Why is it important to combine Email Marketing and Instagram

Instagram is perfect for content creators to build their brand and reach new audiences. But you can achieve even better results by combining it with email marketing.

Combining Instagram and email marketing not only reduces your dependability on one platform but also increases engagement and builds your following far better than either channel alone.

In this blog post, we will show you five tricks that combine email marketing and Instagram to grow your audience and increase engagement.

1. Send Emails With Your Latest Instagram Posts

Your Instagram posts are not guaranteed to be seen by your followers, it all depends on the platform’s algorithm.

Instead of hoping they see your post while they’re aimlessly scrolling through social media, you can use email.

With email marketing, you can send your subscribers an email guaranteed to land directly in their inbox. That way your followers don’t miss out on important information like your latest updates and posts.

The social media agency Laundry Service found that using Instagram-style photography increased click-through rates to 8% and conversion rate by 25%.

Using SendFox, you can easily create an email campaign that contains your Instagram style photography with the Email Generator feature. All you need to do is follow these steps.

Besides increasing engagement and growing your audience, the email generator feature will save you tons of time and resources. 

2. Use Lead Magnets in Exchange for Email Addresses

Generating new email subscribers on Instagram is no different from getting sign-ups with any other platform. To increase sign-ups via Instagram, you can use lead magnets.

Lead magnets are any piece of content such as an ebook, podcast, or guide that gives value to your audience in exchange for their email.

Here’s an example from Shelli Johnson using call-to-action on her Instagram bio encouraging followers to download a free ebook in exchange for signing up for her list.

Pro tip: Make sure your lead magnet is optimized for mobile because most people on Instagram are using the app on their phones.

3. Create Giveaways

Another great way to incentivize people to join your mailing list is by running a giveaway.

Giveaways not only boost your engagement and reach on Instagram but also grow your email marketing list remarkably.

You can use KingSumo for free to set up a giveaway where contestants are required to join your email list to enter. KingSumo also directly integrates with SendFox, making email marketing even easier.

Here’s an example of how Noah Kagan is promoting his giveaway on Instagram to gain more email subscribers:

Check out below Noah’s giveaway landing page created through KingSumo:

4. Share your Instagram Posts On Your Smart Page

SendFox’s smart pages are better than your regular landing pages because you can showcase content from your different social media accounts including Instagram.

Use your smart page to reuse the awesome content you posted on Instagram and encourage people to sign-up to your mailing list and follow you on Instagram.

Trailyn Ventures, showcases their Instagram posts on their Smart Page:

Chris Spiegl also uses this strategy on his smart page:

5. Add your Smart Page to your Instagram Bio

Your Instagram bio is a perfect place to ask your followers to connect with you somewhere else rather than on Instagram.

Sharing the URL of your Smart Page on your bio is a great way to get followers join your email list.

Here is an example from the Creative Coder’s Instagram that you can replicate:

Get Better Results by Combining Email Marketing and Instagram

Instagram and email marketing are both great individually but used together can bring even better results.

To recap, here are five tricks you can use combining Instagram and email marketing to grow and engage your audience:

1. Create email campaigns to share your latest Instagram posts. Don’t depend on Instagram’s algorithm. Increase the chances of your latest content being seen by sending emails to your subscribers with your latest content.
2. Use lead magnets. Incentivize your Instagram followers to subscribe to your mailing list by offering them a valuable piece of content (i.e. ebook, mini-course, etc).
3. Create giveaways. Make sure that contestants provide their email to participate in your giveaway and this will organically increase sign-ups from Instagram.
4. Add your latest Instagram posts to your smart page. Reuse and showcase your Instagram posts on your Smart Page to encourage more people signing up to your list and follow you on Instagram.
5. Share your smart page URL on your Instagram bio. You don’t have to run a giveaway or provide a lead magnet to get more sign-ups. You can include a link to your smart page so that Instagram followers interested in connecting via email can sign-up.

If you’re ready to increase your marketing efforts using email marketing and Instagram, sign-up to SendFox for FREE here and check our guide on how to set it up here.

If you have a podcast, don’t overlook email marketing.

It’s one of the best ways to speak directly to your listeners and promote your podcast. Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter.  It’s also profitable. For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $44 in ROI.

In this blog post, you’ll find out how email marketing can help you monetize, grow, and build a more engaged audience. We’ll also show you how you can get started TODAY.

1. Grow Your podcast Audience by Growing Your Email List

Unlike social media, when you use email marketing, your message lands straight in your subscriber’s inbox and you can decide when and how often you want to communicate with your subscribers.

Here is a list of ways that email marketing can help you grow your podcast:

• Capture future listeners. If you have a website or social media presence, you can capture the people that visited your pages and stay in touch with them: all you need to do is collect their email addresses. Many ESPs include forms and landing pages that will help you do this. You can embed the ESP’s form on your website to collect emails. If you don’t have a website, don’t worry about that – many ESPs, including SendFox, offer free landing pages. A landing page is a website specifically designed to collect email addresses. You can share the URL on your social media, podcast, and more.

• Use lead magnets. Lead magnets consist of offering a long piece of content such as an ebook, podcast, guide (almost anything you can think of) in exchange for a person’s contact details. This will increase the chances that a person visiting your website or social media channel sign-ups to your mailing list and becomes a listener.

• Create a referral program just like the Morning Brew! This is rewarding your most loyal subscribers for getting more people to sign-up for your newsletter and potentially becoming new listeners. You can also make it a milestone system, where your subscribers get different rewards depending on the number of people that they have referred.

2. Increase Your Audience’s Engagement using email marketing

Email marketing lets you directly message your subscribers so it’s also a great opportunity to build a relationship with them. Your subscribers have signed-up to receive emails from you so they are also keen to read your emails and know more about your podcast.

Here are some techniques that you can use to improve the engagement with your subscribers:

• Send regular content. Many podcasters send a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly newsletter to their subscribers that contain updates on new episodes, guests, and topics. You can also include other resources that your listeners might find useful.

• Ask listeners for feedback. Email is not only a way for you to directly contact your subscribers; it’s also a way for them to directly contact you. At the end of each email, you can ask subscribers to give you feedback on what they thought of the episode, guest, or topic. Pro-tip: this also helps improve your sender reputation. This is because if email clients see that people are not only opening but also responding to your emails – they will categorize you as a great sender and make sure that your emails land in the inbox.

• Create a welcome automation series. Automation is a sequence of emails that you can automatically send to your subscribers once they sign-up. After someone sign-ups to your mailing list, you can continue the momentum by sending them an automation series that includes emails welcoming subscribers to your mailing list and also re-sharing the best content from your podcast. Subscribers who receive a Welcome email show 33% more engagement with the brand.

3. Monetization Opportunities

It’s worth mentioning again: For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $44 in ROI! There’s also another statistic, based on data from Sumo Group, that says that every subscriber on your list is worth approximately $1.

As a podcaster, email marketing is a no brainer if you want to expand your opportunities for monetization. Here are three ways you can do this:

• Sponsorships. Using email marketing, you can sell more ad spots and sponsored content. You can speak to your current sponsors and advertisers about your email list to let them know you can put their product or service in front of hundreds (or thousands) of subscribers. You could also add the company’s logo at the beginning, middle, or end of your content, just like the example below:

• Promote your other products and services. Once you’ve done the hard work of building an engaged audience that trusts you, you can easily promote any other products or services that you might want to expand into like merchandise, online courses, and more.

• Paid newsletter. Another way you can monetize through email is by creating an exclusive paid newsletter. Many paid newsletters work on a subscription basis (i.e. $5 per month) and provide subscribers with exclusive content such as non-public videos, behind the scenes content, exclusive Q&As, etc.

Podcasters Using Email Marketing:

Modern Jeeper is a podcast about the new and growing world of off road adventure and Jeep ownership. They send a weekly newsletter to their subscribers with their latest episodes and other information they think their audience would love.

Love Line for Business is the podcast all about helping entrepreneurs love their work again. In their weekly newsletter, they share details about their latest episodes and recommendations on books and tools that entrepreneurs should check out.

Pacific Atrocities is a podcast with the mission of increasing awareness about atrocities committed in the Asia-Pacific Theater of World War II. They use SendFox to send their weekly newsletter with updates of their new podcast episodes and resources that their audience will find interesting.

Step by Step: How to get started with email marketing and grow your podcast audience

Now that you know why you need email marketing for your podcast, we are going to show you how to get started

1. Create a SendFox account

Go to our website https://sendfox.com/ and sign-up for an account. Follow the onboarding process that takes less than 5 min.

2. Start collecting emails

Next up, start collecting subscribers.

We’ll start by creating a SendFox smart page (basically what we call our landing pages). You can follow the steps in this video on how to create a SendFox smart page.

When it’s ready, copy the URL of your smart page and share it on your podcast show notes, social media channels and add it to the footer of your email signature.

Let’s create a SendFox form, check out this video that includes the instructions on how to create a SendFox form. If you have a website, make sure to embed this form to stop missing out on subscribers.

3. Build a Welcome Automation Series

Automations are a great way to start engaging with your audience as soon as they sign-up. SendFox makes it very easy for you to create one using our automation assistant.

After clicking Start with a template, follow the steps of the automation assistant.

When you’re done, you’ll see an option called Welcome Series. Click on this option and SendFox will automatically create an automation for you.

This is what the welcome series created by the automation assistant will look like:

4. Set up your referral system

A referral system is a great way to grow and engage your current subscribers. To set this up, follow the steps in this article.

5. Create and send your first emails

Last but not least, send your first email to your subscribers. If you don’t know where to start or what to include use SendFox’s Smart Campaigns.

With Smart Campaigns, SendFox automatically creates an email for you in less than one minute with the best content from your RSS feed.

Find out more about how it works and how to set it up in this video tutorial.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Email marketing is an important tool to help you grow, engage, and further monetize your podcast.

You’ll get to know your audience on a deeper level, engage them in new and creative ways, and maximize your ability to grow your show, and business.

Get started today with email marketing, get the SendFox lifetime deal here.

And once again, if you have a podcast, don’t overlook email marketing. 

Email marketing is one of the best ways to build an audience and increase your influence.

Here are some real examples of people that did this:

• James Clear used email to grow his audience, which led him to selling multiple online courses and ultimately, becoming a best-selling author and sought-after speaker.
• Millionaire beauty mogul Huda Kattan, built her audience by starting a make-up email newsletter.
• Serial entrepreneur, Robert Glazer, increased his influence after building his audience with his newsletter called Friday Forward that also helped him become a bestselling author.

You can also build an audience and increase your influence with email marketing. Don’t make excuses, the best time to start is now.

In this blog post, we will be debunking the most common excuses about why you can’t start email marketing NOW :

1. “My book, course, website, or business is not ready”

This should be the other way around. Before launching any product or service, you need an audience to sell to.

Email marketing is one of the best ways to build an audience and it can be a catalyst for your launch, especially because many of your subscribers are likely to convert into paying customers. 

You might still be thinking that you need a website to start collecting email addresses but this is not true.

Many email service providers, including SendFox, have a landing page feature. This feature helps you create your own web page that you can easily share and use to start collecting email addresses.

Check out these awesome landing pages for inspiration:

The best time to start building an audience is NOW.

Even if your website, book, or course is not ready, send relevant information or updates to your subscribers to build momentum and guarantee that your launch is a success.

2. “I don’t have anyone to email” 

This step isn’t as hard as most people think it is.

If you don’t have anyone in your email, it’s not because no one is interested, it’s because you just haven’t found subscribers yet. 

Here are 5 tips on what you can do to get subscribers:

1. Add the link of your landing page to your email signature. Most people send around 30-50 emails per day, so by doing this you are showcasing your newsletter to more people than you think.

2. Add your landing page URL to your social media bios (i.e. Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc).

3. Share your newsletter with online communities. For example, if you are a chef that’s starting a newsletter on vegetarian recipes, think about the different online communities that might be interested in your content like a Facebook group for vegetarians or a subreddit on cooking.

4. Create a giveaway! Using a giveaway to grow your list is not only effective, but it’s one of the methods with the highest return for your time. You can use KingSumo for free to set up your giveaway where visitors are required to join your email list to enter.

5. Tell your friends and family. Ask them to not only join your newsletter but also to share it with people they think might be interested in it.

Also, check this guide on Social Media Marketing Tools to see how to get more subscribers through Social Media channels.

If you need more tips on how to get subscribers, check out this article from our friends at Sumo that has 60 ideas on how to get subscribers, or learn how to find email addresses.

3. “I don’t have time”

Your newsletter doesn’t have to be long and you don’t have to spend tons of hours creating unique content for each email campaign.

Many successful newsletters are short and include content created by others. Here’s an example from Noah Kagan:

The first link is a YouTube video created by him and the last two items are product and content recommendations.

His emails are also very short and take less than 5 minutes to read. This has been a successful formula for him and his email stats are higher than industry standards (~21%). The email above got a 35% open rate.

You can curate all sorts of content from other people in your newsletter like blog posts, TED talks, a quote from the book you’re reading, and more.

You can also save time and create a newsletter in less than 5 minutes using SendFox’s Smart Campaigns feature.

SendFox’s Smart Campaigns feature will automatically create a newsletter based on content from RSS feeds that are linked to your account. Watch this video to find out more about how Smart Campaigns work:

4. “I don’t know how to start”

Starting a newsletter is easy, the hard part is being consistent.

If you are looking for a simple but powerful email marketing tool, check out SendFox. You can set up your newsletter, landing pages, and autoresponders in less than 15 minutes.  Watch this video on how to do this.

When you’re starting, you’ll also need to decide how frequent your sending will be (i.e. weekly, biweekly, or monthly). Once you’ve decided on how often you’ll send your newsletter, create a calendar reminder to not forget.

Start your newsletter TODAY

We’ve debunked the most common excuses and showed you how email marketing can grow your influence and audience.

Now, it’s up to you now to start your newsletter!

Get the SendFox lifetime deal, the best email marketing tool to get started and grow your audience.

A referral program can help you grow your email list exponentially.

This is how the Morning Brew, a popular business newsletter, gets over 1,000 new subscribers every day — and grew its newsletter from 100,000 to 1.5 million subscribers in 18 months!

The referral program they use is called a milestone referral system — and we’re going to show you how to do it, too.

In a nutshell, a milestone referral system is when your subscribers get different types of rewards when different milestones are achieved.

Here’s how the Morning Brew’s referral program works:

1. Each subscriber gets a unique referral link.
2. If someone signs up using a subscriber’s referral link, this subscriber will have one referred contact.
3. When a subscriber achieves a specific number of referrals, the Morning Brew will send them their prize.

Here are some other examples of awesome SendFox customers using a referral program just like the Morning Brew:

1. Hoopsfix

Hoopsfix is the go-to website for your daily fix of British basketball.

To reward their dedicated audience and grow it even more, they’ve started using referrals.

Here’s the referral blurb that their subscribers see in the footer of their emails:

 

Hoopsfix also created a referral hub that their subscribers can access to keep track of their referrals and continue to promote the newsletter.

The referral hub also has a leaderboard and a list of prizes.

If you’re not sure what prizes to give out, you can get some inspiration from Hoopsfix:

• 5 referrals get you a shoutout on social media
• With 10 referrals you get an early access ticket
• With 50 referrals you win an exclusive Hoospfix t-shirt

Want to receive Hoopsfix’s 3-Point Thursday newsletter? Sign-up here.

2. Dr. Tammy Lenski

Dr. Tammy is impressive! She’s a professional mediator, executive coach, conflict resolution speaker, and teacher.

To grow her email list, she is also using referrals. Dr. Tammy is offering one prize for three referrals which is an exclusive newsletter. In SendFox, you can set up as many or as few prizes as you like for referrals.

Check out her referral footer for inspiration:

Dr. Tammy also has a beautiful and on-brand referral hub:

Learn more about road-tested conflict resolution tools by signing-up to Dr. Tammy’s newsletter here.

3. The Aloha Press

The fun and entertaining golf newsletter, The Aloha Press, is using a referral system to promote their newsletter and reward their biggest advocates.

At the bottom of their emails, they have not only added a referral blurb but also all the prizes that their subscribers can get through referrals.

Rewarding your most loyal subscribers with cool merch for referrals, will not only help you grow your audience but also increase brand awareness.

Check out The Aloha Press’ newsletters and sign-up to their mailing list here.

Now that you know how and why a referral system will help you grow your email list,  we’re going to show you how to use SendFox’s built-in features to make your OWN referral system.

Setting up Your Referral Program With SendFox:

1. Sign-up to SendFox (Psst it takes less than a minute!):

2. Go to your Account Settings and click Referrals Campaign.

3. Enable the “Promote Referral in all email footers”.

4. In section 1, fill out the title and blurb that you want to include in your email footer.

5. In section 2, you can customize your referral hub by choosing the color and title of the page. You can also include your logo.

6. In part 3, choose the prizes you want to give out and select how many referrals your subscribers need to get for each prize.

And that’s all you need to do to set up your referral program just like the Morning Brew. Easy-peasy!

Create A Referral Program TODAY

To recap, a referral program is a GREAT way to grow your mailing list and reward your most loyal subscribers.

In SendFox, you can easily recreate the Morning Brew’s referral system by creating your own referral hub and automatically adding a footer to your emails with each subscriber’s unique sign-up link.

For best results, give away prizes that are related to your brand to increase brand awareness.

Get the lifetime deal for SendFox here – the best place for content creators to grow their audience.

You want to make sure your landing page is a good one. If not, you’re leaving hundreds or even thousands of email subscribers and sales on the table.

There are good landing pages and there are bad ones…

We’ve created this guide to help you build the BEST landing page and never miss out on email subscribers.

But first, what’s a landing page?

Landing pages are websites built for collecting email subscribers. They can be used for a lot of things like:

• Getting your contacts to take a specific call to action like signing up to your weekly newsletter.
• Growing your mailing list by giving away a freebie.
• Gauging your contacts interest for a new course or product.

At SendFox, we call landing pages Smart Pages so we will be using these interchangeably.

Now that you know WHY you need a landing page, let’s jump into how to build a GREAT one. These are the five best practices we’ll cover:

1. Smart Page Image or Graphic: Use Your Face!

The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, which means the first thing people will see on a landing page is the image. So choose your landing page image very carefully.

We recommend using a picture of yourself not only because studies have shown that we are wired to pay attention to the human face but also because this helps build trust and connection.

Check out this perfect example:

Other landing page images that work:

• Emotional images that show how your contact feels about the problem you are solving or how they will feel afterwards. For example, Holly from Fluid Movement + Wellbeing does a great job of showcasing how some of her clients feel about stretching in a fun way.

• A high-quality graphic related to your brand such as the logo or even a mascot. Check out how Damien Schmitt created his landing page using the characters from his comic Big Sea Tales.

The graphic is high-quality, on-brand and emotional.

2. Make Sure Your Headline Is Extraordinary

There’s a lot of competition for attention, so an eye-catching and exciting headline is critical for people to stay on your landing page and sign-up.

Here are some tips to make your headline extraordinary:

• Headlines that are 55 characters long tend to earn the highest number of click-throughs. Your headline should be around this number of characters
• Use Power Words! Power words are typically words that are well-known for provoking action, curiosity and emotion. Power words include effortless, breathtaking and gripping.
• Emphasize on the hook or what will pull the person to sign-up to your mailing list
• Make your headline big, strong, and clear so that it stands out from the rest of the text.

Here’s an example of a GREAT headline:

Jason has a strong headline because it’s the right length. It also has two power words: best and share.

Lastly, his headline stands out and includes the hook, which is to get his BEST life hacks.

3. Simple & Short Copy = BEST Copy

Research shows that people rarely read web pages word by word; instead, they scan and skim the page. So, keep your copy short.

Besides being short, your landing page copy only needs to do 2 things:

• Clearly convey what you want visitors to do (i.e sign-up to your newsletter).
• Highlight the benefits you will give them and what they should expect from you.

Here are some examples of landing pages that do exactly this:

The Tea Letter clearly shows the benefits of signing up to his newsletter and uses the catchy phrase The Way of Tea which makes his copy unique and memorable.

Using a couple of sentences, Edlin Bets the Farm clearly explains what subscribers will get when they sign-up to his newsletter. Also, if the promise of the occasional baby goat pic doesn’t make you want to sign up, we don’t know what will.

4. CTA’s and Social Logins

Call to Action or CTAs are an important part of your landing page, it will cue your visitor to take action and sign-up! To make sure this happens to follow these CTA tips:

• Make the copy action and benefit oriented. For example, if you are giving away an ebook when people sign-up, instead of saying “Sign-up” use “Get the ebook”.
• Personalize the button copy to your audience. As per Hubspot research personalized CTAs convert 202% better than basic CTAs.
• Make your CTA stand out by using contrasting colors and white space

Pro tip: Add social logins to make it even easier for people to sign-up. SendFox, by default, includes a Google and Facebook login so you don’t have to think about how to add these.

Here’s an example of a great CTA. The CTA stands out, it’s action-oriented and personalized.

5. Include a Feeds Page: Exclusive SendFox Feature

You’ve got an awesome image, an extraordinary headline, simple copy and an action-focused CTA. BUT your landing page visitor might still be on the fence about signing-up.

You can convince them by showcasing all the awesome content you’ve not only included in your previous newsletters but also on your social media.

Introducing Feed pages. 

Feed pages are an optional feature exclusive to SendFox Smart Pages that lets you display content on your landing page from:

• Past Newsletters
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Blogs
• Podcast

In your feed pages, future subscribers will see what type of content you create and if they like it. This not only increases your conversion rate, but it also helps recycle and showcase the content you’ve worked so hard to create.

Check out an awesome Feeds page here.

One of the best parts of the feeds page is that newsletters are displayed as blog posts where people can share and comment.

What We Learned:

You now know how to build the BEST landing page for content creators. Here’s a summary of the main points:

• Use a landing page with a photo of you. If you don’t have one use an emotional image or a high-quality graphic related to your brand.
• An extraordinary headline should be around 55 characters long, contain POWER words and include a hook (the reason why someone should sign-up).
• The copy of your landing page should be short, simple and clearly mention the benefits of signing up. People usually skim web pages so you can also highlight important words.
• Make sure your CTA is personalized and stands out. 
• Include social logins in your landing page to make it even easier and faster for someone to sign up.
• Use SendFox’s feed page to showcase all your awesome content online including your old newsletters to make people want to join your newsletter.

Ready to upgrade your landing page, find out more about SendFox HERE.

In this SendFox tutorial, we’ll show you how to set-up SendFox in 15 minutes so you can get started with your email marketing ASAP.

Check out the video or follow the steps below:

First things first, let’s get an account.

Go to sendfox.com and type in your email address.

Fill out your details.

Welcome to SendFox! Let’s get started by setting up your Account Settings.

1. Account Settings

You can find your account’s settings by clicking the three lines on the top right and selecting Settings.

In your account page, make sure to choose your time zone and fill out your physical address to comply with CAN-SPAM laws.

Before continuing, check the inbox of the email address you signed up with to verify your account and continue using SendFox.

Once, you’ve verified your account, go back to your account page and type in your custom URL. This will be the URL of your primary landing page.

Click on the next tab Web Presence and insert the URLs of your blog, podcast and YouTube.

Next, go to the Domain tab. In this tab, you will be able to validate your domain to improve your deliverability and customize your sender email address. For more instructions on how to validate your domain, click here.

Now, that you’ve set up your most important settings, it’s time to upload your subscribers.

2. Lists

Go to the Lists page and click Create List.

Give your list a name and choose whether you would like to upload your contacts via a .CSV file or through the MailChimp Auto-Import (if you are moving over from MailChimp!).

If you are uploading via a .CSV file make sure you are following the format of this file.

3. Smart Pages/ Landing Pages

Let’s set up your landing page so that you can start collecting new subscribers NOW!

When you go to your Smart Pages page, you will notice that SendFox has already automatically created a landing page for you.

Click on the name of your landing page, to go into the Smart Page Editor. In the top half, you can modify the title and the content of your landing page.

In the second part of the landing page, you can select if you want your content to be displayed on your landing page. All you need to do is check on the box that says “Enable Feed Page” and add your feeds.

If you would like to check out what a landing page with the Feed page enabled looks like go here and click Let me read first.

In the Visual page, you can customize the formatting of your blog.

Last but not least, we have the form section. Here you can decide what information you would like to collect, which list you want your contacts to be pulled into, GDPR consent and more.

Once you’re done modifying your landing page, click Save on the top right. Then, click on the pop-up to view your landing page.

Need some inspiration for your landing page? Check out these landing pages:

• https://sendfox.com/hjalmar
• https://sendfox.com/garrett
• http://sendfox.com/dh

If you need help with promoting your new landing page, go back to Smart Pages and click the Promote button next to your landing page for help.

4. Automations

Automations are a great way to engage your audience. One of the most popular and effective automations to create is a Welcome Series. We’ll show you how to create one.

Go to your Automations page and click Start with Template.

To get the most out of the template, fill in the details requested by the automation assistant.

Choose the option to create a Welcome Email Series.

Lastly, choose which list you would like to trigger the automation (this means that when a contact is added to that specific mailing list, they will receive the emails in your automation).

And voilà! SendFox has automatically created a Welcome Series Automation!

You can click on the Edit Email button on the top right to view and modify the content of your emails that SendFox has added for you.

5. Email Campaigns

Now it’s time to schedule your first email – go to the Emails page and click Create Email.

Psst…You probably noticed that there is already some emails created in the Emails page. This is because in part 1 (setting up your Account), we connected our Blog’s RSS feed. When you connect your blog’s RSS feed, SendFox will automatically create draft email campaigns for you.

We’ll show you how easy SendFox makes it for you to create a weekly newsletter.

In the email editor, add your subject line and select the mailing list you would like to send to. After that, click the Templates button in the footer of your email.

In the templates page, you can select the most recent content from your connected RSS feed’s to generate a weekly newsletter. You can even add more RSS feeds in this page.

Click the content you would like to choose and then click Generate Email. When you’re happy with what your email looks like, all you need to do is Schedule and Save the email.

Here’s another example of what the template feature can also generate.

Awesome job reaching the end of this tutorial! You have now set up your SendFox account and email marketing in less than 15 minutes. 

For more email marketing advice, make sure to check out our blog.

If you need a more comprehensive SendFox tutorial with all the features explained, make sure to check this guide!

With 70,000,000+ emails from 18,000+ customers on SendFox, we’ve researched and analyzed the TOP email marketing trends.

What makes emails great, what tings the BEST senders do, and more.

Here’s what we found…

Gmail: The Email Standard for Email Users

The graph above shows our users’ domain breakdown. Gmail is hands-down the most popular option with our customers.

Gmail is dominating the market and has become the email standard for email users.

Knowing this will help you improve your deliverability.

Make sure to test your emails heavily with Gmail. Their spam filters can be aggressive and this is a great way to learn more about it.

We’ve talked to the Gmail Anti-Spam team, and one pro-tip we can share with you is that when emails are sent and they’re repeatedly outside of industry standards, Gmail has and will blacklist not only the sending IP but the entire domain.

One of the key techniques of staying within industry standards is sending to your active contacts, this means subscribers that have opened and clicked on your emails.

This is personally what we do at Sumo Group for all our emails across all our brands, so we know it works and it’s a best practice.

Subscribers Don’t Want to Open Emails on Saturdays and Sundays

The treemap below shows the open rates in SendFox during April 2020. The larger the box, the higher the open rate and vice versa.

As you’ve probably guessed from the heading and noticed in the graph above, the days with the lowest open rates are Saturdays and Sundays. It looks like most people want to disconnect from their inboxes on the weekend!

Wednesdays had the largest open rates among subscribers. The data also showed that other popular days to open emails include Tuesdays and Fridays.

Keep in mind that this is what we’ve noticed from SendFox customers and might not be representative of your industry.

Send Your Emails Before Lunchtime for the Best Results

The first graph shows SendFox email opens per hour. The second one tracks email clicks per hour.

These were the dates and times that achieved the highest open and click rates:

April 1st.	3:00 PM
April 8th.	12:00 PM
April 15th.	12:00 PM
April 22nd.	4:00 PM
April 29th.	12:00 PM

The data shows that subscribers prefer to read emails at noon or early afternoon. 

So you want to make sure that your email has landed in the inbox before lunchtime.

Most Email Marketers Have Set up an Automation

In the first four months of 2020, we had more than 6,500 people sign-up to SendFox. Approximately 4,000 (62%) of those contacts currently have an active automation.

As the number of email marketers joining SendFox grows, so does the number of emails sent using automations.

Automations are popular because it’s a great way to engage with your audience and doesn’t require any effort once it’s been set up. It will also help improve your open rate.

At SendFox, we’ve made it even easier for our users to create an automation. Using the automation assistant, you can create a welcome series in less than 5 minutes!

Tips From SendFox’s BEST Senders

We measure the success of a sender by looking at their email stats and subscriber engagement.

Our best senders have an open rate of 30% or higher!

Here are what our BEST senders have in common:

1. Keep their emails short and simple.
2. Have an active welcome automation series which includes lead magnets like a PDF or ebook.
3. A constant flow of new subscribers added to their mailing lists.
4. Focus on sending emails to active subscribers.
5. Send at least one email per week.

Main Takeaways From Our Data

In this blog, you’ve learned about the latest email marketing trends and what the BEST senders on SendFox are doing.

Here are the main takeaways of email marketing trends:

1. Gmail is dominating the email users industry. Test heavily to make sure your emails are not getting caught by Gmail’s spam filter.
2. Subscribers prefer reading your emails during the week, especially Wednesday lunchtime.
3. Set up an automation. For best results, include a lead magnet.

Now it’s time for you to take action and apply what you’ve learned.

Still not on SendFox? Get your lifetime deal here.

Still not impressed? Check out this 2020’s Buyer’s Guide to Email Marketing Software and find the best solution for you.

SendFox is here to revolutionize the email marketing industry by offering an affordable and powerful email marketing tool.

Designed for content creators, SendFox has unique features that make it easier and better to communicate and grow your audience.

Find out what makes SendFox different — and why more than 15,000 people are using our tool.

Landing Pages That Convert! 

With tons of data points collected from our thousands of customers, we’ve noticed the best landing pages are 3 things:

1. Visually appealing
2. Quick for contacts to sign-up
3. Easy to promote and share

It’s simple and straightforward to create a custom and branded landing pages in SendFox. We create one for you automatically when you sign up.

Here’s a landing page from Jenny Hill:

This landing page is AWESOME because:

1. The design is clean and on brand.
2. It’s easy for anyone to sign-up.
3. Her URL is sendfox.com/jenny, so it’s easy to share on social media and any other platform.
4. Looks great on mobile too:

Besides making it easy for you to create a landing page in less than 5 minutes, we help you promote it.

After you create your landing page, we have a “promotion” page that has the easiest and most effective actions you can take to grow your mailing list.

And in SendFox, your emails don’t get lost anymore — you can now publish them on your landing page as a blog.

Showcasing your most popular emails as a blog will attract more people to your mailing list. Subscribers can also comment and easily share your emails on social media.

Providing the Best Deliverability 

Email marketing ONLY matters if your emails arrive in the inbox.

Here’s what we do to make sure that happens:

• Use SendGrid, a world-class platform, to send our customer’s emails from SendFox.
• Check our IP reputations DAILY to ensure the quality deliverability.

• An automatic optimization process to help customers with poor emails stats improve their sender reputation — so their emails arrive into the inbox more often.
• A spam filter that checks emails for spam triggers before sending.

Active-Only Sending Feature 

Your sender reputation and deliverability matter if you want your emails to land in the inbox. We’ve not only got deliverability covered for you but also your sender reputation.

To get a great sender reputation you need a good open rate.

To help, we have a feature that gives our customers the option to send emails only to their active subscribers. We do this ourselves to follow best practices and get better open and click rates.

SendFox makes it easy for you to improve your open rate and send to your MOST engaged contacts.

Create an Automation in Less Than 10 Seconds 

We make it easy for customers to start automations.

On average, 40% of SendFox customers create automation within 24 hours of setting up their account.

If you don’t know where to start with automations – don’t worry!

We have customizable templates for you. All you need to do is use our Automation Assistant. It takes less than 10 seconds! Check it out below:

via GIPHY

Besides email sequences, you can use our tagging feature to segment your contacts based on their actions within the automation.

A Team Dedicated to Improving Sendfox 

The agile SendFox team has been working hard since day #1 to build the BEST email marketing tool for content creators.

Since launching the tool in 2019, we’ve consistently added around 7-10 features per month and there’s many more to come!

Our goal is to revolutionize the email marketing industry and we hope you will join us for the ride!

Sign-up to SendFox now