Thursday, February 12, 2009
A standard issue email marketing package – part 2
By Mike Lake
In part 1 of this series, we discussed the benefits of implementing an email campaign: It’s a very cost-effective means of communicating with your market and of positioning yourself as a thought leader in your industry. All without pushing unwanted sales pitches on your audience. We suggested a few resources for getting underway and provided some guidance for your content. We left off with the thought that the topics of the email examples we recommended sounded very similar to Blog titles.
In fact, that is just one example of how email marketing can integrate so well with other forms of social media. After all, getting your content out to your email list is great, but getting that content out to the rest of the world is better, right? It brings people back to your site and hopefully builds your list and, therefore, the number of potential prospects for your product or service.
We’ve written a primer on getting started in blogging for your business, so feel free to read that post to get you started. The point here is that you can write a post for your blog and then use that post as content for your email. After all, don’t assume that the people on your email list are all reading your blog. They probably aren’t, so let’s get them going there. It saves you time by re-purposing your content AND gets more traffic going to your site. In fact, some very successful email marketers simply send out their blog posts every few days or every week as their email content.
So, now you’ve got periodic emails regularly going out to your list. How do you continue to build that list outside of adding the people to whom you become introduced in the normal course of your business day? Remember: Your list is your database for potential clients, affiliates and partners, and therefore, arguably one of your business’s most valuable resource. In the old days (just a few years ago), the primary way to attract new customers was to spend a great deal of your hard earned cash on push advertising using television, radio, newspapers and magazines. Those mediums are still valuable, but email marketing, when done right, can be an exponentially more cost-effective means of attracting qualified people to your product or service.
Back to building your list. Your next step should be to put a short form on your web site so that visitors can add themselves (opt-in) to your email list 24/7. To increase the effectiveness of your subscriber opt-in process, think of some valuable piece of information that you give them in exchange for submitting their name and email address to you. Yeah… a bribe! Go back to part one of this series and look at the example email content subjects. Any of those would work well for this purpose.
To expand upon those examples, a law firm could create a report entitled, “Inheritance: Protecting your lifelong assets for your loved ones.” A real estate agent could create, “Secrets to finding wealth-creating real estate assets in a down economy”. And a home heating oil/AC service company could create, “5 year-round cash saving tips you can do yourself for pennies”. As you would for email content topics, think of common questions or problems experienced by your customers, or mistakes you see customers commonly making. Think of a topic, create the product and have your webmaster post the PDF (or video if you’re a bit more ambitious!) and start promoting that link.
How do you promote that link throughout the Internet so that people opt in to your list? Hint: It has a lot to do with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media of which you haven’t yet taken full advantage. We’ll cover that in depth for you in part 3.
February 12th, 2009 at 8:18 am
Hello.
I like your site and wanted to know if you would be interested in exchanging blogroll links.
Thanks in advance