How to Automate Your Email Marketing

Email Marketing Made Easier

If you’ve been reading the emails in this series, you know that email is a tremendous asset for any business today. It’s a direct way to reach consumers, tell your story, educate, entertain and make offers. Plus, it boasts a huge ROI (return on investment).

Your list is an asset that you wholly own and control, instead of being at the mercy of Facebook, Twitter or some other corporation. In short, email is something you have to pay attention to.

The only problem is, paying attention takes time, energy and resources. That can be a challenge if you’re flying solo as a small business owner, but there is good news. There are ways to automate and make your email marketing simpler and easier.

Here are just a few ideas for you…

Topic Research

The first stumbling block many writers hit is figuring what to write about. If you don’t have the ideas, it’s hard to progress in any meaningful way. To help you with this, have an assistant or writer to generate a list of monthly ideas. Give them a general subject area and have them search for hot topics, products you might promote and new angles to explore.

Writing Done for You

Contract with a writer to expand on the topic ideas. Ask them to deliver a month, or more, of email content, so you can make a comprehensive email marketing campaign. Plan ahead so you can have the writer add relevant links and a call to action into each email message.

Automated Delivery

Use an autoresponder service to manage your email list, and to schedule and deliver messages. You can pre-load a series of messages, so all new subscribers automatically receive all the messages you loaded, according to the schedule you set out.

This means that when Subscriber A signs up on Tuesday, they will get Email 1 on the first day, Email 2 at the interval you specify, and so on. Then when Subscriber B signs up on Friday, they will also get Email 1, Email 2 and the rest of the series, again, according to the schedule you create. I use and recommend Aweber if you’re looking for a good autoresponder service provider.

Using an autoresponder series has a number of benefits including:

• Every subscriber will get every message you send out. When you simply broadcast a newsletter every week, many of the great messages you previously sent out will be missed by new subscribers as they come on.
• You have full control over the message your subscriber receives throughout the series, which can help your conversions tremendously. You can start with providing information on a particular topic, introducing a product to help them and then following up to get them to buy. Each subscriber will receive that full series of messages and then you can continue to progress to topics and promotions that will help your subscribers even further.

Of course, you do have to be careful to ensure your autoresponder series includes evergreen topics and you should check it regularly to ensure that links and information are up to date.

Loading Your Autoresponder

Here’s where to really put your virtual assistant to work. There are many things your assistant can do to help you keep your email marketing hands-free including:

• Proofreading messages and checking links.
• Adding your affiliate and product links.
• Formatting email for HTML, if needed.
• Loading and scheduling messages.
• Checking stats and providing you with a report summary.
• Reviewing autoresponder series regularly to ensure they’re up to date.

The more you can automate your email marketing, the more you can focus on improving your results, developing products and growing your business.

If you need help finding ways to automate your email marketing, please email me and let me know how I can help.