I’ve written a lot of email marketing themed posts over the course of this series. I’ve now taken a lot of them and put together this essential email marketing guide.
For even more email marketing tips, check out my complete resource, The Complete Email Marketing Blueprint.
Now on to the email marketing guide:
Email Marketing Guide
Week 2: How to Get Subscribers
Week 3: Setting Up An Autoresponder
Week 4: How to Use Email List Segments
Week 5: More Email Marketing Tips With Segments
Week 6: Personalized Email Marketing
Week 7: How to Use Pop Ups
Week 8: Mailing List Maintenance Tips
Week 9: Using Double Opt-In Versus Not
Week 10: Why is My Email Spam?
Week 11: What is the Best Email Marketing Software?
Week 12: How to Make Money With an Autoresponder
Week 13: What is Solo Mailing?
To kick things off, here’s a post and quick presentation which I’ve made which I’m calling the intro to the email marketing guide.
First off, let’s answer the question of why you should even care about email marketing in the first place? Ultimately, an email list enables you to do 3 essential things:
- Remain in touch with potentially an otherwise one time visitor to your site. Even if a first time visitor to your site likes your content, there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever come back. With the option of signing up for your newsletter in place, you can remain in contact with that person indefinitely and the odds that they’ll return to your site at some point and even become a customer of yours are significantly higher. You’ve gone to all of that trouble through SEO or paid advertising getting that person to your site, so you should be doing everything you can to ensure future and further contact with them.
- Develop a relationship with your new subscriber. That subscriber is no longer just another visitor to your site, they are now receiving regular emails from you through which you over deliver on great content and build a relationship of trust.
- Make money! Your subscribers are significantly more likely to contribute to your business than the traffic which your website gets each day, and you can offer your products or services interspersed in your emails with great content. When used correctly, your email list will be the most profitable tool which you have because email marketing literally will bring in the most money for your website.
If you ask any webmaster with an email list if they could go back in time and change one thing what would it be, I guarantee you that 9 out of 10 will tell you that they wish they would have started their email list earlier. This will sound a bit dramatic but it’s literally the most valuable tool at the online marketer’s disposal, yet so many still sit on it and put off starting their list.
I used to be in the same boat and I can only speak for myself, but my reasoning and excuse for not starting sooner was that it’s too time consuming or complicated or not worth the time. On the contrary, this should be your number one priority when starting a new site and for every second that you don’t have your list in place, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
It couldn’t be simpler to get started with, either. I did a little study on what is the best email marketing software and ultimately I found Aweber came out on top. Aweber makes it extremely easy and fast to get started with email marketing from creating an attractive sign up box or pop up from their hundreds of premade and fully customizable templates, publish it on your site, and get your autoresponder emails written, all for just $1 in your first month.
One important note to mention is that you should go with the best email marketing software from the start. This is because if you don’t and later on decide that you want to switch then you have to get every single subscriber to resubscribe to your new list, and you’d be shocked at the number of subscribers who won’t know to resubscribe or can’t be bothered to do it and you’ll lose half your list in the switch. Yes, I’m talking from experience, so make it a point to go with the best from the start rather than planning on switching later on. If you’re worried about the cost of running your list you shouldn’t be because when used correctly you’ll be making whatever it costs back each month hundreds of times over.
See you next Monday for more email marketing tips and check out the links to the next lesson which I’ll add each week to the beginning of this post.