Email marketing is a crucial aspect of developing relationships with clients for your online business. It helps you stay in contact with them, it develops client trust and it helps keep them aware of your business.
What is Email Marketing?
When you provide products or services through a website, you want to have a system that allows customers and clients to sign up with their email address. You can then send exclusive emails or newsletters, on a mass scale, to those people. That's email marketing in a nutshell.
Email Software
There are programs that can help you set up your email marketing system. These programs help keep track of subscribers who sign up for your emails. They can also help you set up an autoresponder. These send an automatic response to someone when they sign up for your list. Aweber and G-Lock Easymail are two examples of email marketing programs that provide these services and more.
Landing Page Signup
You'll want to provide a way for potential subscribers to sign up for your email newsletter on the front page of your website or blog. Set up a space for them to type in their first name and email address on the landing page. It can be difficult to entice potential clients to sign up for a newsletter, because they're worried about receiving even more spam. Have your privacy policy available for them, and make it clear that you're not selling their email address to anyone else.
Another thing to keep in mind is that your emails and newsletters have to be valuable to them. Provide something free for them to get just for signing up for your email list, such as a free report. Your newsletters and emails should also provide great content, so they'll want to read it every time. This can range from free recipes to free marketing tips or other specialized advice.
Marketing to Your List
Once you have a list of clients, and you're sending content to them on a regular basis, how do you generate sales? One option is to provide exclusive discounts to people who sign up for your list. Another way is to poll your potential clients. Ask them questions in your email newsletter to find out what their needs are, or what their concerns and fears are. When you know these things about your clients, it places you in a better position to answer their questions and provide for their needs. Answering questions from clients lets them know you care about their needs, and helps them feel more confident in spending their hard-earned dollars with you (rather than with your competitors).
Staying Ahead of the Game
You can type up your sales letters ahead of time to market to your list. If you offer specific sales at certain times of year, such as Christmas, New Years, Independence Day or back-to-school time, you can anticipate those and write them early. You can set up your email program to launch the email at a specific time and date. As long as you're anticipating those dates, you can get the work out of the way ahead of time.
The great thing about email marketing is it can be set up to run with very little effort. Once you get the initial landing page built, you can automate the email program to do most of the work for you. Once you type your sales letters or emails, you can pre-schedule them to be published at a certain date ahead of time, which lets you pursue other marketing or business opportunities the rest of the year.
Daphne Mallory, Esq. is the co-owner of Mallory Writing Services and has written more than 100 articles helping home based business owners and entrepreneurs start and market their business. You can learn more about her here.
