What’s Your Email Marketing Strategy?
To some “email marketing” might sound like just another buzzword. To others, you know it’s essential to your business.
The truth is, if you’re not incorporating email marketing into your content strategy, you’re losing customers. In fact, it wouldn’t be too far off base to say you’re bleeding revenue.
I know that may sound a little dramatic. Yet, the numbers speak for themselves.
Look at this recent Roper Poll.
On behalf of the Custom Content Council, Roper polled 1000 consumers about content marketing—custom content created exclusively for that company. Emails, white papers, video, etc. all play an important role in educating your prospects.
According to the poll results, over three-quarters of respondents said they “understand the company is selling something, but that’s fine as long as the information is valuable.”
Three-quarters!
And, for those of you planning your content strategy over the next few months, it gets even better.
“Nearly three-quarters said they preferred to get information about a company in a collection of articles rather than an ad.”
If over 750 people out of a 1000 are happy to learn about your company when it accompanies useful and informative information, it sounds like it’s time to hone your content marketing strategy. Yes?
Content Marketing for the Small Business
This is good news because once your marketing foundation is laid, you can pretty much automate much of it. When you add a new product or service, you just add some new material around those and your prospects learn about them—especially if you have a strong email marketing presence.
So, what if you’re running a small business and don’t know where to start?
Start With One Method
Your content marketing strategy can include email marketing, webinars, teleconferences, white papers, case studies and numerous other tools in the content arsenal.
However, if you’re not doing any of those, yet, you’ll have to start with the basics, a well optimized and user friendly website that answers questions your audience has and presents your business as the solution.
If you’re not sure what that means, download this questionnaire.
Next, You Want to Build Your List with Email Marketing
In conjunction with making sure your website is making the most sales possible, you need to build your list.
The best way to do this is to capture email addresses by offering something of value—a video, a Special Report, a white paper, or an ecourse delivered in a series of informative, useful autoresponders.
Autoresponders are a great way to provide useful content to your audience to build trust and credibility. Plus, they can run on autopilot. Love that!
It’s definitely worth your time.
Here’s how to ramp up your email marketing.
If you’re not already offering an autoresponder series, get one. Get it loaded into your email provider’s system.
Place the opt-in box on your website in a prominent location. The upper left or right are good places. Clearly label what people will get when they sign up.
Nuts & Bolts:
1. Identify yourself. Your recipient needs to know your email is from a trusted source at a glance. Use the same name in the From line or the same title in the subject line every time.
2. For example, with my email newsletter from www.all-natural-dog-treat.com, my name is always in the From field followed by the newsletter name Baggins Bites and then the subject of that particular newsletter issue.
3. Make your subject lines useful and specific. The more relevant the better. If your prospects signed up for a 7 part series on dog health problems and one of the issues is on chronic ear conditions, then a headline like “End your dog’s chronic ear conditions” will get opened by the recipients who struggle with chronic ear conditions.
4. Run it through your spam checking software. It doesn’t do you any good to craft terrific, useful copy with a relevant offer if it gets hung up in the spam filters.
- Test & track. Review your open rates.
A) Are certain messages more popular than others? What made the difference? Did the topic that really hit home with your prospects? Was it well-crafted subject line? Was it the day or time it was sent?
When you see one that seems exceptional either in very low open rates or stellar ones, make note and see if you can recognize a trend.
If you’re just starting out with a new email list, test sending your emails at different times and days to see which ones get more people opening them.
B) Which ones get the highest click thrus? The type of offer made, the type of anchor text used in the link, whether it goes straight to a landing page or to an internal “preselling” page can all make a huge difference in the rate of conversions. Test, test, test.
Email marketing is huge. Did you know, the Direct Marketing Association states the ROI on email marketing in 2010 was $583 billion?
If you need autoresponders, white papers and other content for your email marketing, contact me for your no obligation consultation.
