Effectiveness of Email Marketing

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a smart way to do business. It’s cheap, effective and simple to do. It’s the process of keeping in touch with your customers and prospects via email. Let’s face it, email is convenient. Most people have an email account, and most of these users check their email several times a day.

Email marketing is when someone gives you permission to email them on a regular basis. Usually, this happens on your website when someone signs up for your newsletter or requests your “free special report.” By opting in to your form, they give you permission to send them emails. At this point, you can send them emails forever, until they unsubscribe or die.

How Does it Work?

To succeed in email marketing, you need an auto-responder. An auto-responder is a program that manages your leads in one central location and lets you create pre-written messages that are sent out automatically. Personally, I recommend Aweber.When someone’s name and email is uploaded into your auto-responder, they automatically receive your emails, at the frequency you determine.

In addition, you can go in at any time and send a message to everyone at the same time. This is known as a broadcast email. Emails that people get automatically (your pre-written messages) are known as follow-up emails. I recommend you use follow-up emails and broadcast messages to improve the effectiveness of email marketing for your business.

Getting Started

If you are just getting started with email marketing, you need an auto-responder. Your two best choices are Aweber or GetResponse. Both work quite well. Most auto-responders cost $20 to $40 per month, depending upon how many subscribers you have. As your list gets bigger, so does the fee.

Once you have an auto-responder, your next step is to write your emails. At a minimum, you want a welcome email and several other emails. Next, you must add an opt-in form to your website so people can start subscribing. It really is that easy.

Tips for Success

The spam filters are getting smarter and smarter. That means that it’s getting more difficult to get your emails to your end user. You need to proof-read your emails text and subject line to make sure you don’t use spammy words that trigger the spam filters.

Another way to improve the effectiveness of email marketing is to use a combination of text messages and HTML messages. The HTML messages are the fancy designed emails that often include graphics, videos and fancy images. This look for professional than regular emails, but often get stuck in the spam filters.

I also think it’s important to stay in touch with your prospects regularly. Some people recommend once a month and others recommend once a week. I’ve gotten great results by sending 3-4 emails per week. However, I don’t send many sales messages. Most of my emails are educational in nature, so people enjoy getting them. If you end lots of sales emails, you will have a high unsubscribe rate. That’s why you need to balance your sales emails vs. educational emails.

I’ve also found that adding a pop up to your website is very effective for getting emails. I was reluctant at first, but after I did some testing, I found that I got 3-4 times more subscribers when I added a pop-up box. So, I’ve decided to keep it ever since.

Hypothetical Example

I want to give you a hypothetical example to show you the effectiveness of email marketing. Let’s suppose that over the course of a year you add 3,000 subscribers to your email list. That equates to 250 new subscribers per month. I’d say that’s very easy to do, depending upon how much traffic you have visiting your website.

Let’s assume that you’ve sent frequent emails on a weekly basis, to keep in touch with your customers and built a good relationship with them.

Let’s also assume that you just finished developing a new eBook that you want to start selling. Your eBook generates $30 in profit per sale. So you send out an email to your list of 3,000 subscribers and you get a 2% response rate. In this example, you would generate 60 sales at $30 each. This equates to $1,800 profit from one email. Not bad.

Are you starting to understand the effectiveness of email marketing? I hope so. This is how I make my full-time living from home. It works for me and I know it can work for you too!

Final Thoughts

All business owners should focus on email marketing. That means they should constantly collect names and emails of their customers. If you have a traditional business, get your employees to collect names and emails of your customers. Give your employees an incentive for collecting emails too, such as a $1 bonus per valid name and email. It will be worth the small investment.

Next, you should send out a weekly newsletter, which provides tutorials, discounts, special offers and any other beneficial offers. Make sure your message provides real value for your customers.

I think it’s very important to stay in touch with your customers on a regular basis. Once a month is not enough. At a minimum, I recommend you stay in touch with your customers once a week. If you follow the advice listed in this article, you will improve the effectiveness of email marketing for your business.

On a side note, I want to hear from you. Please tell me about the effectiveness of email marketing with your business. How has it helped you? What worked well? What didn't? Just fill out the web-form below to get started.

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