Getting Started with Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best, if not the best way to sell to people in the modern digital age.
It offers a situation that rivals no other: a targeted group of people at your fingertips who are likely to be receptive to your offers and opinions.
The way it works is simple, you gather together the email addresses of interested people into a list, and email them.
Couldn’t be simpler, could it?
Offering Value
Email marketing can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be, it all comes down to knowing that you are emailing people, and that they will react in a similar way that you would.
You see, if you don’t offer value in your emails and you just push a sales speech at them, they will simply unsubscribe from your list, or worse, mark you as spam.
This is why offering your thoughts, opinions and advice should be your number 1 priority with email marketing.
Of course, there is no harm in spreading out some offers for products that you recommend, or adding an affiliate link every now and then. The key is to not alienate the people on your list by acting like a stereotypical marketer.
One of the best things to do when learning to write emails to a mailing list is to sign up for a bunch yourself, preferably in the same industry but it isn’t a necessity, and see how the other writers do.
If you get turned off by a writer, examine why you don’t like them. Is it because there are too many sales pitches? Boring topics? Emails are too frequent?
What about the ones that get you excited before you open them? Why exactly are they good?
Examining the different styles can really help you to build a successful email marketing business.
Remember though, don’t lose your own voice and style that is what makes you unique and is what can attract loyal followers to your list.
Building a List
Getting started with a list can be a daunting task. Where do you begin?
Slowly.
Getting subscribers via one or more websites is the most common route. These sites can be small, purely targeted at getting that email, or they can be large sites full of rich information already, which is beneficial to the potential subscriber.
If you are using WordPress there are many mailing list plugins available to help with list building.
It is still important though to offer that person something extra, and incentive to actually give over their email address to your and permit to being contacted.
The easiest way to do this is via a free product of some kind:
- Ebook
- Video
- Report
- Top Tips
- Access to a private area on your site
- And many more
These don’t have to be huge products and are often just an amalgamation of content elsewhere on your site, though it helps if it is unique and useful.
You can give this away for free, or one great idea is to charge a nominal fee, say $0.99 or $1.99 for the product, that way you will know that the subscribers are more inclined to purchase something from you.
Tools
Manually tracking and recording email address and timing emails to be sent out is a chore, unprofitable and time consuming.
Nowadays there is a great automated system available that can do all of that for you and more.
These systems are called Autoresponders, and the best in the industry is provided by a company called Aweber.
Good autoresponder systems like Awebers will automatically add users for you, unsubscribe them if they want and provide great reporting and link tracking.
The main thing that you will need an autoresponder for is drip feeding emails out.
You can write 10 (100, 1000, however many you want) emails and have schedule them to go out at specific intervals. Not only that but new subscribers can be set to start from the beginning of the email campaign rather than in the middle.
This allows you to create a funnel like pattern in the emails, easing new subscribers into whatever you are writing about and start the sales process slowly.
You should check out Aweber, the first month only costs $1 and you can even get a test drive by signing up below.
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