Set up your email marketing in just 6 steps

If you’ve been wanting to set up or revitalize your email marketing, I’m here to support you in that. There’s really no time like the present to lean into your email marketing – it’s one of my top recommendations to clients looking to strengthen their marketing. Here are my 6 steps to building yourself a fully-functioning email marketing system.

Step 1: Pick a platform

My current favorites are Flodesk, for really beautiful emails, and a reasonably simple user interface, or Mailchimp, a longtime trusted tool with a free option, and helpful features for growing a larger business or organization account that needs to connect to other systems. I’ve used both of these systems for myself and clients, but I’m currently using Flodesk for my JuliaBeers.co emails.

If you’re considering trying it out, I have a deal for you: get 50% off your first year of Flodesk by joining at this link!

Step 2: Outline a basic email marketing strategy

Review your business goals and your own capacity, and build a strategy that aligns with those. Ask yourself: what are my business goals? And how much time capacity do I have on a regular basis to work on my email marketing? Outside of the setup process, I generally estimate about 1 hour of work per email (though obviously this can vary a lot depending on the email complexity and how comfortable you are working in your email platform). 

If you’re a service-based business who wants to nurture your followers along a sales journey, consider emailing 1-3x per month. If you’re a product or retail business, you’re going to want to structure your strategy around your product availability. If your business is more about capsule/collection drops and launches, plan your emails around those. If you sell more on an evergreen basis, then test out sending frequencies, looking for the sweet spot of how often you can email without seeing significant decline in opens (or worse, significant increase in unsubscribes).  

Very few brands can get away with emailing weekly or more– generally they are larger ones who are prepared to risk annoying people with frequent emails in the hopes of driving up sales at volume. If you’re a smaller brand, you’ll want to be more thoughtful and intentional about your presence in your customer’s email, because it’s a valuable privilege for your business to have. The long-term value of that customer might actually be worth more than a few piddly sales generated from spamming inboxes. 

Step 3: Create templates for your strategy

You really don’t need to get fancy– an email is an email (and the fancier you get, the more likely you are to run into accessibility issues). Instead, focus on loading in your brand fonts (or choosing an web-friendly approximation, as not all fonts play nicely with email), your brand colors (making sure that you’re using high-contrast color combinations, especially in text), and including your logo or a brand header. 

Most email tools offer a suite of existing templates to their users– pick the template that’s closest to what you want for your email, and then update it with these tips to get a custom version that you can use for your future emails. 

Step 4: Add ways for people to subscribe

At a minimum, add your subscribe widget to at least one place on your website, and have a way for social media followers to subscribe. This could be linking to your website contact page, linking to an anchor link where the subscribe widget lives, or building a second standalone subscriber form that social followers can navigate to, just to subscribe.

Step 5: Plan your emails

Create a 3-month email marketing plan (long enough to try out an actual plan– short enough to figure out how to make it work for you. You’re going to reference the strategy you just created for how often you’re emailing and what type of content you’re sending in those emails. Now for the plan, you’re actually going to plan what future dates to send them on, and what you’re writing about, or including, in those emails. 

You don’t have to write the entire email right now– you’re just creating a basic outline for your plan. Example:

Month 1 emails:

Newsletter:  Main topic, secondary topic, include 1 helpful link (your own content or others’)

Sales email: Promote X offer/product, tease Y offer/product.

Now when you do the next step, you’ll have a plan to follow!

Step 6: Do the work

This is arguably the hardest step because you’re going to have to choose to come back to your email marketing on a regular basis to write and create your emails, schedule/send them, and plan again.

For small businesses, this might look like 1-2x per month for a minimal strategy; for a more involved strategy, you’ll probably need weekly time. I recommend putting a regular time block on your calendar to work on your email marketing– without it, it’s very easy to find yourself skipping doing the work for weeks (or months at a time). 

I always err on the side of simpler or less; as you gain confidence and competence in executing your email strategy, you can always beef it up. It’s preferable to overscheduling or overcommitting, and then dealing with whatever negative feelings come up from that! Keep it simple, and build gradually, and you’ll find an email process that works for you and your business– and that's a big win.