When was the last time you emailed the people within your social network for marketing purposes? Since the importance of email marketing for your business cannot be overstated, familiarize yourself with a few email marketing best practices.

Choose the Right Platform

Streak, Mailchimp, and AWeber are among the entry-level marketing platforms that give you a lot to work with in terms of layout, design, and automation for your mass email campaigns. These platforms differ from standard email messaging services, such as Gmail or Outlook. An email marketing platform is a website and server that hosts your business’ email list. These platforms make sending email blasts a breeze, and you can tinker with the outline, content and overall presentation of each email campaign. You don’t want to send emails one by one via Gmail, for example. You also want to ensure that people can unsubscribe from your notifications if they need to, an option that email platforms make available to your recipients.

Upload Your Email List to Your Email Marketing Platform

Once you’ve created an account on an email marketing platform, you must create your main email list. This task in and of itself raises some questions, such as, should you segment your lists, or separate your lists based on certain criterion? Keep it simple. If you’re new to email marketing, simply create your main email list, and plan to get sophisticated later. You can name your list whatever you want once you upload your email list to your email marketing platform of choice. It may be your name, or your company’s name. The idea is to give your subscribers clarity and to avoid being too cryptic.

Create Your First Autoresponder

An autoresponder is a follow-up email that goes out immediately after someone confirms their subscription with you. If you sign up for a service on a website, for instance, you may expect to receive a confirmation email in your inbox soon afterward. This email is referred to as the autoresponder. You may want to create an autoresponder that has a free attachment included that introduces you and your company mission. Keep in mind that autoresponders don’t have to be sent just once. You can schedule a follow-up autoresponder that notifies the subscriber of other important details of your organization in the following days or weeks after said subscriber has opted in. Autoresponders are a great way to minimize your workload, because they are scheduled, and they allow you to keep up with your subscribers in an efficient and timely manner.

Create an Opt-In Form on Your Website

Now that you have your email list uploaded and your autoresponder ready to go, the next step will be to advertise these features to everybody via your website. On your email marketing platform, go to your list and create a sign-up form specific to that list. You may wish to create one for your sidebar, which has the advantage of being seen throughout every page of your website, or, you may wish to create an entire landing page for your opt-in form. Dedicate space on your website to describe the perks of becoming a subscriber, and then make a form that allows the user to enter his or her name and email address. The “About” page on your website is a great location for your opt-in form. Users who are just getting to your website and who wish to learn more about you will decide to stay because of what they’ve learned on your “about” page. Then, they can choose to sign up for your email list.

Prepare Your First Email Campaign

You need to be very clear in your opt-in form, and in your newsletters, how regularly you plan to communicate with your subscribers so that they’re not caught off guard. Staying consistent and delivering this transparency is a good way to keep your subscribers happy. Subscribers might be thinking about how to do business with you in the future, if not at least staying tuned to learn more about the value they can receive via your email blasts. Therefore, consistency is key to maintaining a professional presence in the email marketing scene.

Email marketing is a powerful tool with which to generate leads, information, and overall returns. The process involves gathering contact information, so that you can put your message before your target audience in any way you deem fit at any time you want to send an email blast. When understood and used properly, email marketing can be the best tool in your marketing arsenal.