The following piece covers email marketing for newbies or established marketers, who want to move into this area or improve their email results. It is included here because it is a well thought-out treatise on four of the most important steps that need to be taken. I hope you enjoy it.
Introduction
Online and offline marketers have found a way to quickly build ‘success’ lists and monetize on their email subscribers. Follow up email lists are a critical tool for any marketer. Lists of 10, 100, 10,000 or 100,000 people are all valuable. A short term mistake however, is focusing only on the size of the list. List size does not produce results; we must learn and understand the strategies and programs it takes to build and monetize a list. We begin with laser focused lead generation, followed by targeted challenges, effective opt-in boxes and value driven follow up content for subscribers. These paragraphs will summarize four email marketing list building strategies and show you how to build a successful email marketing list.
Step One
Step one is to target your market or niche objectives. Business success comes from focused attention to a specific market’s needs. What are you trying to achieve? What service do you provide? What problem can you fix? Look at the big picture of your business and then plan effective marketing programs, timelines and milestones to accomplish predetermined goals. Develop a series of messages to lead your target audience to your offer page. We accomplish this with traffic methods.
Step Two
Step two is strong and focused traffic generation. Traffic (people reading your content) is the foundation of success in the Internet marketing world. That’s seems simple. What is not obvious is what needs to be done to develop this traffic.
For example, there is organic traffic, paid ads, referral incentives, and many offline ways of generating online traffic. Some marketers spend $10,000 a month on Google Ads, some incentivize with affiliate commissions and some employ teams to generate and publish content. If you are an Internet marketing newbie, the vast amount of differing methods that are available can be overwhelming. In the end, traffic depends on how much time you have, how much you have to spend and how good a manager you are.
Step Three
Step three is well placed lead capturing or “opt-in” forms. Once we create a steady stream of readers, our opt-in box gives people the ability to ask for more information. To increase our opt-in numbers we use incentives to coax prospective clients to leave a name and email address. The more value you give away the higher the opt-in rate.
Step Four
Step four is to follow-up your subscribers. Again value is the key. After subscribing to your list, people are going to look for valuable knowledge, ‘feel good’ entertainment or relevant information about what you are doing and how they can benefit. When your prospect’s perceived benefit is higher than the perceived monetary value then they will be willing to purchase whatever it is that you have available for sale.
Mail-Outs
Experienced marketers differ on how many messages to send to a list in any given week. Aggressive marketers or guru’s send several times a day. The downside is that this practice causes rapid list burn-out or churn. Consistent and valuable information is the key. Emailing valuable information two or three times a week cuts down on churn and increases reader interest. Longer periods tend to decrease retention and your list will get stale.
Summary
These four steps are the basis of a profitable email marketing plan and the key to building a valuable list. Follow-up lists are basic building blocks for any online or offline business. This is where the gold is. Each and every subscriber is a potential sale so treat them as if they were live customers and write to them as you would speak to them in person.