Email Marketing – What Works Today?
Most experienced Internet marketers teach that e-mail marketing is still the most effective way to sell to potential customers. The basic formula goes something like this:
1) Develop a list building strategy
Here are some ways to build a list:
- Place ads in publications related to your niche.
- Write articles about a subject(s) related to your niche.
- Set up a blog and post to it on a daily basis. This will cause search engine spiders to visit and index your site regularly.
- Do a joint venture with a marketer who already has an established list.
- Use pay-per-click to drive traffic to your offer so more people will sign up for your list.
- Use offline advertising such as postcards to drive traffic to your web site and sign up for your list.
- Develop strategies using social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to tap into the tens of millions of people who regularly visit these sites.
2) Get as many of those visitors as you can to sign up for your offer.
Most marketers will do this by offering some type of free gift to motivate visitors to sign up for your list. This is a crucial part of the strategy. Merely offering something for free is not enough. The gift on your squeeze page must be so compelling that people will gladly exchange their e-mail address for what you’re offering.
3) Build a relationship with your new subscribers.
Now, let’s step back a few years to the dawn of e-mail marketing in the middle 90′s. At that time, list building was a piece of cake because this form of marketing was fresh and new. People were excited to get ANY mail. Then as Google came along, e-mail marketing really exploded. Many marketers who got on the e-mail marketing train became wealthy using this new way of reaching customers.
Now, let’s fast forward to 2011 and consider where e-mail marketing is today. Within a span of 16 years from about 1995 to 2011 e-mail marketing has gone from an almost instant path to wealth to being a struggle for most new marketers to squeeze out a few dollars. Why?
There are numerous reasons why e-mail marketing is not working for most marketers today. Here is what I think is the biggest reason:
Free Stuff
That’s it, Just about every marketer thinks that they have to offer some kind of free gift to get people to sign up for their list.
We have to understand that many people who may sign up for a list only to get the free gift. Some will give some kind of bogus e-mail address, or an address set up on a junk e-mail account they never even look at. A person could start a complete information business just by signing up to lists that offer some kind of free gift.
The trick is to be able to give away a free gift and still get the people who sign up for your list to actually read your e-mail messages.
Here’s one solution that might help to solve that problem: Make your free gift a five-part e-course that is sent to the new subscriber once each day for the next five days. Each day you send information that’s interesting, helpful, and leaves the reader curious and eager to open the next day’s email.
If this is done right, most of your subscribers will stick with you. They will open your e-mail messages regularly because they know that you will always provide them with outstanding information.
E-mail marketing is going to get more difficult in the days ahead. It is still the best way to build relationships with your subscribers. But to make it work for you, you’ll have to be more creative than your competition to get your e-mail messages opened.
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