Whether your business is online or off, using a targeted email marketing strategy can help you make more money, keep your customers longer and turn more causal visitors into paying customers.
The nice thing is that it is cheap and easy to do, virtually anyone can do it no matter what size your business is.
As with all things, there are some steps you must take to put it all together.
Here is a quick overview of those steps:
1. Figure out who your target market is. If you are already in business you probably already know who your target market is so this step is probably already done. Knowing what your ideal would be customer is interested in, what they are looking for and where you need to be to reach them will all be factors to be considered.
2. Add a op-tin form to your website along with some sort of enticement for them to sign up. Most people will use some sort of training such as an e-book or an e course. Remember, value is in the eye of the beholder. Don’t think that you have to pay for something to give away so people sign up to your list. That would be dumb.
As long as you come up with something that will teach them something, they will think it is very valuable. Remember too, to keep your incentive to sign up relative to your niche market. If your niche is on bird watching your enticement shouldn’t be on weight loss, it should be on bird watching.
3. Once you have your opt-in form and enticement set up, you will need to write a series of emails messages to send out. This is where you can really shine. This is where you can offer help and advice to the people on your list. By proving to them that you are an expert in your field and that they can benefit from your advice.
4. To help improve your odds that your emails will actually get read by the people on your list, do two things. One, make sure that you have great subject lines. Make them something interesting and that will peak their curiosity. Do yourself a favor though and go lite on the hype. We’ve all been hyped to death and most of us are immune to it by now.
And, two, if you provide quality, helpful information eventually the people on your list will come to expect something of quality and will be looking for your emails and looking forward to reading them.
Targeted email marketing is the only way to go.
There is no point in wasting time trying to get people to your website if they are not interested in your product or service (or if they aren’t buyers and are not likely to actually make a purchase). All your time and effort will be wasted if you aren’t striving for only targeted traffic. Know your target audience and give them what they want.
Why Segmentation Is Good For Your List
Here are a couple of paragraphs from the crew over at Hupspot on List Segmentation…
By now, most marketers understand the importance of email to their overall marketing strategy and recognize that it’s not dying in the wake of other emerging marketing tactics like social media. But while most marketers realize that email is here to stay, unfortunately, that doesn’t exactly mean certain email marketing best practices have caught on. Segmentation is one such best practices. Segmenting your communications can improve your email marketing campaigns by leaps and bounds (read on — we have the data to prove it!).
Luckily, marketers are at least starting to realize the importance of segmentation in their email communications. In fact, according to the MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, 32% of marketers say segmenting their email database is one of their organization’s top objectives in the next 12 months. Furthermore, 52% of marketers say they have a great need to improve email database segmentation.
So if you aren’t slicing and dicing your email database into various segments and tailoring the content in your emails to those individual groups of contacts, we think you could use some convincing. Read on to find out why all marketers should be segmenting their email communications.
Check out the full post here: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/32848/Why-List-Segmentation-Matters-in-Email-Marketing.aspx
If you use this method you are going to find that your subscribers are much more interested in what it is your saying, it will build trust which then will lead to sales.
That is the basis for an extremely profitable online business.
