At a glance

Quick summary

• Here’s a quick-start guide for email marketing
• We’ll cover a tool called MailerLite that, as long as you have fewer than 1,000 subscribers, is free to use!

Sign up for MailerLite

• MailerLite is a freemium tool that allows you to collect subscribers, automate workflows, and monetize your audience.
• If you’ve got less than 1,000 subscribers, and are sending fewer than 12,000 monthly emails, MailerLite is totally free!

Use your custom business email address!

• When you sign up, you should use your custom business email address.
• If you don’t have one already, I wrote a short post on how to get that set up:

How I structure my MailerLite account

• Catch-all group: Every new subscriber I get is automatically added to this list. I named this list Courage & Grow after my business.
• Source field: This is a custom field I created. Every time a new subscriber joins my list, the form has a hidden field (which I set manually in each form) that passes along a keyword that identifies where they originated.
  • e.g., If someone signs up to download The Ultimate List of 28 WordPress Tips & Tools for Beginners, one of my free downloads, the form on that page has a hidden field which sets the Source field to lm-ultimate-wordpress-tips
• Secondary field: This is another custom field I created. I use this to trigger automations.
  • e.g., When someone signs up for The Ultimate List of 28 WordPress Tips & Tools for Beginners, the Source field tells MailerLite to kick off the automation which sends them that download via email. At the end of that sequence, MailerLite sets the Secondary field to just-set-up, which tells a new automation to run and begin sending my I Just Set Up My WordPress Site emails.

How to set up a catch-all group

• Within your account, head to Subscribers > Groups
• Click Create group
• Give your group a name (for the catch-all, I recommend using the name of your business) and click Create
• Here’s a resource with full details: https://www.mailerlite.com/help/how-to-create-and-use-groups

How to set up custom fields

• Within your account, head to Subscribers > Fields
• Click Add new field
• Enter the name of the field (e.g., Source or Secondary), leave Text selected, then click Create
• Here’s a resource with full details: https://www.mailerlite.com/help/how-to-create-and-use-custom-fields

How to set up a form to begin capturing emails

• To start gathering emails, you can set up a form in your MailerLite account that you can then embed on your website.
• Click Forms
• Then, you can choose Create Popup or click the down triangle and choose Create embedded form

• Here’s a resource with full details: https://www.mailerlite.com/help/how-to-create-an-embedded-form

Sign up for a free email marketing audit!

• If this feels overwhelming, or if you have any questions or thoughts, we can help!
• As part of our free (yes, free!) SiteAudit service, we can complete an Email Marketing Audit for you.
• We’ll help you get your MailerLite account set up

Others? Questions?

Any thoughts or questions? Anything with which you disagree? Anything I missed?

Leave a comment below and let me know!