely to be read So keep those key messages at the top and People also, you know become more and more Skin readers as time goes on so it's good to keep the content split up And that's by using images headings and using things like italicizing or making bold Words in your content to really draw people in and to give them an idea of the content without them having to read the entire article you should also provide a call to action and The call to action would be a button preferably you can also include text links But the call to action is Really important because if you don't get clicks in your newsletters Then how do you know whether people are enjoying the content an open rate doesn't mean That people have enjoyed the newsletter because you don't know how long people have been reading it for But if you use a click it means that people were going to be interested in your content Once you sent a newsletter out It's a good idea to Review and look at the reporting. This is an example from my email blog and And A newsletter that I sent out a few months ago now on this heat map. You can see I hope you can see at the back But it says 20% at the top. That's a That's 20% of people who read this email clicked on on that link at the top And then you can see a massive 80% of people use the call to action at the bottom To click through and read my post you should also note that the Picture is also a link, but nobody clicks on that and this kind of really proves that having a call to action is important and that Taking time to review and see What kind of things people are clicking on and where people are clicking is a really useful idea for reviewing and showing you Which content people were interested in it's all very well looking You know at a list of links and seeing what people clicked on But I really feel like a heat map is the most useful way of reviewing your content now Okay, so you said I'm gonna send a newsletter out. That's fine But how can we grow our list and there's a number of ways? Obviously you will want to perhaps put some sign-up forms on your website You might want to put them in the sidebar as a widget Some other good places are to put them below the blog post just before the comments and Perhaps in the header depending on whether you have a search thing there. You don't want to distract people from it and I'm also going to go against what a lot of email marketers say because I've discovered that a lot of my friends don't like it But I really recommend having pop-up forms on your website and the reason for this is that I Find that people do engage with them a lot more now they have got a bit of a bad rap. I will be honest they They the problem is that many people use them badly and They'll pop up on the site as soon as you've had Like as soon as you've got on to it so people are Put off by them But if you do them properly and you do them correctly then they can they can be very successful And the way that you would do this is to ensure that they pop up after a certain amount of time Or that you might want to use exit intent to To have them pop up then But I I really like pop-up forms as a way of recruiting and also My recommended plugins for this are well, I use pop-up ally It has I bought the premium one and I find it very powerful if a little tricky to set up And but there's also things like opt-in monster and a few others that All do the same job and can be very successful And when you start when you perhaps buy these plugins You will find that you will get a lot of tips from them about how to successfully use them Another tip would be if you're if you're intending to use plug-in a pop-up plug-in is to consider having different types on different pages depending on where people are Visiting or browsing your site and you can target the pop-up Messaging towards where people are looking a few little tips for you and some definite do's When signing up consider offering a free gift now that could be an e-book or you if you're running a book on my site That could be a Like a discount those types of things will really help to encourage people to sign up and and give them a reason for Giving over their email address because you know people just kind of think that they'll give it And then you're just going to spam them forever more So be a nice person and and give them something in return for handing over their email address The second thing would be Sending a welcome email now. It might be just one or you might do a series a series Can be useful because it will create a relationship with your subscriber. In fact Your subscribers are most engaged in the first 60 days of you of them having subscribed So it's really good to build a positive relationship with them then Perhaps you might want to introduce your company and tell them what you're about Then you can you know if you didn't want to give a free give straight away you could consider incentivizing at the end of it and Thirdly Once you've got those people on there, you do need to do some housekeeping occasionally Why well your deliverability can actually be affected by Subscribers who are not engaged. So by that I mean people who are not opening your emails Not the people who are unsubscribed, but the people who just receive the emails and never ever read them Because for example, if you've got a load of people on Gmail who are Not opening your emails you could actually End up going into the junk mail for other Gmail subscribers So you need to keep engagement up and engagement is opening and clicking and even replying to your emails So make sure that you don't use a no reply email address when you send emails out Finally, I'm just going to talk a little bit about reporting and what it means as I showed you the click overlay map earlier But it's also useful to take a look at some of the other information The first 24 hours you're usually the most important in any email newsletter send As you can see the as soon as I sent the newsletter out There was immediate engagement there and it tells off a lot towards the end There's also some other information you should know and that's about unique opens and unique clicks Unique opens are ones where a person it's related to the subscriber So it means how many subscribers have opened this email, but a unique The total opens would be where someone has opened it maybe five times So that would be counted as five and a unique open would be counted as one And it's the same for clicks as well And it's a good idea to get yourself familiarized with what all these numbers mean so that you can See perhaps whether you need to change your schedule or whether you might want to consider sending more emails or less Emails and keeping an eye on your opens and clicks as you as time goes on and your email list grows That's about it from me. I'm Bex KR on Twitter Sometimes you can find me lurking around the WordPress plug-in suggestions group on Facebook too, so I might see you there. Thank you very much