When you build a website, you wait for your potential customers to come to you. When they visit, you can then provide them with the information they want as well as tempt them with some special offers so that they’ll make a purchase. But email marketing is a more proactive approach. Instead of waiting for customers to come to you, you go to them and initiate contact.
There are 3 basic steps to email marketing:
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Getting their permission
When you send emails to potential customers even though they haven’t given you their express permission, this is called spamming. Not only is it against the law, it’s also ineffective because it does nothing except to annoy your potential customers. This is why buying lists of email addresses from others is essentially counterproductive.
You can, however, use your website to get the email addresses of your visitors and get their permission to send them emails. Essentially, you offer them something for the email address. You can ask them for their email address in exchange for membership status or for freebies you offer, such as a free ebook.
Personalizing your emails
It has long been proven that sending generic emails to potential customers doesn’t work. Emails are for more personal communications, and businesses have to follow that style as well.
Some people think that personalization is nothing more than inserting the recipient’s name in the greetings instead of just using lines like, “To whom it may concern”.
But personalization can mean much more than that. You can use software to track your recipient’s location so you can send them geographically suitable messages, such as articles pertaining to a certain area or discounts offered in stores near their locations.
You can also monitor the items they spend more time with on your website, so that the bargains and the articles you send in your emails will be about those items. You can even use surveys so that you can add more data to your personal profiles for these customers.
Essentially, you have to know more about your customers, so that you can tailor your email message to make it look like you are sending them a unique message—from one friend to another. But you can also use software to this this on a bigger scale, and these programs can even space out your messages so that you can send them messages regularly every week.
Monitoring and improving your email messages
It’s not really all that easy to figure out what approach to take when you send an email message to a potential customer. Some messages are deleted immediately, others are opened and just disregarded, and there are even some messages where the customers actually click on the links you want them to click.
With email marketing, you have to know what works. It may be the words you use for your headline or the words you use in your email body. It may also be about the graphics you choose to include in your message, or the type of message you send.
Email marketing sounds simple when we put it this way, but it’s not. It takes quite a bit of time and effort, but over time you will learn how to do it the right way and this in turn will improve your bottom line.
