Today everyone is so focused on social media marketing that they forget the importance of others. Email marketing is an extremely important tool that your company should be using. This is because there are over 4 billion email users in the world, and 99% of them check their email before anything else in the morning! With email marketing you get complete ownership of what is posted, when it goes out, and who sees it, unlike social media channels. Lastly, email marketing is basically free money as it is the most profitable marketing channel. 

Building Your Email List

The first thing you need to get set up is your email marketing list. You can build this list through social media by giving your followers a reason to sign up. This can be done by giving them a value add, by offering them exclusive content that’s only available through being added to the email list. Once you build up your email list and email following you can then advertise that being on the email list is the value in and of itself. This could be done through testimonials or statistics of people you’ve helped through your email list. 

Welcome Sequence

Once someone joins your email list they should receive whatever exclusive content was promised to them followed by an email welcome sequence. This welcome sequence should consist of 3 emails and should be sent on a similar time schedule as you email your email list. For example, if you email your email list 3 times in a week, then you would want to get your email sequence out within a week. This will also help to set the tone of what to expect for your new subscriber. 

The first email should acknowledge the new subscriber by welcoming them to your group and thank them for joining you. This email is focused on the new subscriber not on you or your company and it can also explain how they will benefit from joining this community. 

Your second email should make the new subscriber feel included and a part of your community. You can do this by sharing your mission statement or brand promise, and explaining what you are all about. This email should also reiterate that they made the right choice by joining your list and reinforce their decision. 

The third and final email you should send should mobilize this new subscriber. Have a call to action and explain that this is the next step in them reaching their goals. This email is also the moment for you to share social proof such as reviews, testimonials, and stories from your current customers. 

Creating Content

No matter how many subscribers you have on your email list or how awesome your welcome sequence is you still need to create content. Alex Cattoni, founder of the Copy Posse created the 5x5x5 rule for this exact reason and it can be applied to any type of marketing. At the end of the 5x5x5 rule you will have 125 new ideas that you can repurpose and build off of to create everlasting content. 

For the 5x5x5 rule you first start off with your brand in a circle, now draw five lines from that circle and on each line write a content pillar or your overall categories of content. Three of these pillars should be directly relating to your company but the other two should be a little more personal whether that’s travel, family, ect. Once you have your five content pillars you are going to write five lines off of each of them. On these lines you will write your content subtopics that apply to that particular pillar. Once you have your subtopics written down you will create 5 story bricks per subtopic. For your story bricks you should cover your life (personal story of your experience), community/customers (case study, mentor, testimonials), authority (tips, strategies, tactics), the world (reference real life events), and imagination (reference hypothetical situations). Once you’ve completed this you should have 125 content ideas!

By always having creative and updated content you will enjoy writing emails more and your subscribers will enjoy reading them more.