Grow Your Business In 3 Steps With Email Marketing
Email marketing can change your business, and your life. It connects you to your tribe. It helps you understand your audience’s pains and desires, so that you can plan your next marketing move. Once correctly understood and utilized, email marketing is easy, affordable, and proven to get results for your business, so that you can live the life you’ve dreamed of.
It’s a fact: email campaigns generate $43.62 in sales for every dollar spent, according to a Direct Marketing Association study.
You might say be thinking, “I have a sizeable following on my Facebook fan page,” or whatever social media you use, but putting your faith in social media could be a huge mistake. Here’s why: On average, less than 10% of the people who like your page actually see your posts. And Facebook said to expect that engagement to drop over time, unless you start paying money to “boost” your posts. In addition to that, you don’t have your fans email addresses, which means you have no direct way to contact them. Ever wonder what would you do if Facebook ever shut down? It’s possible, but to give you a less drastic possibility: what would you do if Facebook suspended your account for whatever reason? You would instantly lose touch with all of your fans or customers, with no way to contact them. They make the rules, and it’s happened before.
In this article, you will learn practical tips to help you leverage the power of email marketing to make your business more profitable.
Stop sitting back and watching other people do it.
This is a bit of advice I had to take for myself when I finally decided to start building my list. It’s easy to make excuses, but at the end of the day, everyone starts the same way: by deciding to actively recruit subscribers to their list via a sign up form. This is NOT optional, and it applies to you whether you run an online business, like a Fitness Blog, or an offline business, like a small art consignment shop. Even if you don’t have a website yet, you should still be building a list (and by the way, it’s totally possible to link a sign up form directly to your Facebook business tab so people can sign up from there, so not having a website is no excuse).
Take the time to set up an autoresponder series.
After you have signed up for an email service you like (such as Aweber or MailChimp, for example), created your first opt-in box, and started to get a trickle of subscribers, don’t just leave it at that. Collecting email addresses is all well and good, but if you don’t take action to regularly communicate with those people, then you’re missing the whole point.
This is where the concept of the “autoresponder” makes its entrance. In a nutshell, an autoresponder is a feature that allows you to send regularly scheduled, pre-written emails to your subscribers and intervals that you specify. For example, if Jane Doe signs up to be on your email list via a web form on your site, she will get an immediate follow up email asking her to confirm that she actually wants to be on your list (also known as a double opt-in). After she confirms, she will begin to get pre-set messages from you. You could have the sequence set to send her an email on day 3 that asks her what her biggest pains and struggles are. You could ask her what she wants to know or needs from you (which is great for future blog post and product planning, by the way). The following week, she might receive an email with a link to one of your most popular blogs posts, and the week after that, she could receive another useful email from you related to your niche, and so on. In time, your audience will learn to know you, like you, and trust you.
It bears mentioning that you make the emails sound personal, like they are actually coming from you (which they are!). Sounding like a corporate robot will not get you any brownie points. Be yourself, because that is precisely what sets you apart from everyone else.
Use Practical Strategies To Grow Your Email List
So, how do you make your list grow faster? This is one of the most common questions out there. Before I go into the strategies, I want to state that it is a given that you are already putting up high quality, relevant content on your site, be it articles or video. Why else would people visit, right? So if you’re not putting up useful content that can help your audience, then you need to be immediately. This is the cornerstone of your email marketing strategy.
On to the strategies:
Offer a valuable incentive to get them to opt-in. Examples include E-Guides, reports, a resource list of online tools for your niche, or a mini video or written –course delivered by email. Whatever free incentive you choose to offer, make sure it is high quality and will bring value to your audience. Even though they are not paying for it, it still needs to be helpful to them.
Next, you want to get strategic with where you put your opt-in boxes. Back in the old days, you’d get advice like, “Put your sign up forms on in the sidebar of your site, or above the fold, and you’re all set.” That is no longer enough. Put it in your sidebar, yes, and above the fold, yes, but also in your footer. Also, put an opt-in box on your About Page, which has the potential to convert quite high. Additionally, with Google Analytics, identify which of your website pages gets the most traffic, and put opt-in forms on those pages. You can also put opt-in forms on the posts get the most comments.
Now, let’s take things a step further: create special opt-in offers related to the specific content they’re reading on your most popular pages. Make it actionable. Example: if you wrote a post about being more productive with your time, offer a specific checklist they can that gives them the top 10 Time Saving Online Resources to create 4 more hours in their day. Put this special opt-in box part-way through your blog post, and then at the end. Put an exit pop-up offering it one more time as they’re about to leave the page, and make sure you state the benefit to them. Make sure they know they’ll be gaining more precious hours of their day.
Additional Note: Use pop-ups and lightboxes. Intelligently. Don’t show them a pop-up every time they come to your site. SumoMe is a free resource that integrates with Aweber, for example, and helps you increase opt-in conversions on your site. It takes pop-up boxes a bit further than a regular email marketing service provider by giving you more options for the timing of your pop-ups, and how often they appear.
Final Words
Email marketing is not a “get-rich-quick” scheme by any means. It takes work to build your list, communicate with your subscribers, build a genuine relationship with them, find out what their biggest problems are, and then build the right product to help them solve that problem. But it is absolutely worth it, and can be one of the greatest assets of your business.
Having a growing, active, happy email list + creating a product once that they essentially asked you to create = selling something over and over again that essentially get’s you out of the “dollars per hour” race. You’re happier, and your subscribers are happier. You’re providing more value to them, which makes you more proud of your business. Not only is your business healthier, but you eventually have more time freed up to live the LIFESTYLE you want because your super-targeted, awesome product is selling over and over again with the sales funnel you set up.