Description
Social media gets all the attention. Email marketing gets the results.
While small local businesses pour their energy into Facebook posts and Instagram content, most of them are sitting on one of the most underused and undervalued marketing tools available to them — a direct line of communication to their most loyal customers that no algorithm can interrupt, no platform change can diminish, and no competitor can see.
An email list is owned infrastructure. A social media following is rented land. This course teaches you how to build, manage, and grow the owned asset — and how to use it to deliver real, measurable results for small local business clients month after month.
What you’ll learn:
- Why email marketing matters more than most small businesses realise — the owned versus rented audience distinction that reframes how a client thinks about their entire marketing presence, and what realistic, achievable results look like for a small local business newsletter.
- How to set up and navigate MailerLite — the most intuitive and appropriately priced email marketing platform for small local business — including the technical setup requirements that need to be in place before professional sending can begin, and why those requirements matter more than most new email marketers know.
- How to build and manage a healthy subscriber list — where subscribers come from, how to import existing contacts compliantly, how to set up a welcome automation that runs forever and consistently outperforms every other email you send, and how to maintain the list health that keeps deliverability strong over time.
- How to plan a monthly newsletter strategically — including the annual content map that reveals the full rhythm of a client’s business before you plan a single send, the reminder email as one of email marketing’s most genuinely useful and most underrated applications, and the content brainstorm that means you’re never stuck without something worth saying.
- How to write email content that gets read — subject lines that earn the open, opening lines that set the voice for everything that follows, body content that respects the subscriber’s time, and the “all roads lead to Rome” principle that ensures every newsletter drives traffic back to the website where the business works hardest.
- How to design professional emails in MailerLite — building a brand-consistent master template, working confidently in the drag and drop editor, optimising images for email, designing for mobile first, and running the pre-send checklist that catches errors before they reach every subscriber’s inbox.
- How to send compliantly and confidently — understanding deliverability, avoiding spam triggers, meeting the requirements of Australia’s Spam Act 2003, choosing the right send times, and handling mistakes professionally when they happen.
- How to report results clearly and honestly — understanding the key email marketing metrics, finding the data in MailerLite’s campaign reports, presenting it in a format clients actually read, and combining email and social media reporting into a single monthly document that tells the complete story of the client’s digital marketing activity.
- How to grow the list and improve performance over time — active list growth strategies that fit naturally into the monthly rhythm, subject line testing, and recognising the signs that a client is ready for an expanded email program.
Who this course is for:
This course is designed for people who have completed the Become a Freelance Marketing VA foundation course and are ready to add email marketing to their service offering. No prior email marketing experience is required — just the foundation course, a willingness to learn by doing, and the understanding that building something valuable for a client takes consistency and time.
This course is part of the Sandy Taylor Digital Marketing VA training suite. For best results, complete Become a Freelance Marketing VA and Manage Small Business Social Media before enrolling.
What’s included:
- 9 lessons of detailed, practical course content
- Action items at the end of every lesson to build real skills before you move on
- Guidance on tools, templates, and workflows ready to use with your first email marketing client
- Access to the Uncomplicated Marketing graduate community
- Listing on the Uncomplicated Marketing job board upon completion
Course duration: Approximately 7 hours, self-paced.
