Most website owners focus on building content for their websites, without understanding that email marketing is one of the most critical facets in building their profitable online business. But if you are new to the whole concept of building an online business, you are probably wondering "How do I actually create email marketing campaigns that work?" I think it's important that we first discuss why it's important to learn about email marketing and why it's critical to your success that you make it a major focus of your efforts.
Email marketing right now is probably the most powerful form of Internet communication. If you don't understand email marketing, then you are probably going to make 90% less money than you could be making if you use it effectively. And while a well set up website or blog is a great tool for attracting visitors, if you don't make the most of those visitors when they arrive at your website, you're pretty much wasting your time.
With nearly every product people buy online these days, email marketing is involved at some stage of the process. In the huge number of product launches you see going on, email is like the blood that carries the oxygen around the patient's body. It's critical that you really 'get' how to do email marketing effectively, or you're probably not going to be as successful as you could be online.
Email marketing really is such a boon to business owners, because in the past, it was really difficult to follow up with prospects and do sequences of communication without spending a fortune. Before the email revolution and before the Internet, if I wanted to follow up with my prospects over time, I would have to call somebody on the phone or write them a direct mail piece, or visit them in person, and then I'd have to track everything in a database so I know where they were in the sequence. It was doable, but it was much harder to keep track of.
But now you can use an autoresponder and program a sequence of messages that go out automatically. They get a new message every couple of days in the exact order you want them to receive them, and you can sequence the whole thing so it automatically runs in the background without you lifting a finger.
OK, so here's how to set up your email marketing system. What I'd like you to do is -
Step 1 - Sign up for an autoresponder service (you can get a good one for about $20 a month).
Step 2 - Grab a piece of paper, and write out the conversation you would have with your prospect if you visited his or her home every couple of days. This is what you would say to then if you were trying to build a relationship with them and convince them to buy your product or service. Write down all the things you'd say and include answers to all the questions they would ask, and then go ahead and turn that into an email sequence.
Now because you aren't there with them you're not going to be able to get feedback from them and answer all of their questions on the spot, so you are going to have to imagine the questions they would ask you, and you have to answer them all in our email sequence. So, write out that conversation, and write a series of autoresponder messages that build a relationship with your prospect, just like you would do in person.
Step 3 - The real key to successful email marketing is to get started RIGHT NOW. If you wait until tomorrow, if you don't sign up right now for your autoresponder account and you don't go and write out your messages, and sequence those autoresponders and start getting some sort of results right now, then chances are you're not going to ever do it.
If you follow the steps in building a properly constructed website, you WILL attract people who want to hear from you again. But you want to have this system ready BEFORE your visitors arrive. Every person who joins your email list is like money in the bank. Every extra day you put this off, it's costing you money.
So you've got to go and do it straight away - you could have this ready by tomorrow and start to have some of your website traffic opting in to your system and you can start making money by tomorrow afternoon.
Go and do this right now!
Your Action Steps
1. Choose an autoresponder account and learn how to use it.
2. Write out the conversation you'd like to have with a prospect you were trying to convince to buy your product or service. Give them all of the information they need to make a decision to purchase from you.
3. Create a subscriber sign up page. It's just another page of your site with some text and a subscriber form supplied by your autoresponder service. Important Tip - It's best to offer a bonus to help convince more subscribers to join your list because as we've said, every subscriber is worth a lot to you.
4. Go back and put an autoresponder optin form for your Newsletter on every page you've built and ask your visitors to subscribe.
It's so important that you do this, I can't stress it enough - you must focus a large portion of your time on building a list of interested prospects, and then building a relationship with them through your messages. Don't just rely on the once off visitors your website or blog brings to you, focus on having people subscribe to your newsletter (or a mini course of some kind) and you'll have a much more profitable long term business.
More Information:
Rocky Tapscott is a
Site Build It expert and coach. He has created a Free 27 page Report that teaches how to set up automated income streams using
marketing with email - Grab your Free Report now.
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