How To Start Email Marketing In Nigeria (7 Easy Steps)

Benefits of Email marketing

A. You own your platform

Remember the time Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp shut down?

Businesses that were solely built on these different platforms were on the verge of going bankrupt.

In business and marketing, you can’t place all your eggs in one basket.

A huge pro about email marketing is that you own your audience and the risk is next to zero.

It’s not a rare thing to be banned from social media platforms for misuse. This is why you should drive traffic from your audience to an Email list to be on the safer side.

B. No Complex Algorithms To Master

Unlike on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, email marketing has no complex algorithms to put up with.

Although there are regulations governing whether or not you land your emails land in your subscriber’s inbox, these rules are quite stable and easy to learn.

C. High visibility

Recently on my Instagram page, I’ve suffered decreased reach and so have other content creators on the platform.

My business would have shut down if that was my only source of traffic.

These social media platforms constantly undergo algorithmic changes and creators also have to stay up-to-date with the latest growth strategy.

With email marketing, there are no complex algorithms, the only thing you’ll have to take care of are the Email spam regulations.

These are email deliverability policies to make sure your emails get delivered to your subscriber’s inbox and not the spam section.

Once you can get to the inbox and have your email copy optimized, your work is done.

D. You get realistic analytics

Yes, Social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube provide detailed stats and analytics as regards your audience and content performance.

With email marketing, it’s so much more precise and accurate.

• If you get a High delivery rate, it means your emails landed in the inbox
• If you get a low open rate then it only means you had a poor subject line and need to work on that.
• If you get a low click-through rate, it means your email copy wasn’t convincing enough to get them to click through.

Disadvantages of Email marketing

A. There are strict regulations

The spam regulation policies can really be quite strict.

Missing out on any of these rules might mean the emails you wrote in hard work, end up in the spam section, where they might never get read.

B. It Depends on a Chain effect.

The progress of any stage of your email marketing campaign will hugely depend on that of the previous stage.

Here’s what the chain effect looks like:

• Your email deliverability score determines if your email land in the inbox
• Your subject line and preview text determines if your email gets read
• Your email copy determines if your email campaign generates any leads or sales.

Hence, messing up any of these stages will affect your email campaign success

C. You need an email list to start Email marketing

A huge limitation of email marketing is how you’ll need to build an email list from scratch.

So you’ll be starting on a blank slate and growing your audience on email from scratch. This will require your time, effort, and dedication.

How to start Email marketing in Nigeria

1. Define your audience

The main aim of creating an email list in the first place is to make sales in your online business.

The only people who’d be willing to buy from you or your business are your ideal clients. Email marketing might be powerful but building a list of random people in random niches is useless.

This is because these people won’t ever convert to sales for your business.

To ensure high conversions with your emails you need to make sure you’re building a list of people in your exact target audience. 

So how do you target the right people to build a list from? The first step to this is defining your audience.

These Questions will help you nail your Target Audience

• Who would benefit the most from your products or services?
• What are their major pain points and problems?
• Where do they hang around the most on the internet?

The process of nailing your target audience is called Market Research.

2. Set Specific goals for Your Email Campaigns

There are several reasons why businesses start email marketing in Nigeria, some of these goals include:

• To increase brand awareness:
• To promote your content

Content creators and course creators use email marketing to promote their content and drive traffic.

Most algorithms prioritize the initial engagement a content piece gets. With email marketing, you can promote your content and get your email subscribers to go over and engage.

• To nurture your audience to become sales for your business

3. Plan your Email marketing funnel

To have email marketing work for you, you need a funnel.

A sales funnel is an illustration of a buyer’s journey.

From when they first get to know about your business to when they take action and become clients or customers.

The core elements of a sales funnel include:

a. A Lead magnet

A lead magnet is a free resource you give to your potential clients or customers in exchange for their email addresses.

Your lead magnet has to be relevant to your products or services, specific, and enticing to your potential client or customer. Some lead magnet examples include Checklists, mini-courses, guides, discount codes e.t.c.

You are going to need an opt-in page to make this work. This is where your leads land to drop their email address in exchange for the free resource you promised.

b. An email autoresponder

An email auto-responder is a series of emails that automatically goes off whenever your email subscribers sign up for your lead magnet.

These series are intended to achieve the smart goal you set previously for your email marketing campaigns.

The Two Main Types of Sales funnel

For businesses who want to start email marketing in Nigeria, here are the 2 types of funnels to consider

a. A product-based funnel

This is for eCommerce businesses. What a product-based funnel should look like

• Lead magnet Ideas: Discount code for your products or a free shipping offer.
• Email autoresponder series: This should include: Welcome emails, Catalogue emails, Abandoned cart emails, and promotional emails.

b. A service-based funnel

This type of funnel is for coaches, agencies, freelancers, and content creators that offer some form of service or digital product.

• Lead magnet ideas: Checklists, free guides, templates e.t.c
• Email Auto-responder series: This series will be aimed at nurturing your new subscribers. The goal is to help them see the value in whatever you have to sell them.

4. Choose your Email marketing service

There are several email marketing services on the internet today. These services are quite similar in function.

Most of these services are free while others have premium plans.

For product-based funnels as described earlier, I really recommend Klaviyo.

For Service based funnels, I highly recommend Aweber.

Aweber is completely free to use and has all you need to start email marketing without investing anything upfront

5. Write your Email copy

There are so many tips to keep in mind with email copywriting.

You do understand that your emails have to follow certain rules to make sure they are convincing enough to bring in sales. Some of these rules to apply if you want to start email marketing in Nigeria include:

A. Craft an Engaging subject line

Your email subject line can be a huge factor that determines if your email marketing campaign flops or becomes a massive success.

No matter how creative your email copy is or how amazing your product is, If your subscriber doesn’t even open your emails, then it’s all a waste of time.

Your email subject line should trigger emotions and curiosity, in order to get your subscribers thinking about what the email could be about. 

Which emails would you rather open? “Online Business Mistakes” Or “I messed up”.

Most definitely the second, this is because it triggers some form of curiosity making you want to click to find out how I messed up.

Another way to write better email subject lines is with personalization. Email marketing services allow you to refer directly to a particular subscriber by using their name, location, company name, and more.

Imagine this subject line “Ella, I messed up”, it’s one step further ahead of the first one. This is because there’s an element of personalization that triggers your subscribers to stop scrolling through their inboxes and reading your emails.

B. Optimize your preview text

Your preview text is the next line of text after your email subject line.

It boosts the effectiveness of your email subject line and helps give context to it, hence increasing your open rates.

The perfect preview text should be relevant to the subject line and also spark some form of curiosity and emotion.

3. Make your emails scannable

Humans don’t read, they scan.

With your emails, the main goal is to get your subscribers to read through them till the end and take the desired action to interact with your business on another level.

You, therefore, need to make it so easy for your readers to scan through your email.

A good way to do this is to divide large chunks of words into smaller paragraphs. Don’t forget to add memes and quotes.

Make sure not to make to clutter your emails with these, or you might trigger spam filters.

4. Use storytelling

If you don’t have anything to say in your emails, tell stories. These stories could be yours, or simply success stories from past clients.

Stories are relatable and engaging, the better you get at telling them, the more eager your subscribers will be to read more of your emails.

5. Email deliverability

Once you’ve written your emails, it’s time to ensure they land in the inbox and not in spam.

This would mean all your hard work goes down the drain. There are certain rules you need to follow to make sure your emails land in the inbox of your email subscriber.

A. Use a Business Email address

Sorry but your traditional “Gmail” address isn’t going to do the work for you on this one.

Your business email allows you to set up all the necessary DNS Records needed to prove to the email spam regulators that your business is legit and not just a spammer looking to promote cheap schemes.

How to Get a Free Business Email address In Nigeria

Services@Ella.com is an example of what a business email address looks like.

1. Sign up for your domain name on Namecheap.com

2. Head over to Zoho.com. It gives you a free business email addresses, all you need to do is link your domain name on the Zoho dashboard

3. Don’t forget to setup the necessary DNS records for your domain name including DMARC, SPF and DKIM

B. Optimize your Email Subject line

This is very important because once your emails start landing in the inbox of your subscribers, that’s not the end of your email journey with spam.

If you send consecutive emails to your subscribers and those emails don’t get opened consistently, these email filters receive this signal.

They interpret it as your emails have become irrelevant to your subscriber, causing your emails to land in spam and reducing your reputation score.

So make sure you’re taking the time to craft subject lines that get people opening your emails proving to these email filters they want to engage with your business.

C. Clean Your Email List Regularly

If after optimizing your email subject line you still get low open rates, then your subscribers might not be as interested in your business as you want them to be.

The best thing to do in the case scenario is to unsubscribe these people from your list hence avoiding the risk of lowering your reputation score.

Another way to clean up your list is using a tool called Debounce, where you can upload your email list and check for fake email addresses to remove.

These fake unverified email addresses are like fake followers on Instagram, they kill your engagement rate in the eyes of the algorithm.

So make sure you conduct email hygiene at least once a month, depending on how many subscribers you get per month.

D. Check your Email copy

Your email content can be the reason why some of your emails are landing in spam.

Email spam filters have a huge record of spam emails and can track a common trend in these emails. If your email looks or sounds like one of these, you risk ending in spam.

So how do you fix this?

Avoid using email templates you find online and instead try crafting yours from scratch.

You also need to avoid spam-triggering words like Free, 100%, guaranteed, limited-time offer, and other words that sound promotional. Here’s a list of some spam words to avoid.

E. Ask them to whitelist your email

This tip is the end all be all for getting your emails to land in the inbox of your subscribers.

The way this works is by asking your new subscribers to whitelist your email address.

What this means for you is you won’t have to fulfill any of the above requirements. This is because Whitelisting sends a signal to Spam filters, that your email subscribers want to receive emails from you.

7. Build your Email list

Once you’ve followed the outlined steps, your email marketing funnel is all setup and ready for launch. It is time to drive traffic. This is the final step on your journey to start email marketing in Nigeria

There are so many ways to drive traffic to your email list, it’s literally going to be the same as when you’re marketing your business online but instead of driving traffic to your store or sales page, you’ll be driving your traffic to your opt-in page for your lead magnet.

3 Ways to promote your email list include:

• Content Marketing
• Network Marketing
• Paid Ads

Read this comprehensive guide on how to market your email list/business online In Nigeria.

Tips to Start Email Marketing in Nigeria

• Don’t Pitch Straight Away: Give value first, build relationships, and then sell.
• Check Your Analytics: Track your email open rate, click-through rate, and your delivery rate. Then do all you can to optimize it for better results.
• Test Everything: Don’t be scared of failed campaigns, you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. Once you get hold of a successful campaign, replicate what made it so in your subsequent ones.