Email Marketing 101 THE COURSE

I’m amazed having been in the email marketing business for over 22+ years, that there are Email Marketing College courses, like Email Marketing 101, available which seem so second nature to me.  It didn’t’ take long for email marketing to become the class to take as part of the curriculum for some Marketing Degrees.  In fact, email marketing has grown so much in popularly and use, it’s turned into a big industry

In the early days, before it was sanctioned as big business and a must-have marketing course, my late husband and I were guest speakers for several semesters at Eastern Michigan University, specifically for the marketing majors.  We would lecture on the good and bad elements of email marketing, how it’s done, why it works, security, what is the cost and so on.  Since that time all the essentials of email marketing haven’t changed.  However, people did get smarter about DNS, SPAM filters and IP addresses. ESP’s (Email Sevice Providers) may have added some spiffy marketing tools and we are told that email marketing is the best way to grow and maintain your small business, but the medium, email remains unchanged.   

Yes, the medium is the same and so are the essentials of email marketing, the elements that I continue to cover in my 100+ blogs offered online on our mailinglistservices.com website. 

Although email is the same, email delivery programs themselves have changed, some in appearance, ease of use, specialties, and pricing.  However they are all designed to do the same thing, ( some are better than others some are worse), deliver the email to the inbox and get it opened.

My plan with this blog was to write about email marketing basics and inbox delivery.  There are so many blogs on that subject and most of it is repetitive, so I decided to create my own syllabus for Email Marketing 101 if I were to teach the course.

INTRODUCTORY COURSE EMAIL MARKETING 101

Course Title: EMAIL MARKETING 101
Every 4th Semester starting January 2020
Course ID: 110819
Instructor: Ms. Patricia K Rountree ESP and Marketing Specialist
Location: Online
Contact information: Dundee Internet Services, 24/7, info@dundee.net, 734-529-5331

This course will define email marketing and the benefits of using email as a marketing tool.  It will teach you how to develop an email marketing plan to increase your business with full control and analysis of your marketing efforts.  The course will cover the difference between email marketing, past, present, and future and compare it to the more traditional types of marketing, such as TV and print ads.

The student will walk through the exercise of creating content for a specific audience with transactional email responses.

Students taking this course will have the tools to begin a career in email marketing as they learn how to:

• Collect email addresses in an acceptable way
• Used opted-in and double opted-in memberships
• Personalize messages
• Include CTA’s (Call to Action) in their content
• Promote brand awareness
• Generate revenue with referrals

They will develop the skill of creating an email that is

• Delivered
• Engaging to the subscriber
• Opened
• And be able to analysis a mailing, its success rate, make appropriate changes, test, email, and analysis again

Prerequisites:

None, this is a first-year course

Materials:

This course is taught exclusively online, white papers, labs and webinar lecturers.
Assignments are all researchable on the Internet.
All testing and email distribution will be done on the Lyris ListManager platform.  Each student will have an online account with Lyris ListManager and access to the online help manual and the 24/7 help desk.

At the conclusion of this course

You will have a working knowledge of email marketing.  You will be proficient in content creation, testing, segmentation and understand the delivery process of your email message from start to finish.  

COURSES

Understanding Email Marketing

We will define email marketing, and answer questions such as

• What are the parts of an email campaign
• How is an email marketing strategy useful in business
• How are traditional marketing channels currently used in comparison to Email campaigns?

List management and segmentation

• How to collect list names
• Why opted in
• What can you do with demographics
• How to segment a list

Email Design

• The importance of design
• Templates or HTML
• FONTS and Color
• Images and links

Content writing

• How to write good content
• A brief discourse on Subject Lines
• Transactional and Transitional email

How to Deliver the right message

• How to send the right message to the right person at the right time
• Autoresponders
• A discussion on CTA (Call to Action)
• A/B Testing  

Email Deliverability  

• Throttling
• The shared and dedicated IP address
• What is a Blacklist
• What is a SPAM trap
• ESPs expectations  

Analyzing your Email Campaign

• What do all those report numbers mean
• From Bounces to Opens

The final

Each student will create an online website sign-up script (URL and passwords will be supplied) Each student will join the list of each other student so there will be a full list membership of the class for each individual student’s newsletter.   How you opted in your list member is up to you. 

Students will be evaluated on deliverability, analysis of their email campaign, for example, explain the cause of a bounce (if any) and the type. Other students will critique the newsletter received, and on a scale, grade the content, color, font, subject line, and images.

This course is $200 a person, it runs for  7 weeks, class size is limited to 25. What do you think?  Would you sign up?