How To Get Started with Email Marketing: Five Steps for MSPs

Email marketing is a cost-effective, easy-to-track tactic to reach your target customers with personalized and relevant content related to your business’s products and services. The goal of email marketing is to build customer relationships and ultimately drive sales – but to be successful, a thoughtfully planned strategy is key. Follow these five steps to get started with email marketing. 

1. Define your audience

To effectively market and sell your products and services, you must understand your buyer. This can be done through a variety of customer profiling techniques, but the most straightforward way to determine your target customer is to focus on the problem your business is trying to solve. You can do this by analyzing your existing customers:

• What kinds of pain points drove your customers to buy your services?
• What ongoing customer pain points do your services mitigate?

2. Establish your goals

Goals are important, but they can be hard to project – especially if you’re just getting started with email marketing. To help identify objectives that make sense for where your business is at, consider your contact list. Who are the contacts you plan to communicate with? Where are they at in the buyer’s journey? If you’re starting with a small list of leads, your goal may be to grow your list. If you already have a sizable pool of contacts, your goal may be to qualify leads and generate prospects. Finally, if you have a list of warm leads you think may be likely to buy your products or services, your goal may be to convert leads into customers. 

For businesses brand new to email marketing, it may be worth focusing less on a specified goal, and more on the execution of a consistent, sustained strategy, with careful monitoring and analysis of the results over time. For example, after six months of consistent email marketing activity, review any closed sales and look back on the marketing activity it took to get here. How many touchpoints did the customer receive over what period of time? Was there certain content or messaging that produced better results than others? Tracking this information will give you data to inform future strategy and goals.  

3. Brainstorm topics and content

Your established email marketing strategy will be easier to execute if you’ve got subject matter banked and ready to go. As you get started, it’s important to spend some dedicated time devising a list of topics you might address with your prospective customers, with the goal of delivering them value and insight.  

A good way to generate content topics is to put yourself in the seat of the prospective customer. Think about what that person’s pain points are and what solution they may be seeking – how can your business answer that pain point? For example, a prospective Collabrance customer may be seeking solutions because they’re frustrated with their overseas help desk support. We answer that pain point by sending a marketing email that highlights our 100% U.S.-based live-answer service desk. Challenge your team to come up with five to 10 customer pain points and use those pain points to create five to 10 marketing emails.  

With every email, remember to include a call to action (CTA). Your CTA should align with the goal of your email marketing campaign – what do you want the viewer to do next? Going back to the example goals shared above, if you want to grow your audience, your CTA might be a link inviting users to subscribe to your company’s blog. If your goal is to generate leads, you may want to link to content that requires the user to enter their contact information into a form to access it. If the goal of your email is to turn existing leads into customers, your CTA may be to “get a demo” or “schedule a 15-minute discovery call”.  

Lastly, follow these guidelines to avoid your emails being marked as SPAM:  

• Include your company name and address in every email. 
• Place visible unsubscribe links within your emails. 
• Use real email addresses in the “from” and “reply to” fields. 
• Write subject lines that indicate the content of the email. 

Related: Four Tips for MSPs Designing Their B2B Website

4. Create a schedule you can stick to

Decide how often you plan to email your targeted contacts, and make sure it’s a cadence you can commit to, based on your workload and available resources. The optimal frequency for email marketing depends on a wide range of variables, but two emails per month is a good baseline. If two emails per month isn’t realistic for you, that’s ok – determine a schedule that’s reasonable and build on it later. Consistency is crucial in building trust with your audience and keeping your business top of mind – and ensuring your email marketing efforts don’t go to waste!

5. Measure your results and take informed action

There are numerous metrics and key performance indicators that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of your email marketing, but the following three metrics are among the most important:

• Clickthrough rate (CTR): CTR is the percentage of users who clicked on a link within a marketing email. A strong CTR may indicate that the content of the email was especially engaging, or that the user has a level of interest in your company.  
• Open rate: The open rate is the percentage of email recipients who open a given email. A high open rate may mean the subject line was particularly compelling. It could also mean your audience is “warming up” and moving further through the buyer’s journey. Open rate is best examined as a comparative metric; ideally, your open rate will improve over time.
• Unsubscribe rate: Unsubscribe rate – the percentage of users who unsubscribe from your mailing list after opening an email – is an important metric for businesses new to email marketing, especially if you’re working to grow your contact list. When you initiate an email campaign for the first time, a high unsubscribe rate could be a sign that you need to re-evaluate your email frequency, content, or both. 

Metrics like email clicks, opens, and unsubscribes will provide insight into contacts that may have a higher level of interest, helping to steer your sales representatives to the warmest leads. Email marketing will also create more user data for you to work with, and it’s important your marketing and sales teams are aligned in keeping that data clean. 

Use an email automation tool

To best understand the results of your email marketing, an email automation platform should be used. Even if you’re only marketing to a small list of contacts to start, automation software will allow you to see how people are engaging with your emails, which provides valuable information for future action. There are a number of email automation platforms available, but if you’re a small business just getting started, a simple tool will suffice. Constant Contact is one of the most popular and longest-running providers on the market; it’s beginner-friendly with strong customer support. Keap may be an option to consider as your email marketing and corresponding sales strategy grows. Do some research to determine the solution that will be best for your business. 

Conclusion 

Getting started with email marketing may seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. There are seemingly unlimited “how to” resources available online, but following the steps outlined here will create a solid foundation. And just as a consistent cadence will help strengthen your relationship with your audience, it will help you strengthen your own expertise, too. The best way to learn and improve email marketing is to do it, and following these steps will help put you on the right path. 

Additional resources 

Email Marketing: The Ultimate Guide (HubSpot) 

What’s a Good Email Open Rate & Click Rate? (HubSpot) 

16 Email Marketing Benefits Your Marketing Team Must Know (HubSpot)