Email marketing has continued to evolve online and more and more enterprises from the smallest home based business to the largest corporations on the web have made it a vital part of their Internet marketing strategy. If you’re one of the few enterprises on the Internet who have yet to introduce email advertising to their marketing arsenal then you should resolve in 2011 to make it a major part of your business plan.
Launching a successful email marketing campaign takes some preparation and planning but isn’t difficult to implement as you will see from these six steps:
1. First and foremost you need to set up a dependable autoresponder or subscribe to a reputable provider who will walk you, step by step, through the set up process. An autoresponder is a must for a successful strategy because it will create your directory of names, or the all important email list, and will respond to these addresses automatically on a regular basis as determined by you the webmaster.
2. Next you need to determine what you want to accomplish from this email advertising strategy. Is your primary objective to capture names for your list or do you want to go straight for the jugular and start making sales? Another goal could be building relationships with your potential customers before you decide to take the plunge and ask them to buy your product.
Remember people are more likely to buy from someone they feel they know and trust rather than from a perfect stranger. For this reason it may be best to wait until you’ve built a rapport with your list members before delivering the sales pitch. Which ever route you decide to take you must make up your mind before proceeding to the next step.
3. Now that you have your autoresponder in place and you know your strategy objectives you now need to write your follow-up emails to upload to your autoresponder for delivery to your list on a regular basis. These messages should provide value to your potential customers and not be too sales oriented unless this is your goal. You also don’t want to turn people off by over selling them or by emailing too often.
I’ve found a good rule of thumb to be to send an email every second day or at least three times per week. If you’ve created an ezine your articles should be related to the overall theme of your home business with each message containing links to your offers and sales page.
4. Your next step once you have your follow-up email messages loaded in your autoresponder is to start building your email list. As anyone who does business online has already heard, “the money is in the list” and, in my opinion, truer words were never spoken. The most effective list building tool in my arsenal is the squeeze page, also called the landing page or the opt-in page.
This should be the first thing your visitors see when visiting your website and it should make them a free offer such as a subscription to your ezine for adding their contact information to your opt-in box. These names are then captured by your autoresponder and added to your list. This is a great way to build a targeted responsive list which will eventually become the life blood of your home based business.
5. Now that you have your email campaign up and running you should put your traffic generation strategy into over drive and start sending hordes of targeted visitors to your home business website and your landing page. A steady flow of potential clients to your home page will begin to build your list exponentially and you will soon have the foundation laid for an effective email advertising promotion.
6. Finally, it’s very important to monitor your results on a regular basis. Check to see which email messages are yielding the most positive responses in terms of click through rates to your product. If certain messages aren’t producing the desired results it may be necessary to tweak them or to trash them entirely and start again. It’s important to learn from each campaign so you can carry this information on to your next email strategy and not repeat the same mistakes.
A successful email marketing strategy can explode your sales and profits and lay the groundwork for a long and lucrative home based business career online.