How to Make It Work

Email marketing is an essential component to any online enterprise.  It’s a cheap way to build an ongoing relationship with your clients after the initial purchase and get additional, future sales, increasing the lifetime value of each customer.

There are internet entrepreneurs who have built massive email lists over time and can generate $5,000 or more instantly just by sending out a single email promotion to their list.  When done properly, email marketing can add stability and longevity to an online business.

However, just like many online trends, email marketing is not as effective today as it was when it first started.  Spam abuse and over saturation has limited its appeal.  But it would be a mistake to abandon this form of marketing because its low cost and broad reach makes it an attractive marketing medium.

Here are the basic steps of email marketing:

1.  Purchase a web-based, email marketing software.  Two popular ones are Aweber and Getresponse.  These applications handle all aspects of your email marketing:  generating the opt in forms, creating multiple campaigns, handling opt-in confirmations and unsubscribes, and creating autoresponder emails.

2.  You can either set up an autoresponder series or choose to do broadcast emails.  Autoresponders are a series of email marketing messages sent in intervals you specify; i.e, email #1 goes out instantly; email #2 goes out 2 days later, email #3 goes out 4 days, later, and so on.  Broadcast emails are individual, one-shot emails sent to your list that you send whenever you feel like it.

Of course, you’ll need to put some thought into your autoresponder emails.  They can be a short course, or an ongoing newsletter with useful content.  The idea is to engage your opt ins, provide great content so they actually open these emails and read them, and sprinkle in links that lead to a purchase page of one of your products.

Let’s say you spend a weekend and make 26 email autoresponders for one of your campaigns, set to go out every 2 weeks.  Well, you are set for the year!  Your email software program does the rest.

3.  Place an opt-in box on your site, or in a pop under when the visitor first sees your site.   You make the form (ask for first name and email only) in your email marketing software (easy to do), take the code, and paste it before the body tag of your index page.  Offer something of value in exchange for the visitor’s email address.  The ideal thing is a free, downloadable ebook.  This ebook must offer information that helps solve a problem, and that can’t readily be found online.

As people submit their emails, the email marketing software, behind the scenes, adds them to a campaign you previously set up.  If you set up an autoresponder series, the subscribers will start getting your emails.

5.  Monitor your results:  check the number of opt-ins each week.  Look over your stats (Aweber and Getresponse have this feature) to see the open rate of each email, and which email results in the highest conversions (purchases).  Tweak your email messages based on this feedback.

NOTES:

Most internet marketers go with plain text format emails (as opposed to HTML).  They look plain, but they tend to make it past spam filters at a higher rate.

I recommend that, unless you have really compelling content that draws readers in, to keep your autoresponder emails relatively short and to the point.  But most of all, offer relative and useful content to your subscribers.   Offering additional, unannounced freebies on occasion is very effective in keeping your readers engaged.

Lastly, come up with creative Subject lines for your autoresponder emails that pique the recipient’s interest.  Use your imagination– what subject line would make you open an email?