Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels on the Internet. You can use it to promote your websites, to interact with your customers, to make money with affiliate offers and so on. Yet, the vast majority of bloggers and website owners still neglect email marketing.
That is why I decided to write a quick guide with all you need to know to get started on email marketing. Enjoy.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses email as its communication channel. Direct marketing is an umbrella term used to describe all marketing forms that go straight to the end user, thus not passing through the traditional advertising channels, which include television, print and radio.
Companies using email marketing basically collect the email addresses of prospects and clients, and then send email messages to those subscribers, containing information about the products, special offers and so on. The company must explicitly ask permission to collect the email address and send future messages, and this is usually done with a double opt-in process (where the subscribe must fill a form with his name and email address, and then click on a confirmation link sent via email).
Why You Should Use Email Marketing
Over the last years email marketing started being used by a wide range of individuals, including bloggers, website owners, affiliate marketers and small business owners. This happened because email marketing proved to be one of the most effective marketing channels online.
Email messages get delivered straight to the subscriber (as opposed to blog posts, banner ads or online articles, which require the person to visit your website). Secondly, if you craft the content of your email newsletter carefully, you’ll be able to build a solid relationship with your subscribers, which will yield really high conversion rates (i.e., your subscribers will pay attention to what you recommend to them, and will actually take action based on it).
Finally, email marketing is very flexible, and it can be used for a wide range of purposes. You could use it to drive more traffic to your website, to promote affiliate offers, to build a relationship with your existing customers, to launch new projects and so on.
Email Marketing is NOT Spam
Many people are reluctant to start using email marketing because they associate it with spam. In other words, they believe that email marketing is the art of spamming other people and trying to make money while doing it.
This is obviously a confusion between the tool and how you use the tool. Email marketing is just a marketing tool. How you use it is a completely different story. Sure, some people use email marketing to spam, but you’ll find that most use it legitimately and ethically.
In fact if you subscribe to the email newsletter of any reputable company, blogger or online marketer I am sure you’ll be surprised by the quality of the content you’ll get from it.
It is perfectly possible, therefore, to use email marketing without annoying your users. You just need to make sure the content of your email newsletter will be top notch and relevant to your subscribers. If you do that they will actually thank you for your newsletter, and that is what modern marketing is all about.
The Effectiveness of Email Marketing In Numbers
Let’s use an example to illustrate why email marketing is such an effective marketing channel.
Suppose there are two bloggers, Mark and John. Mark focuses exclusively on growing his traffic and RSS readership, while John focuses on growing his traffic and his email list. After six months or so Mark is receiving 1,000 unique visitors per day, and has 3,000 RSS subscribers. John, on the other hand, also is receiving 1,000 unique visitors, but he has 3,000 email subscribers instead.
Now suppose both bloggers launch a paid eBook. The content and price of the ebooks is very similar. Mark promotes the launch of his eBook by writing a post on his blog about it. John, on the other hand, writes a post about the eBook but also sends an email to his list, encouraging the subscribers to purchase the eBook.
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