Let’s cut right to the chase: You’re here because you want to know how to grow your sales and make money with email marketing.
Am I right?
If so, let me tell you! I’m happy you’re here because you’re in the right place!
In this article, were going to discuss what is email marketing and how you can use this powerful marketing strategy at your advantage to build your list of loyal subscribers and potentially grow your sales and make money.
My goal here is to give you all I know about “Email Marketing” so that when you’re done reading this article, you’ll have all the info you need to start building your email marketing list and become an email marketing expert.
So, without further ado, let’s dive directly into our subject.
What is email marketing?
It’s a good question! Before properly using a new tool, it is always important to know what it is, how it works or what it is for.
So here’s the answer:
“Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives, to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant’s relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.”
Source: Wikipedia
Email marketing can be an effective and efficient way to reach a large group of potential customers at once and saves you lots of time in the process.
To give you a real-life example, imagine that you have a shop and each time a customer of yours buys something in your shop, you send them a message to thank them for being your loyal customers.
To be able to do that, your customers would have to give you their personal info (phone number, email address, postal address, etc.), that you would store somewhere insecure, let’s say in an excel file.
If you had to manually send a thank you message to each of them, what you would do is open the excel file where you stored your customers’ info, upload their email addresses in your personal inbox one by one then send your message to your customers one by one because free email providers like Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail don’t allow you to send broadcasts emails. It’s considered spams.
As you can imagine, sending just one “Thank you” email to your customers without using email marketing would take you days if not weeks.
But thanks to email marketing, you can send 1000, 10.000, 50.000 emails at once in with just one click of your mouse.
And the good news is that to start making a killing with email marketing, you just need 4 basic things:
- An email marketing provider service that will manage your campaigns
- A system to capture people’s emails (landing pages, squeeze pages, your blog or your website, etc.)
- A product or a service to sell
- Traffic ( to drive as many people as possible to your landing pages)
Even though it has the potential to have a high return on investment, you must understand the key components of email marketing that will allow you to reach more people than ever before.
The first thing you need to learn about email marketing is what it is really all about and if it can help you boost your business. You must learn about the benefits of this marketing strategy and how it can be used to your advantage.
First off, email marketing is extremely inexpensive and quite effective in the same way that paid to advertise is extremely effective when you know how it works.
Email marketing is also incredibly fast and powerful. It’s quick and easy to set up and does not require you to deal with manually uploading your prospect’s info one by one in the system since all this can be done automatically.
The best part about email marketing is that it is extremely flexible. It can work on any type of business regardless of its age and its size.
To make email marketing work for you, the first thing you need is to build a list. A list is just a database of people who have agreed to give you their email address (leads) and granted you permission to email them and let them know about your promotions or your offers.
Here is an example of one of my lists:
You will want to create a specific list of targeted customers and you must do it wisely to get the most benefit from your efforts.
What I mean about this is that if you want to increase your open rates, make the most of your list, your list must be targeted.
For example, if your business is about selling fitness apparel, you might want to build a list focused on people who want to lose weight or looking for a good workout.
If you’re in the fitness niche and you have a list of people who are not interested in fitness at all, you’re just wasting your time because even if you have a list of 10.000 people, it’s probable that they will never open your emails. You will never grow your sales and you won’t make that much money.
Rather, you need to make sure that your target audience is specific enough so that you can guarantee that they will be able to open your marketing emails when you send them an email or when they are looking for what you are offering.
If you don’t use email marketing, your customers might forget about you and your business or your products. They are going to still receive numerous newsletters from your competitors but not from you.
However, with email marketing, these people will never forget about you as long as you keep building a long-term relationship with them.
Once you have a list and you start emailing that list, there’s something you must never forget: customers are notoriously wary of being advertised to.
Therefore, you need to make sure that you do everything possible to make sure that your message is delivered without compromising the security of your customer list.
In order to ensure that customers are safe, it’s important that you take steps to protect their email addresses and to make sure that they feel comfortable giving you their names and addresses. This may sound like an overbearing and intrusive measure, but it really is not.
Another reason why you should use email marketing is that you can save money by using it as your primary means of communication. This is a proven fact that many companies have already found to be true.
The fact is that even small businesses are realizing the value of email addresses. By using email marketing, you can get a larger group of customers who are willing to buy more products, at lower prices.
The main benefits of email marketing
Most companies need to know how to improve their email marketing campaigns if they want to become successful. But what exactly are the benefits of email marketing? Below is a shortlist of the benefits of email marketing:
Great targeting and its effectiveness
The biggest benefit of email marketing is that it allows users to target their campaigns. The messages in an email campaign can be specific or general depending on the recipient’s interests.
Through their email address, users are given access to a wide range of information that they can use in order to determine their budget allocation and plan the best way to go about reaching out to potential customers.
Prices are very affordable
With the evolution of technology and the arrival on the market of new players, email marketing has become accessible to practically everyone. Prices are more and more affordable.
Today, you can start your marketing campaign in stride for just $ 30 a month with companies like GetResponse or Convertkit. Or, if you want an all-in-one package for $99 a month with Kartra, you can build your entire business without necessarily spending a fortune.
Email helps market your business 24/7
The main purpose of an email campaign is to increase the sales and profits of its users. Since a customer or client has already expressed interest in the product or service that you have to offer, the first thing that you can do to get more attention is to send out emails.
Since consumers read their emails every day and everywhere it is extremely important to market your business in an appropriate manner. You can reach your customers 24/7.
Email is your most valuable asset.
If you’ve been online for a few times now, you’ve probably already heard the phrase that says “Your email list is your most valuable asset online”.
Your social media accounts don’t belong to you. They can shut you down when they want and it doesn’t matter if you’re just getting started or if you’re an influencer with millions of followers. Your email list is the only thing that really belongs to you.
You keep everything under your control
It is no longer necessary for businesses to hire expensive media companies to create an effective email campaign for them. Instead, it is now possible to choose from a wide range of email marketing services that offer a wide range of solutions that include the creation of effective emails and follow-up marketing.
With this, you don’t have to do anything but simply get your business to be seen. Also, you don’t need a team of tens of people to deploy your campaigns. you can do everything by yourself. You keep everything under your control and you can email your list whenever you feel like to.
It’s measurable
Today most email marketing providers give you the opportunity to track your campaigns and therefore measure your results. Depending on the number of people you email to, you can see how many gave opened your email, how many have clicked in your link and even how many have made a purchase.
Good ROI compares to many other marketing channels
For every dollar invested in email marketing, the average return is over $40 ($44.25, to be precise), according to certain sources.
As an email campaign becomes more successful, it becomes increasingly necessary to keep up with it. This is because the user is actually interested in the product or service that you have to offer and wants to know more about it.
So there are a lot of options that you can take advantage of. You can do nothing more than to follow up after the first couple of emails you send to your audience.
Then, you will be able to determine which recipients are still interested by your emails and which ones are not. Then, you can send follow-up emails until they are fully interested in your services or products.
There are many benefits of email marketing, but as I told you, one of the major benefits is that it helps to ensure that a business is remembered.
This can be done by remembering those that follow up to give your business the proper attention it deserves. If they never did and you have a small percentage of no-followers, then you will not only be remembered but also make sure that your emails are well-received.
There are several companies that offer email marketing services that can be tailored to fit any kind of business or organization.
The online marketing company that you use to undertake your email marketing needs should be able to help you tailor your campaign to suit your specific requirements. You can tailor it to include as many follow-up messages as you want to which can be sent to all those people who haven’t responded.
You can even customize the content of these messages in order to make them look more appealing.
In the business, we call that A/B testing… or segmenting your list.
You can make sure that your message will reach its intended target audience if you follow the above-mentioned tips. Aside from this, there are different follow-up strategies that can also be incorporated into your campaign.
However, there are some things that you have to remember when you are conducting your follow-up emails. First of all, you need to focus on getting responses from your clients and prospects.
This can be achieved by sending your email campaign at a time that suits their needs and preferences without spamming your list.
This is one of the most important aspects of your campaign, as the main purpose is to grow your business while providing help and value to your customers. Through this, you will also be able to reach out to a larger number of prospects. Always be honest in your follow-up campaign.
Most importantly, be consistent when it comes to your follow-up strategy. Having a daily follow-up will allow you to determine if the campaign is successful or not.
Another advantage of email marketing is that it can offer a huge quantity of exposure that will be effective especially when your target audience is spread across the globe. Due to this fact, you can easily reach your potential customers even in remote areas.
Related content:
4 Top email marketing services that will help you boost subscribers and sales
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How to make money blogging: 10 Ways bloggers actually make money (Part 2/2)
How to grow your sales with email marketing
Many bloggers I follow today and who make more than $10.000 per month say that they would never be able to reach that level of income if they did not have an email list.
So there’s no doubt that email marketing still works and that heir email list is their most important source of income.
This confirms to me that as the saying goes, “the money is in the list”.
But at this point, you may ask yourself: “How to grow your sales with email marketing?”
That’s a good question because knowing how to make more sales let it be with email marketing or any other type of marketing can be one of the most effective ways to increase your business and of course, to make more money.
Email marketing is not all that complicated, and once you get the hang of it, it becomes the easiest way to market. The reason for this is that people are more likely to respond to a personal message from you than they are to a commercial they saw on TV because if you have taken the time to build a real relationship with them, chances are they know you and they trust you.
And if you are able to convert those people into customers, your sales numbers can shoot up dramatically. This is the real secret you need to know if you want to grow your business and your sales with email marketing.
Having your own list of loyal subscribers can also help you get even more targeted leads into your sales funnel.
So if you sell computers, the people that sign up for your list are going to be more than happy to receive emails promoting your computers, and if they have opted-in to your email list, then you can reach them by personal emails and pitch your computers to them. Since they are targeted, they will click on your links and buy your computers.
Let’s say you have a list of 1000 subscribers. And only 10% of your subscribers open your email, click on your link and buy your computers.
That’s 100 sales you can potentially make sending just one email. Depending on how much you make per sale, you can quickly go home with $500, $1000 or even more with just that one broadcast email you sent.
It’s a good idea to have some sort of lead capture page on your website. This will help build your trust with your readers, and it will also get them to click through to your opt-in form to join your list.
To give you an example here’s what looks like my lead capture form:
So, please make sure to subscribe to my blog below so we can keep in touch.
I used Kartra to build it in 5 minutes…
One of the main keys to succeed with email marketing is learning how to become more aware of what your customers want, and if you can provide that, your business will always be on top of its game. You must have a marketing plan that you implement on a daily basis.
You should constantly update your customers about what you are doing, and what your customers think about your products and services, on a regular basis. In other words, you need to communicate with your customers constantly.
Remember, creating constant relationships with your customers will only be helpful to you in the long run. When you do this, you will never regret the efforts that you put into learning how to grow your sales with email marketing.
The final key to success is to remember that you have a responsibility to stay in touch with your customers. You should have a letter that you send out every so often, reminding them of the things that you are doing to help them improve their lives.
Now that you have learned how to grow your sales with email marketing, it’s just a matter of consistently sending out these messages to keep your sales number up. The more sales you make, the more you’ll be able to invest in new products and technology that will help your business to grow even more.
How to Get Started with Email Marketing
If you are new to the concept of internet marketing, then you may be looking for a practical solution for the creation of your first list. Fortunately, there are a number of different options you can consider. Some work better than others, so there is no one right answer.
To get started with email marketing, most of the case here’s what you will need:
- 1. A system to capture email addresses (leads) using opt-in forms
- 2. An email marketing service provider
Many small and large businesses have realized the value of collecting email addresses in order to test different types of marketing campaigns. A single email can reach thousands of subscribers, and this information can be sent out in various forms. This provides a chance to generate hundreds or even thousands of dollars in revenue.
While there are several different ways to get email addresses, you may find yourself overwhelmed by the options available. There are a number of different ways that a website owner can go about putting together a list of email addresses.
Before you get started, find a good product that will encourage your readers to take action. This could include suggestions on ways to grow their online business, how they can lose weight or take care of their dog. It could be a simple newsletter, free e-books, or a giveaway.
In the industry, that’s what we call “Lead magnets”.
Yes! You get the point. If you want people to give you their valuable information. You must give them something valuable first.
Once your lead magnet is in place and that people start subscribing to your list, it is important to ensure that the information is kept in a secure place and that it’s confidential.
This includes providing a link to a privacy policy page on the website that collects the data. You should also provide the addresses to the proper resource for validation purposes.
Once you have a list of email addresses, it is necessary to use the information to help grow your business. What most marketers do is that they create a newsletter, offer a free e-book, or offer sweepstakes to build traffic.
You can try these strategies too. Once these strategies are completed, you can begin to develop relationships with the people that sign up for your lists.
Many people sign up for a free trial with a website but do not receive information from them. This has happened to me many times and maybe to you too.
This can leave the person confused as to whether or not they can use the service that they purchased the information from. This is why it is important to make sure the information provided is legitimate and helpful.
In order to start with email marketing, you will need to have in place a system that will allow you to collect information about your prospects.
There are many different ways to collect this information, and you should find a way that suits your needs and your budget. But in most cases, you will need an opt-in form just like the one I use and that I have shown you above.
It is important to take the time to gather the information so that it can be helpful in your efforts to sell more products.
Today most email provider services will give you all the resources you need to go from being a complete newbie to becoming an email marketing expert.
Now, let’s see how you can start capturing more emails with an opt-in form:
1. How to capture email addresses (leads) using opt-in forms
There are many different methods to capture email addresses. But as I told you, using an opt-in form can be one of the best options you have for this purpose.
Having a mailing list is essential if you want to make money with email marketing. This is because people have grown accustomed to receiving offers of products and services through email marketing campaigns.
An opt-in form is one of the most popular ways to capture email addresses. It allows you to send out emails without giving the recipient any reason to unsubscribe.
To use this method effectively, you need to make sure that the opt-in form is set up in such a way that it is very simple to use. The form should look attractive and have everything you need to fill out to be able to capture email addresses.
The minimum necessary fields, you should be able to ask the user to enter into the form include their name, email address, mailing address, and phone number. Any additional fields are superfluous and only hinder the creation of the form and the email marketing campaign as a whole.
Since you have already provided the basic information required in order to create an opt-in form, you should try to include some forms of proof in order to create trust with the user.
Proof could consist of a link to a landing page that can help the customer obtain more information about your company or product before making a purchase or before they give you their personal info.
You might also give them the option to opt-out. This will make it easy for the customer to unsubscribe from the list at any time should they choose not to follow the link or they decide to do so.
Other things you can do to create a good opt-in form are to allow a summary of what your offer is like at the beginning of the form.
By including this information, you can give your potential customers a place to get started when they fill out the form and get to know what your email marketing campaign is all about.
Many forms have a pre-set field where they can enter information, which will help to eliminate the time involved in completing the entire form.
In addition, these pre-set fields are usually more appealing than the entire form, so even those who are pressed for time will find this feature useful.
If you are going to offer a free service or product, your opt-in form will have to be designed around that idea as well. Making the user signs up for your email marketing newsletter will be the easiest way to do this, but once they do, you can direct them to an incentive to keep them coming back to your website.
If you are going to be sending out emails to a list of email addresses, you should consider including a form where they can subscribe to your list.
This makes your site even more appealing to the customer, and it makes their experience even easier since they do not have to manually sign up for your newsletter each time they want to receive an email.
As you can see, an opt-in form is an effective way to build a list. By creating an opt-in form, you are ensuring that your customer gets the information they need to be able to continue to purchase your products in autopilot mode.
2. How to choose an email marketing service provider
What is an email provider service?
An email provider service is similar to a web hosting company. It offers you email management tools for a flat monthly fee. It allows you to manage emails for your web site or email lists.
It allows you to choose how to manage the messages and emails sent to your customers.
This type of email provider service is perfect for a business that needs to handle a large number of emails.
There are many different ways to choose an email marketing service provider. Before you make any decisions, you need to know what it is that you want and you need to know how you will be using the service.
The first step in deciding how to choose an email marketing service provider is to think about what it is that you want:
- Do you just want an email service?
- Or do you want an autoresponder that will send your emails out on a regular basis plus the possibilities to benefit from many other features?
In most cases, the autoresponder will be more cost-effective. If you just want an email service, an autoresponder will not be necessary. All you need to know is how often you want to send out your emails. You will probably not need to track every date of the week or even every month.
Most email service providers have something called a sender-friendly interface. This means that the emails are more responsive to your customers. They will be more likely to open and read your emails if you took the time to build a targeted list as I told you earlier.
The next step in deciding how to choose an email marketing service provider is to determine how much you can afford to spend per month. If you choose to go with a service like Kartra for example, here’s what you must expect to pay each month depending on the options you go with:
If you’re just getting started, you will soon realize that things can quickly become expensive. But once you start getting some return in investment, this type of service can quickly become your most important investment.
Remember that there are some companies that do not charge for a particular type of email campaign, but they will charge more if you do more. If you are just starting out and not ready to pay for an entire campaign, you may want to consider using a free service to get you started.
Another consideration in choosing an email marketing service provider is how you will manage your email campaigns. This is something that will vary from company to company. The best thing to do is to find one that allows you to set up alerts.
This can help you manage your business emails and when they are sent out, you can be alerted to them.
The last step in deciding how to choose an email marketing service provider is to figure out how much time you want to put into managing your email campaigns. Most companies offer tools to help you manage them.
You should also find one that gives you the ability to track them. You can also use them as a tool to help you grow your business and track the progress of your marketing campaigns.
By thinking about these aspects you can go about choosing an email marketing service provider that is right for you. It should be something that allows you to manage your email campaigns and track the progress of your campaign. Remember to take your time before making any decisions and also find one that gives you tools that are easy to use.
Among the best email marketing providers that exist in the market today, we have:
- Aweber
- Convertkit
- GetResponse
- Kartra
- And many more…
How to grow your email list fast
There are various techniques to grow your email list and get tons of leads. But the first thing I recommend is to master how to drive traffic to your website.
Traffic can be generated from different sources such as paid listings, paid advertising, from customers, or even from social media or search engines.
There is free traffic and paid traffic. I recommend using a mixte of both if you have the budget. To grow my blog and build my list, right now I’m focusing a lot on Pinterest traffic.
Here is the kind of traffic I’m getting from Pinterest alone :
Conclusion
Building a larger list with thousands of subscribers is not easy. It takes time and effort. The key to growing your business is to keep your email list growing and to do this, you must understand how to promote and build your email list.
The first thing you must do to make sure your email list is growing at a rate you want is to find where your targeted audience is hanging out then go try to bring them to your landing page.
Some methods are more effective than others but finding a way to get prospects interested in your product is the way to go. Once you find your leads, follow up with them to get them to sign up for your list.
The biggest mistake that many new marketers make is not establishing a consistent newsletter or autoresponder to maintain their email list active.
The newsletter is important because it allows you to send periodic emails to your subscribers with important information about your products and services.
The autoresponder is important because it keeps you on top of your customers and keeps them coming back to your site. Without these two tools, you will not be able to grow your email list.
Many marketers overlook the importance of social networking. The number of people using Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest is very large, and this is only going to increase as people continue to grow and the number of social networks continues to increase.
Find ways to leverage these networks to grow your list because your customers are already there.
When you send out promotions, do not forget to create sales pages. These sales pages allow you to easily capture and send information to your subscribers. You can even use these pages to email their friends about what you have to offer.
Your business is better served by having a consistent marketing plan. This will help to keep your subscribers happy and content. Make sure that you don’t run out of ideas when it comes to marketing, or you will lose sales.
The goal is to build a list that is large enough to cater to all of your clients. A large list allows you to turn every prospect into a customer.
I hope this article will help you get started with email marketing the right way. If you liked it, make sure to share it to spread the world.
Also, if you think that I forgot to mention certain important elements on what is email marketing and how it works, don’t hesitate to let us know by commenting below.