Email marketing is the hidden gold that a lot of websites never ever take advantage of and the only question that I have is “Why?” email is one of the least expensive ways to marketing yourself so whether you are running a personal blog or a corporate website it doesn’t make sense NOT to collect emails and build your email list. There are a lot of service providers who offer email marketing services such as MailChimp, Aweber and GetResponse but more importantly is the concept of email list building. Email marketing is a form of what is known as “Direct Marketing” because it involves directly marketing towards potential customers.
One very interesting statistic about email marketing is that for every dollar spent on email marketing the average return on investment (ROI) is $57.25 (according to the Direct Marketing Association and Jupiter Research Inc.). That means that for every dollar that you spend on email marketing you can expect an average of $57.25 back in your pocket. All other types of online non-email marketing don’t even come close to this in terms of return on investment which is $22.52 ROI on every dollar spent.
Opting In
Currently the biggest problem with email marketing and advertising is that pesky four letter word “SPAM”. I am sure that you hate it as much as I do and for some reason we all keep on receiving it in our inboxes, every day, more and more SPAM. When you build your email marketing list the concept of “opting-in” is important. Opt-in email marketing is a type of permission marketing where the person who signs up receives an email asking them to click a link and verify themselves. This is a sort of handshake protocol and this is something that I do with email marketing and email list building on SpicyWebDesigners.com to avoid the problem of spamming anyone unnecessarily. Once you’ve got this in place on your website and you start collecting email addresses and information you can rest assured that when you send out an email to your email list that no one will complain about receiving SPAM.
When else does email marketing involve?
For you to get started with email marketing you are going to need a few things to be able to do it successfully.
Email List Building Software – You can use any number of email marketing software vendors including MailChimp (This is the one that I personally use), Aweber, GetResponse and the list goes on. These vendors provide a number of tools from online form creation to simply manually updating your email list with confirmed email addresses and names (Make sure that you ask whomever you add to your email marketing list before you do; if you don’t this is seen as SPAMMING). The great thing about these vendors is that they follow the CAN-SPAM act that was passed to protect email marketers and people from being spammed. The pricing of the services and software offered to help you build your email marketing list does vary from vendor to vendor so you will need to do your homework. As I said before I use MailChimp to build email lists and I chose this particular email list building and marketing software because of its integration capabilities, its API and the fact that I can integrate Google Analytics to track the success of email blasts.
Email Capture Forms – If you are running a website and building an email list then you are going to need to capture those names using a form. Having your visitors complete the action of signing up to your email list is very important if you are building email lists… its life and death actually. Think about it, if no one signs up to your email list how are you ever going to be able to effectively use email marketing to promote things happening on your website, capture those visitors who came to your website once and never returned or develop this particular medium into a reliable source of leads and eventual customers.
Content – Some professional email marketers use content to “Squeeze” names out of their visitors. As you can imagine this is very hard to do without some well written content whether it’s an excellent offer or an exclusive guide. You need something that is going to make your visitors think “Hey, I really want that!” or “You mean all I have to do is sign up to your email list to receive that… Done!”
Something to sell! – For the guys and gals out there who are looking to use email marketing to sell then having something to sell is also important. If you are just sending out email blasts to share information then this may not be as important for you. If you’ve developed your own product then you may want to promote it during an email campaign however if you don’t have your own products you are not completely out of luck. It is entirely to become an affiliate of someone else’s successful product and with affiliate programs paying between 10% and 50% per sale it’s possible to do very well using this method of marketing. This is also the reason why email marketing is so lucrative compared to all other forms of online marketing. Let me give you a brief example of what I’m talking about here…
You Sell 20 products using an affiliate marketing program
Profit per sale is $25
Email marketing costs are $30 per month for up to 2500 Subscribers
Total profit is $500 – $30 = $470.00
Total ROI is 1666.67%
There is a lot of information written on the subject of email marketing, tons actually, and depending your goals when email marketing here are a few sources of further information that may help you to better understand its use in your website, online business, blog or web presence…
RSS Email 2.0 – Turn One Time Visitors into Regular Readers!
RSS Email 2.0 is a collection of videos which shows how to add rss feed in the blog as well as how to create a email subscribers list and broadcast the blog posts to the subscribers.
Now only
$17.00
(click here for all the information)
Enjoy building your profitable email marketing lists. Like I said before I personally use MailChimp, its very user friendly and has a lot of great features and their basic account is complete FREE to sign up for! What do you have to lose?
Luc Arnold
Ready? Set? Go! and build your email lists!
