A website that is attractive to visitors and conducive to purchasing has plenty of white space and pages which load quickly and effectively but, most of all, contains a ‘call for action’ such as a squeeze page for collecting names and email addresses, advising potential customers that you will never rent out their personal details, that you follow the CAN-spam rules and ensure you only send out to double opt-in clients. When you have sent in emails inviting people to visit your website and to buy from you do you ensure that you have payment methods correctly set up so you can send customers through to PayPal, or World Pay or any of the other online facilities for collecting payments? Are you able to receive credit cards and do you offer a money back guarantee? Would a purchaser using your site feel safe shopping with you? So, how do you develop that credibility and convey to people that you are worth a few minutes of their time?
As you consider beginning your email campaign dwell over what people would like to see, not what you want them to see. There is nothing more irritating than one of those obviously bulk emails from somebody’s ill-designed auto-responder campaign. My own pet hate, apart from the brusque rudeness of the mindless auto-responder campaigners, is the constant bombardment of emails and the obvious naïveté showing through of brand-new squeaky clean email marketers who seem to have been lulled into the false impression that a few clumsy emails will bring in pots of money and all their problems will be over. They are misled into believing email marketing is easy and does not entail much work. My advice here is that email marketing is extremely effective and can earn you a good income but you need to understand the concept behind it and it is jolly hard work. It is just as much of a full-time job as any bricks-and-mortar business.
There are certain times of the year when email marketing ‘drops off’. In other words, if you are not receiving emails at a certain time of year there is usually a pretty good reason for it. School holidays, religious festivals, Thanksgiving, these are just a few times when advertising is less effective. You need to concentrate your efforts on a time when people would actually want to see something new and have the time to spare. Basically, get to know what market segmentation is and put it into practice. It is worth the effort and it lets you focus your mind on your own target market.
Email marketing is not just about sending out an avalanche of emails to prospects. Effective email marketing involves disseminating newsletters, marketing information, training and study guides, or other customer information that could increase your sales and, in this game, being covert is paramount – people do not like being sold to. Provide the information in such a way that the customers decide for themselves that they must have the product and your sales will go through the roof.
The key, however, is good email marketing. Take newsletters, for instance. Make it attractive, with a good design, eye-catching graphics and catchy little headings. The idea is to guide the reader’s eye downwards and onwards – if they keep reading long enough they will begin to identify with the product. Nowadays there are innumerable template services out there in e-space. You can either pay for the design to be done for you or you can obtain one of the many templates which are given away free.
If you are unable to write HTML then obtain one of the WYSIWYG software creations on offer – again, many of them are free. WYSIWYG [meaning ‘what you see is what you get’] allows you to cut and paste the information you want to put into your newsletter into your WSIWYG editor then, with a click, your WSIWYG editor converts plain English [or any other language it is compatible with] into beautiful web-ready HTML text. You can add background, sound, pictures, attachments, subscribe buttons plus many more features such as that silly little wizard floating around the page, and produce a very professional looking newsletter.
You can, of course, employ a professional email marketing service to do the work for you. They have the knowledge to incorporate all of the above features, add trackers, click-through monitors, and conversion ratings amongst other details. Making use of professional email marketing allows you to have much more time available for the work you prefer to do and are probably better at doing. Professional email marketing newsletters incorporate articles and information how-to’s and assist you in tailoring a marketing service most appropriate to your own business.
What you really need to get out of email marketing is increased business, more web traffic and, ultimately, more customers who return again and again. The key to business is customers: the key to web traffic is also customers. The key to customers is acquiring a large mailing list, keeping in touch with them on a regular basis and monitoring the results. This works better if your email marketing campaign is friendly and you are able to develop a relationship with each of your subscribers. Success in email marketing does not just mean acquiring customers, it means keeping those customers.
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