Effective Email Marketing

If you own a website, then the next best thing you need to do is to build rapport with the visitors of your website. You do this by investing in email marketing. Email marketing is all about sending commercial email messages to a group of people who have given their permission to receive those emails.

Email marketing can help turn a visitor to your site into a potential customer. A visitor to your site may be looking for information related to his/her problems. He/she may read an article on your website that addresses the problem. If your website is selling a product or service that helps to alleviate the problem, then the visitor may buy the product or service you are offering to help them overcome their problem. There are many factors that affect the customer's decision on purchasing your product. It may be due to the price or the problem they are facing may not be that severe (i.e. they could do something to get temporary relief from the problem). Either way, Email Marketing is designed to let potential customers know that your website is offering information that addresses their need or problem.

Click here for a free "Growing Your Business with Email Marketing" guide.

The average visitor to your website will probably leave your website forever after reading a couple of articles instead of buying your product or service. Most potential customers look for solutions that are free instead of paying for a product or service. If you want to sell products or services to your website visitors, you will need to build rapport with the customer and educate them about the products you are selling. The best way to build a relationship with your customer is to get their email address. Once you have their email address, you can contact them whenever you want and educate them about the benefits of your product or service.

Contacting and sending personalised emails to each and every one who subscribes to your newsletter is virtually impossible if you grow your list into the hundreds or thousands. In this case, you need to send personalised commercial emails. The problem is, your potential customer's in-boxes may be flooded with promotional emails from various companies in your niche, especially in a competitive marketplace. It is very common to find your emails arriving with other marketers. Each email has the same goal: sell a product or service. You need to make sure your email stands apart from those other emails (which will be marked as spam by the potential customers) you need to provide informative FREE content to your readers.

Informative FREE content in your commercial emails will have bits and pieces of information for getting rid of the problem the customer is facing. You can include solutions that give temporary relief to the customer (something they can implement immediately for temporary relief). Once the customer finds that the information in your emails actually works, he/she will begin to think of investing in your products or services. The first 2 to 3 emails should focus on the solution for the problem and indirectly hinting to your customer about your products. Most customers will purchase your product by then. You can also give them special reductions that will expire after a time period in order to increase the urgency in buying the product.

You can learn a lot about your customer by observing the response rate and other statistics of the emails you send. With the help of professional auto-responders, you can do split tests of your emails. You can divide your email subscribers into groups and send a different set of mails to each group. Even a slight change in the subject lines can increase the open rate of your emails to 70%.

As an internet marketer you cannot shy away from email marketing. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and other social media advertising can only bring a potential customer to your site. The only way to make a visitor into a customer is by building a relationship with them. Email marketing is the best way you can help visitors with their problem and turn them into a customer. If you are effectively using the technology available today within email marketing, then the customer can be converted to a repetitive buyer of your products or services.

The number one warning about email marketing is to make sure you are only adding email addresses to your list with their permission. Using a "double opt-in" is currently the easiest and safest way to make sure you are obtaining the clients permission to send them future emails. Any other way could back-fire on you and you could be banned from your auto-responder if you are not obtaining permission before sending emails to others.

Email marketing, when done correctly, will turn website visitors into customers. Email marketing will help you to build rapport with your email list and sell products and services to your email list. Not every person on your list will buy from you. But if you are continually offering quality information to your list, the majority will probably purchase something at some point in the future. Just be sure you are not sending so many emails that it becomes labelled as "spam" by your email list.

I personally do not like to send more than 2-3 emails per week - and that is just for the coaching lessons. If I am only sending informative emails to my list, it is no more than 2 per week. Just enough to keep my name in front of the potential client and to provide quality information to them on a regular basis.

Bottom line, if you are not doing email marketing, you probably will have a very difficult time in Internet Marketing. The old adage is absolutely true: "The money is in the list." Communicate consistently with your list with quality communications and you will reap a very nice reward.

Click here for a free "Growing Your Business with Email Marketing" guide.

By Robert Thibodeau  - Article Source: EzineArticles.com/9491252