Email Marketing Tutorial

Email marketing is an online marketing strategy where emails are sent to people who have signed up to receive them. Consumers then use these email marketing leads to perform an action, like read your blog post or make a purchase. 

It’s essential to use email marketing for small business because it offers a direct line to customers. It’s also a great way to solicit feedback, and it can help you build a target audience quickly.

Keep reading for a quick rundown of what email marketing entails. You’ll learn:

• When and why to use email marketing
• The role of email marketing leads and lists 
• Which email marketing tools to use 
• How to launch an email marketing campaign

When and Why to Use Email Marketing 

Email marketing for small business can be used for several reasons, including: 

• To conduct surveys or gather feedback 
• To generate website traffic
• To build an email marketing leads list
• To boost sales 
• To encourage repeat sales
• To connect on a personal level

Email Marketing Leads and Lists 

Before you create an email marketing plan of your own, you need to build a mailing list. 

A mailing list is a set of email addresses you’ve received over time through a form on your website. When someone visits your website and likes what you offer, they may input their email address to ensure they receive updates about your company. 

Over time, you can use this mailing list to send emails to promote products, services, and special offers. 

Typically, you will use email marketing to generate leads. Leads are the people behind the email addresses that make up your mailing list and who have expressed interest in what you have to offer. People on your list are a targeted group of consumers to market to. 

To collect leads, you can use a variety of forms on your website or blog. A few options include: 

• Static opt-in forms, landing pages, and lead magnets
• Calls-to-action that appear at the end of pages and blog posts
• Pop-ups, sliders, and other eye-catching lead generation forms

 

Email Marketing for Small Business: Your First Campaign

After you collect email marketing leads, you can create your first campaign. First, decide what type of email you want to send. 

Within most email marketing for small business services, you can select from a variety of templates that simplify the email creation process. A few examples of templates include:

• Thanks for signing up: Once someone submits their email address, you can configure an autoresponder email that greets the email subscriber and thanks them for joining your list. It’s a great way to acknowledge them and welcome them to your mailing list.  
• Newsletter: Not everyone is going to read your blog regularly. You can send out a monthly newsletter to update email subscribers on the status of your business, as well as new projects, products, or upcoming sales.
• Seasonal: If there’s a holiday coming up, it’s a good idea to check in on your email list. It gives you a chance to touch base and to inform them of upcoming promotions.
• Abandoned cart: If you have an e-commerce website, it can be effective to send an email to those who’ve left something in their shopping cart without making a purchase. That nudge could encourage them to complete their journey through the sales funnel.
• Post-purchase follow-up: You can also configure an autoresponder for a set time after someone makes a purchase. It’s an effective way to encourage repeat business and nurture leads. 

How to Write a Marketing Email

While the type of email you want to send will inform the email content you write, most emails you send will follow a similar structure. Use the following guidelines as you prepare to send an email to your email marketing leads for the first time:

1. Write a great headline: Take time to write a snappy and compelling headline or subject line. It’s the first thing readers will see in their inbox, so make it count.
2. Follow web copy rules: Break up text with bulleted lists, add images, use web-safe fonts, and keep your message concise.
3. Speak to your customers: Keep language personable, light, and social. Use I/you/we. 
4. Add personalization: Use automation to add the subscriber’s name to your emails to give the impression you’re speaking directly to them.
5. Offer value: Give away e-books, guides, and checklists to attract attention and provide value to your subscribers.
6. Always split-test: Most email marketing tools provide A/B testing tools. Use them to gauge the effectiveness of headlines, text, and images. 
7. Set email marketing KPIs: Lastly, set email marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) to ensure your campaign is working. A few KPIs worth tracking include email open rate, click-throughs, and conversions.

Final Thoughts: Getting Started with Email Marketing Leads, Lists, and More

It takes a lot to generate email marketing leads but the effort is worth it to gain new and repeat customers, as well as a loyal following for your company. 
Once you’ve gained email marketing leads, ensure you’re sending them back to a well-hosted website. Domains Buy Design prioritizes easy setup and security with plans starting as low as $10.00/month. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO.

How to prepare for Google’s SEO rank change?

You’ve probably heard that Google began rolling out a major change to their search algorithm this summer. The changes started in mid-June and are expected to finish in September. The change affects how Google ranks websites, because they have added metrics called “Core Web Vitals” in their scoring.

These have been introduced to reward websites that deliver a great user experience.

There’s a lot of advice available on how to protect your website’s SEO rank during this transition. Some of it gets very technical and complex. The good news is that if your site is built on Domains Buy Design Website Builder we’ve done the heavy lifting for you.

The main thing you need to do is republish your website.

Of course, there are best practices that you should follow if you want to optimize your position in search results. Search ranking is all relative — your placement will depend on how well you’ve prepared your site compared to other sites. While we can take care of the technical aspects of SEO optimization, the choices you make about site design and content also matter for SEO results.

Republish your website

Google pre-announced that they would be making this change to how they determine search ranking. We’ve been working hard to improve Core Web Vitals scores for Domains Buy Design Website Builder sites. To take advantage of the work we’ve done, you will need to republish your website.

Don’t worry — your site design will not change.

We’ve simply optimized the website visitor experience in the three areas that matter in Google’s new algorithm:

Loading

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how fast the main content on your site loads.

Domains Buy Design Website Builder sites apply a variety of techniques to optimize LCP.

For example, we’ve reduced server response and resource load times, and adjusted client-side rendering. These ensure that your website pages feel fast to visitors since the site content loads quickly.

Interactivity

First Input Delay (FID) measures the time it takes for the browser to process your website visitor’s interaction with the page — this includes link clicks, button taps, page navigation, etc. Website visitors don’t want to wait — interactions should feel smooth and fast. Google rewards websites that don’t take a long time to respond.

Website Builder sites have a very high pass rate for this metric. Since Domains Buy Design manages the website code and has custom integrations with third party platforms, we are able to prevent problems that can be introduced from third party code. Our engineering team has also optimized how fast JavaScript is executed.

All that is to say — your website visitors will have a happy experience when they click through the site.

Visual stability

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much the content on the web page shifts unexpectedly. This is particularly a concern on mobile devices, because it may be more noticeable at slower internet speeds that different parts of the page are loading separately. It’s a better user experience if everything loads at the same time, and Google rewards this with higher ranking. This metric tends to be harder to “pass” for many sites. While Domains Buy Design has optimized many of the technical aspects that impact CLS, the design choices you make for your website can have a big impact.

For example, while the website builder will optimize your images for faster loading, sites that have a lot of very large images will usually perform worse than sites with fewer images.

Other considerations

For added peace of mind, Domains Buy Design Website Builder sites take care of other factors that impact search rank.

Security is critical, so we include SSL certificates for all plans at no extra charge. In addition, content added to the site or downloaded to your computer is automatically checked to ensure that it does not have malware.

For submissions to the contact form, we have Google ReCAPTCHA integration to prevent spam from bots.

The main thing you need to know is that the technical optimizations that our developers have made, and continue to fine tune, require regular republishing of your website in order to take effect. We don’t republish automatically since you may have edits in progress that are not ready to be seen publicly. So, it’s a good idea to login regularly, preview your site, and hit Publish.

Evaluate your SEO results

Google is gradually rolling out the changes to the search algorithm.

Your website’s rank might not change all at once, so it’s a good idea to monitor it over time. You can check how your website is performing using the SEO tool in Website Builder.

The integration will show your website’s daily page position and rank on Google. Top keywords and phrases that website visitors use to search for your site are displayed, along with impressions, clicks, and average position. Another option to check website rank, especially for more technical website owners, is to use Google’s Search Engine Console.

So far, it’s still too early to know how much impact the new ranking algorithm will have on search results.

Google does not disclose details of their scoring and ranking algorithm. However, they define thresholds for what user experiences are considered “good” in each of the three Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS) metrics.

These are still early days since the rank change is just being rolled out. As you review scores, don’t be surprised to find that many websites do not pass all three metrics.

If all of the metrics are “good,” then the website is determined to have “passed” the Core Web Vitals assessment.

A site may meet the criteria to be “Good” for two of the three metrics, but the website would still “fail” Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment.

In addition, Google evaluates both mobile and desktop pass rates for Core Web Vitals. It’s more important to do well on mobile, since the majority of website traffic is mobile.

Google’s ranking will favor sites that perform best on mobile.

Keep in mind that website rank is relative. It can be concerning if your website is not “Good” for all three Core Web Vitals. If your scores are higher than those for competitors, your website will have the rank advantage. This is where the choice of architectural platform for building your website makes a difference.

Domains Buy Design Website Builder has two to three times more websites (on a percentage basis) that pass Core Web Vitals compared to other website builders like Wix and SquareSpace, according to comparisons done by The HTTP Archive, an open source project that tracks website performance.

Follow best practices

While Domains Buy Design will take care of the heavy lifting to prepare your website for Google’s rank change, there are still some things you can do to optimize your rank results.

Your design choices and content can have a major impact. Here are five things you can check:

Add links between your website and your social media accounts

You should also add links on your social accounts to your website.

This cross traffic helps Google and other search engines determine that your site is legitimate, which boosts your rank.

Tip: Check that all your links, social and otherwise, are working correctly. Broken links are a bad experience for your visitors, and this will hurt your ranking.

Be judicious about the media you add to the website

Pictures and video drive engagement with website visitors. However, sites with a lot of imagery or large video files will take longer to load, which will make the website visitor experience worse and reduce your ranking.

Sometimes “less is more” — pick a few high quality photos to highlight rather than overloading the site with imagery.

Videos should be compressed, and make sure that audio does not play by default. If you choose to autoplay, consider turning it off on mobile devices. It’s best for the website visitor to have control, especially on mobile since it might add more data charges.

Make sure every image has ALT tags

These are keywords that describe your engine.

This text helps search engines and visually impaired people understand what the image includes. It improves the indexing of your website on search engines, and content that has higher relevance for the searches people are entering will rank higher.

If you are adding video, make sure that you give the video a name and description that has some relevant keywords.

Check that your content is complete and unique

Duplicate content makes it hard for search engines to determine relevance, which hurts ranking. Many Websites + Marketing sections come with “starter text,” but it’s important for you to edit these text blocks so that they are unique to your business.

Additionally, don’t have empty pages where there is no content for search engines to index.

Include local SEO and customer reviews

If your business is eligible for Google My Business, make sure you set up a free profile.

Proximity is a factor in ranking, so if Google learns that your business is near the person who is searching, your business will be more likely to show up higher in the results.

And if you have positive reviews, by all means, showcase them on your website — you can set up a feed to do this automatically.

Google will boost the websites that have better reviews.

If you want recommendations tailored to your website, consider upgrading to one of our paid website plans to use our SEO optimization tool. If you are too busy or don’t want to work on this, there is always the option to hire an expert.

Key Takeaways

Google makes frequent updates to their algorithm for determining search rank results. The change happening this summer to improve website experience is considered a major update.

However, if your business has a Domains Buy Design Website Builder website, our engineers have already optimized how your website performs, working closely with a team from Google. The main thing you need to do is republish your website to get the benefit of this work.

Beyond that, it’s always good to follow content and design best practices to improve your rank.

If you need help, we are standing by.