|
When done correctly email marketing can become your most powerful way to generate sales. There are two parts to Email Marketing, Creating Your Audience and Selling to Your Audience. For success you need to do both well and correctly. Creating Your Audience.
Email Marketing involves building a list of email addresses. Your email list should only contain addresses for which people have given you their email addresses. ( Anything else will be considered spam ). Most email addresses are submitted to lists via a form on a web-site. You can convince people to subscribe to your list in a variety ways some of the more successful are, Offer a Free Report or Article about a Subject related to your Product or Service.
By offering information, which your visitors will find useful for free, you can get them to sign-up to your list.
I.e. "Enter your email address here to receive your Free Guide" Everytime you sell a product, capture your customer's Email Address
Your customers will already be entering their details on your payment pages and as such you should be adding their email addresses to your list. Run your Own Newsletter or Ezine
Publish on a regular basis a Newsletter or Ezine based around the subject of your product or service. You should dedicate an area of your web site to your newsletter and encourage people to sign-up for future issues by letting them view previous issues.
There are no hard and fast rules about how you should hold or store your email list but it must contain the ability for people to unsubscribe. i.e.. People must be able to request not to receive any further emails from you. Providing this ability shows you operate a respectable list and you are far less likely to be accused of spamming. Selling to Your Audience
Many people try and sell their product or service directly from their emails. However this is really the job of your web site. The purpose of your email campaigns should be to purely to get people to click to your web site. Two of the most successful ways to do this are, An Email Article
Create an article which describes a common problem that your product solves. Don't necessarily mention your product in the article but do point out some of the things to be considered when choosing a solution. Close your article by simply saying something like "For Further Information and a Solution - click here". This then links to your products sales page at which point the user is already thinking about the problem and what to look for in a solution. They discover your product which just happens to solve the problem. A Series of Articles - Newsletter.
In each issue focus on one particular problem that your product solves. Dedicate the whole issue to describing this problem and what to look for in a solution. At the end of each issue point them in the direction of your product's sales pages. Again by the time they hit your web pages they will be primed and ready to Learn how Your Product Solves their Problem.
You should be able to see how we use these techniques throughout this whole Internet Marketing Center to sell the TrafficFile Gold Service, and were about to do it again in the next paragraph. See how it works, we are providing Good, Useful information which draws the audience, we then clearly define the problem and finally offer a solution, which in our case is the TrafficFile Gold Service. ( Now don't get me wrong, we are not just inventing situations to to sell our product, we are first and foremost providing information which we truly believe in and use to solve real world problems. In fact our product wasn't just created for the sake of it, but in response to a problem we ourselves faced when it came to monitoring our marketing results ). As with all marketing activities to be really successful, you need to try the activity, monitor the results, from the results adjust your activity ( change a few words etc. ), try the activity again. Only by this process of monitoring and refining can you improve your results. Now it's no different with Email Marketing, you need to know from each article or newsletter how many people are clicking through to your product pages. Only by doing this will you truly discover just what it is about your product that attracts your audience. (i.e.. What is the number 1 problem that your products solves in the minds of your customers ? ) So if you are not already doing so, you need to be tracking the visitors coming to your web pages and also where they are coming from - The TrafficFile Gold Service does this for you - click here for further information. See what I mean, about how you need to describe the problem, outline what the customer needs from a solution and then finally provide them with your solution. Well that's all there is to it, and that's the key to success. Warning
The following two email techniques may at first glance seem tempting, however both are highly dangerous and could cost you a lot more then you bargained for. Purchasing Email Lists.
You've seen the adverts, " 10 million email addresses only $150". People selling these lists tell you that even if you only get 0.1% click through rate you will make a lot of money. Indeed if you did get that kind of response in those kind of numbers you probably would make a lot of money. However the truth is, it's just not going to happen and here's why. Generally the email addresses are harvested via automatic software from web sites without the owner knowing, ( i.e. the person has not chosen to join the list). Because the people on these lists have not chosen to join the list the first thing they are going to do when they receive your email is assume it's spam. At best they will simply delete and at worst they will complain to your ISP / Hosting Providing, saying you are "Spamming", requesting that your account be closed. In addition you will be getting back a lot of angry email yourself ( if only 0.01% of 10 million people complain to your ISP in this manner, how long do you think it will be before you are closed down ! ). The next thing to consider is how you are going to send 10 million emails. To actually send out 10 million emails take a long time and some pretty serious hardware. If you have your own dedicated server with a high bandwidth your system can probably send out a few thousand per hour, let's assume 5,000 per hour. At this rate it is going to take 2,000 hours or 83 days to send out all those emails and that's assuming you don't get shut down first ! The reality is, at best you will get to send 20,000 before your ISP suspends your account. Now a response rate of 0.1% of 20,000 doesn't look so good does it. You will be lucky to make 1 one sale. Is this going to cover the cost of re-setting up your web site with a different host ? Never mind all the hate mail you have to deal with. The bottom line is, these purchased lists are a con, the people trying to sell them are lying to you. Don't fall for it ! Email Harvesting Software
There is software that you can buy that will "surf the net" for you recording every email address it finds. It will then allow you to send out an email to everyone on the list. Again this sounds tempting, you can have a piece of software which is running 24 hours a day, finding new customers for you and making the sales pitch all automatically. Well again this doesn't work, once again it is considered spam and can result in your ISP / Web Host closing down your site within days, if not hours. As with the purchased lists it's just not going to generate sales for you, for exactly the same reasons. The claims made by the people promoting this type of software are once again false and you should avoid them. Don't be fooled, instead invest your time and money in activities that really work.
| 
