[intro] When you have completed this Guide, you will have installed EKM Email Marketing onto your EKM online shop and will be able to offer marketing emails to your customers. [/intro]

EKM Email Marketing is our own email marketing platform that allows you to send newsletters to your customers, encouraging sales and increasing your brand awareness. If you have not used email marketing before, it's an excellent and very cost-effective way of promoting your products and your brand. 

The Benefits of Email Marketing

Good Return on Investment

Email marketing is one of the most affordable marketing methods available as unlike print media, you don't need to pay separate costs for design, printing and distribution. Email marketing platforms require you to pay one fee according to how many people you send your newsletter to so it is very cost-effective and as there's no paper involved, it's environmentally friendly too!

Global and Segmented

Your email newsletters can be sent to customers worldwide if need be, or on a smaller scale, you can segment your customers into different groups according to their location, which is useful if you plan on running any targeted promotions in the future. 

Instant

An email newsletter can be sent to all of your customers within a matter of hours and minutes, not weeks and days, which is ideal for getting word of a new product line or a flash sale out quickly and effectively. 

Easy to create and personalise

With EKM Email Marketing, you can choose from either repopulating one of our existing email templates or designing a new template from scratch, which means there's a lot of possibility and scope for translating your branding and products into an email newsletter format that can be used time and time again. 

Less Intrusive

Compared to other methods of promotion, email marketing is one of the least intrusive; as customers who clearly like your product have signed up to receive your newsletters, from the outset they are interested in what you have to offer. This is a stark contrast to postal mail drops which rely on 'blanket bombing' potential customers. 

Target fans of your Product

As mentioned above, the customers who have signed up to receive your email newsletters are clearly already interested in your brand and your products. Using email newsletters, you can encourage customer loyalty by offering discounts and 'sneak peeks' at new ranges.  

Calls to Action

Email newsletters are an excellent place to add Calls to Action to encourage customers to make a purchase that perhaps they would not have done without a friendly email update from you. 

Easy to measure

As quick as it is to send hundreds and sometimes thousands of email newsletters out, you can expect to see the results of your campaign very quickly too. On the EKM Email Marketing platform, you can quickly analyse how well your email campaigns have been received with clearly defined totals for who opened the email, who didn't and what bounced. From these results, you can manage your contacts to ensure that going forward your email newsletters provide the most impact possible. 

Installing EKM Email Marketing

1. From the Dashboard, click Features on the left-hand menu:

2. Click the Feature Library tab:

3. Scroll down to the Marketing features and click the View More button on the right-hand side:

4. Click the Email Marketing icon:

5. Click the green Install Feature button:

6. Click the Launch button:

Configuring the Feature

You'll then see the following options listed. Many of these options will be pre-ticked for you as they offer the best possible customer experience and will increase the number of customers who will sign up to receive your email newsletters. 

  • Newsletter Signup - lists all of the places where a signup form will be displayed on your EKM online shop. 
  • Signup Settings - The drop-down menu here allows you to select which Contact Groups any customers who sign up via your EKM online shop will be added to. A default Contact Group is used at first, but you can amend this at a later date by creating a new Contact Group and assigning it using the drop-down menu on this page. 
  • Popup Settings - These relate to the popup window that will appear when customers go to leave your EKM online shop, which encourages them to sign up for your email newsletter. If you wish to edit the content of the Message listed in the Popup Settings, please click here for the Guide. 
  • Account Settings - Here you can unlink your EKM Email Marketing account from your EKM online shop.

1. When you have reviewed these settings, you need to click the Save button on the bottom right-hand side of the page. 

2. You then need to scroll to the top of the page and click the button to log into your new EKM Email Marketing account:

3. This will now open a new browser tab that takes you to the EKM Email Marketing dashboard, a completely separate email marketing platform:

4. To continue setting up EKM Email Marketing, you need to create a Contacts Group where customers who sign up for email marketing via your EKM online shop are added. Click Contacts:

5. Click Create Group:

6. Give the group a name and a description, and then click Create Group:

7. Your new Contacts Group will look like this:

8. Return to the browser tab which is still viewing your EKM online shop, and refresh the page. You should then be able to select your new Contact Group from the drop-down menu, before clicking Select This Group:

9. Click the green Save button on the bottom right of the page. Your settings within the Email Marketing feature should now look like this:

10. At this point, you need to check the Shop tab of your EKM online shop to see if a newsletter sign-up form has appeared on your homepage. On some Themes, the newsletter sign-up form will simply appear, however on some Themes it will not, dependent on the age and the design of the Theme. If you cannot see the newsletter sign-up form anywhere on the Shop Tab, get in contact with our Customer Support Team - you may be using an older Theme so we will need to add this for you. 

Your next step is to set up your EKM Email Marketing account - you can do that by clicking here. 

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[contact] If you need our help with your EKM online shop, contact your Ecommerce Expert or the Customer Support Team, who will be able to point you in the right direction. We're open from 8am-6pm weekdays and 9am-5.30pm weekends. If you'd like to suggest a feature or an upgrade on any of the EKM platforms, please let us know on the EKM Suggestions Board. If you have a non-account-specific question to ask the EKM Team, join us in the EKM Community. [/contact]