|
Email Marketing - The Backbone of
Online Sales
A Critical Part of Your On-Line
Marketing Mix
Paul Smithson - 28th October 2008
Email marketing
is probably the most critical component of the vast
majority of extremely successful online businesses.
I’m not talking about spam, or unsolicited bulk email -
that is obviously a complete no-no for any ethical
marketer with an ounce of integrity. No, I’m talking about
emails that are sent to a list of people who have opted in
to receive your information.
This could be a list you’ve built through
offering incentives. It could be a list of previous
customers. It could even be a list of people who have
signed up because they like you and want to hear what you have
to say. But the point is, they’ve signed up to receive
information from you for some reason.
Building a list is absolutely crucial,
because it increases the lifetime value of the customer.
Studies have shown that most people don’t buy a product the
first time they see an ad for it. It may take several times of
being exposed to a particular product for a person to finally
make the decision to buy it.
If you don’t build a list of prospects,
then you could be losing out on hundreds, or even thousands of
sales each year. By building a list, you can expose your
subscribers to your offers multiple times, and you can also
expose them to other offers. This increases your chances
of making multiple sales from a single
customer.
Almost any type of business trading online
can benefit from using email marketing just by building a list
of their existing customers. This list is incredibly valuable,
because these people are proven buyers. They’ve proven
that they’re willing to buy online, and that they’re willing to
buy from you. By collecting their email addresses, you
can mail them information about new merchandise, sales, and
special offers.
Information marketers can greatly benefit
from building a list. You can build a list of previous
buyers or people who have simply opted in to receive a free
report or other incentive. Not only will you be able to market
your own products to these lists, but you’ll be able to use
your list as an incentive to get people to JV with you, and
also as a powerful method of promoting affiliate
products.
Even if you only run AdSense-style
information websites, you can benefit from the power of email
marketing. Let’s say you run a site about trout fishing.
You provide articles and information about it, and you have
AdSense and a few affiliate ads on your site. If you fail to
build a list of your visitors, you’ll probably only have a
single chance to sell to them, which is the first time they
visit your site. Most people don’t return to small niche
sites, unless you have unusually sticky content such as a forum
or a blog that’s updated regularly.
If you grab their email addresses when they
are first on your site, you’ll have the ability to market to
them over and over for a long time. Just make sure you
provide solid content when sending out your mailings so as to
minimize opt-outs and to keep people reading the messages you
send out. People who visit content sites are usually more
finicky about the newsletters and mailings they receive, and
will want to receive good content on a regular basis, not just
sales letters.
No matter what type of online business
you’re running, you’ll benefit greatly by adding email
marketing to your repertoire. You’ll increase the lifetime
value of your customers, and provide yourself with an ongoing
way to monetize them.
About Paul Smithson -
Paul Smithson is the founder of Intellimon and the driving
force behind the best-selling XSitePro web site development
tool. Since graduating in Business Strategy and Direct
Marketing from two of Europe’s leading business schools, Paul
has set up five multi-million dollar companies, one of which is
now owned by the BBC. His areas of expertise include business
strategy, e-commerce, on-line and off-line marketing, software
development, and maximizing the potential of on-line
businesses.
For more information about
this, and many other Internet Marketing-related
topics, visit Paul Smithson's site, www.xsitepro.com. |
Source:
http://www.xsitepro.com/email-marketing-the-backbone-of-online-sales.html
Print this page
|
Bookmark this
page
|