Posts Tagged ‘permission-based email marketing’
5 Reasons Why Driving Traffic With Opt In Marketing Works So Well
If you ask 25 Internet marketers what they think the best form of traffic generation is, you will likely get 25 different answers. One of those answers (and I would say the best method) would have to be opt in marketing and listbuilding, then communicating to that group via targeted email. I know many people would argue this point, but I would disagree with all of them. Below are your five top reasons why.
* Opt-in email marketing by definition is very targeted traffic, pretty much the most targeted traffic you can get. One thing you can do to make it even more powerful is to make agreements with partners in your niche. These agreements allow each of you to refer traffic to each other. This means a lot to the audience, and they take seriously wherever they’ve been sent. People sign up for your list because they are interested in what you have to offer, with the added credibility received through this referral. It works very well.
* The subscribers are already in your niche, so you do not have to sell them on the basic subject to get them to stick around. They have already opted-in and that expresses interest in the subject. Now, all you have to do is continue to give them useful content and great offers. If you build trust, create a friendly environment, and as a result trust, buying will be a natural result down the line.
* Although you have a captive audience, don’t forget to still test your pages and always look to improve the take up rates for each stage of your process. After your traffic increases you’ll have a great amount of data to test with.
* They are a trusted audience, and they trust you. As you know a good business person must gain the trust of his customers, or they will not buy whatever he is offering. With an opt-in list, just by signing up, they have taken the first step in a long, trust-building friendship. It’s the first mental hurdle. Another way to help them move forward
* I think the major advantage of an opt in marketing campaign is the numbers. It is so much easier to build a successful list than any other way to build a customer base using other methods. The reason is that you always have that audience to communicate with when the time is right.
An opt in list is your most valuable source of recurring and controllable traffic, simply put, because of its ability to build a very targeted and responsive audience that has trust in all your communications.
I think to overlook these factors is a grave mistake to your business. So with these reasons and facts in mind, everyone who is serious about their marketing campaign should not be without an opt in list. For more information on how I added 1,982 subscribers to mine in just 9 short days, get my complementary training resource below.
How to use email marketing ethically and responsibly
E-mail marketing in this economy has to be a major strategic role in a company’s marketing efforts. If you are not using email as a medium for business marketing and communications, you are simply not taking full advantage of the Internet to position your company as an expert and sell products and services.
Most online sales strategies focus heavily on customer acquisition. Getting new customers is not cheap, howeever, meansing a smart marketer needs to work hard to cultivate repeat business from an existing customers. While SEO and PPC advertising is a great tool to find new leads, permission-based bulk email software, when used responsibly and ethically, excels at:
- Converting them to sales
- Solidifying a relationship that will produce repeat sales
Some modern email marketing techniques are:
- Autoresponders (Drip Email Marketing)
- Newsletters (Broadcast Email Marketing)
- RSS Feed Updates (blog update subscriptions, etc.)
Auto-responders
E-mail drip campaigns are a great tool to keep in your email marketing toolkit. If you have never set up a “drip campaign,” you should do so immediately. It is one marketing tool that you can truly “set it and forget it.”
The downfall of any marketing technique is if it requires too much human involvement in order to work. In a perfect world, you should try to set up a system that runs itself. With an auto-responder, you can do just that. Here’s how it can work:
- A user signs up on your website (or you add them after a phone conversation)
- They instantly get an email with a free report or instant download of some sort. For the real estate field, it could be something as simple as “Why I’ll buy your home if I don’t sell it in 15 days.” You want to create a helpful resources that readers will want to enough that they will be willing to sign up to receive it by email.
- They will get a followup e-mail – automatically – an hour later, a day later, or a week later. You can even reference an email you sent “yesterday,” even though you wrote it last year, because your autoresponder system schedules the messages for you.
- You can send more followup e-mails automatically at key time periods that you choose. You can say “A month ago, I emailed you a free guide entitled….”
Broadcast Email Marketing
Broadcast emails are distinguished from drip campaigns because they are sent as a broadcast message to the entire list at the same time. Email newsletter marketing is a great way to establish your credentials as a knowledgeable expert in your field, or simply send out product announcements and press releases. You choose the material you want in the newsletter. The key is to make it fit the interests of your users as perfectly as possible.
An email newsletter marketing system should allow for email scheduling as well. With this feature, you can write announcements in advance and have them repeat annually, such as “It’s December 1st, have you done your Christmas shopping yet?”
RSS Email Updates
RSS Feed subscriptions are a great feature for marketing blogs. While popular browsers like Firefox make subscribing to a blog feed simple, a smart e-mail marketer knows that most people don’t read their bookmarked feeds – but people do read their emails. So if a reader is interested enough in your website content to sign up for your RSS feed by email, you’re much more likely to keep him reading your blog than if he had only bookmarked it in his browser.
