We’ve spoken many times before about Email Marketing and the importance of building your contacts lists but in this blog post, we’re going to be looking at the downside of Email Marketing and how you can avoid it.
The best way to get results online is to build a contact list of people who are interested in your product/service. One of the best ways to do this is by getting people to sign up for your email newsletter. And how do you get people to sign up? By rewarding them. Now here’s the catch, what email addresses are people giving you to take advantage of your free download or exclusive podcast?
It’s not like it’s hard to find an email address. Gmail is just one of the many services that will give you one (or more) for free. Whilst double opt-in forces your reader to give you a real email address - real addresses are cheap. Readers have dozens of ways to capture your valuable free reward, and then ditch the rest of your email once they’ve got it.
They might unsubscribe (best case scenario). They might throw the email address away or just quit checking it. They might set up a filter that automatically pours your messages right into their Delete folder. Or they’ll mark you as spam (worst case scenario) rather than take the “trouble” of unsubscribing. Annoying but it happens. Incidentally, this is why you must make it really easy to unsubscribe from your stuff. If it’s more than a click or two, you’ll regret it.
So what can you do?
You need to show your readers that what you’re offering is going to be valuable to them. If you can offer a fantastic collection of benefits then you'll get their attention and what you're offering will be too valuable to throw away.
This is why an email auto responder is absolutely essential for every marketing project you work on. Whilst newsletters are an excellent tool, they’re 1000 times better when they kick off with a terrific auto responder.
This works better than a one off download because you’re creating an email sequence that puts the reader in the habit of opening each message. Sure, they can still ditch you at the end of the sequence but by that time, you’ll hopefully have created some trust and your reader will have started to know and like you.
Just think – if you emailed ‘Mr Jones’ 9 times in a row and you’ve only sent him valuable information that gives him the results he wants, then do you think he’s likely to open that 10th email?
