How to get started with email marketing on your website - in three steps

Building an audience for your website can be a challenge. You need to find a way to keep visitors interested, and encourage them to come back in the future. In a crowded sector, it can be especially hard to get people’s attention.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to keep in touch with visitors who express an interest in your business or organization. Integrating your email marketing offering into your website means you can display a strong call to action (CTA), so visitors can subscribe to your mailing list directly from your site.

In this article, we’ll explain what email marketing is and how to integrate it into your website. Let’s get started.

A brief introduction to email marketing

Email marketing refers to any promotional marketing done via email, using a mailing list. This is an excellent way to grow your audience.

Social media algorithms mean that your page followers may not end up seeing many of your marketing posts. However, email marketing messages have an average open rate of more than 20 per cent.

What’s more:

Visitors can self-select whether they would like to be on your list, meaning that only your most interested fans are likely to view your content.

You can use various services to manage your mailing list, such as:

• MailChimp
• Constant Contact
• AWeber

These services provide attractive templates for your email messages, as well as automatically handling any subscribes and unsubscribes you receive. This is a far easier option than performing those tasks manually.

There are other benefits to using email marketing services as well. Many offer built-in analytics, which let you see how well your emails are performing and how many people are clicking on your links. We’ll go over a few of the top choices and their benefits in the next section.

How to get started with email marketing on your website in three easy steps

Just about any business with an online presence can benefit from a robust email marketing plan. Fortunately, this is something that’s easy to get off the ground. We’ll explain how to get started from scratch in three simple steps.

Step 1: choose an email marketing service

It’s quick and easy to sign up for an email marketing service. However, deciding which one to use can be a bit difficult. Let’s look at a few of the most popular options.

First up, we have Constant Contact:

With a wide variety of templates to choose from and integrated payment tools, this service is a great choice for e-commerce or nonprofit businesses. Pricing starts at £13.50 per month, with special discount options for nonprofits. Constant Contact also has a marketplace with some handy e-commerce extensions, such as a Shopify app to connect your store and a fundraising platform.

Next, let’s check out MailChimp:

MailChimp is an excellent option for small businesses without a big budget to spend on marketing. It offers a simple drag-and-drop editor, with basic templates to get you started, and it’s the cheapest of the three options. In fact, you can use MailChimp for free with list sizes of up to 2,000 subscribers, and pricing starts at £8 per month for higher-tier plans.

Finally, AWeber is also worth a look:

For anyone who’s serious about email marketing, AWeber has a lot to offer. Its advanced features include the ability to program an automated welcome email series for new subscribers. You can use this to offer a course or series of informative articles as a ‘freebie’ to entice subscribers. AWeber has tiered plans that are on the pricier end, starting at £15 per month for 500 subscribers.

Once you choose a service, you’ll need to integrate it into your website. We’ll explain how to do that next.

Step 2: brainstorm a call to action (CTA)

Before you integrate your email marketing into your website, you’ll want to think about how you’ll encourage people to sign up.

To do this, you can use a carefully-crafted call to action (CTA). A CTA is a simple, one-idea directive showing visitors what step you’d like them to take next – in this case, subscribing to your mailing list.

For inspiration, it helps to check out websites that use a similar CTA effectively. This can be something simple, as long as it’s persuasive. For example, Sarah Selecky’s writing class offers a newsletter as a way to stay informed about the school, as well as providing resources that potential writers could be interested in:

You could also tease that subscribers will receive a freebie, such as a PDF or a discount code. What’s most important is that your CTA is clear, specific, and designed in a way that stands out visually.

Step 3: Add a subscribe option to your site

Now you have a CTA and an email marketing service in place, all you need to do is place a subscribe option on your website. No matter what platform your site is built on, this is generally simple to do.

Each of the three services we mentioned previously offer HTML embed codes that you can add directly to your website. In MailChimp, for example, you can use the form builder to create a custom signup form:

Once you have an embed code, open up your chosen page within WordPress. In the HTML viewer, simply paste in the code you’re provided with at your desired location:

If you need any help with this process, your email marketing service should offer documentation on how to proceed. Once the integration is up and running, you can edit the text and other elements on the page to incorporate your CTA. Conclusion

Email marketing is an excellent way to keep in touch with your target audience. Adding a subscribe button to your website with an enticing CTA will let anyone who wants to subscribe do so easily. You can even offer freebies or discount codes to encourage people to join.

To get your first email campaign up and running, you’ll want to:

1. Choose an email marketing service, such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, or AWeber.
2. Write a powerful CTA that convinces visitors to subscribe.
3. Add a subscribe option to your website.

Do you have any questions about how to get started with email marketing? Let us know in the comments section below.