Targeting is Crucial
It’s much more important to have a highly targeted list than it is to have a massive list. In fact, if you’re paying for subscribers then you want to actively discourage people from signing up unless they are: interested in your niche, willing to spend money online, engaged and committed to your brand.
Make sure that everything from your marketing to your use of incentives keeps this objective in mind.
Value is Even More Crucial
Even more important than targeting your audience, is to ensure that you are providing great value. That your emails should be filled with great content that people can’t wait to read. Ideally, the emails will be the incentives!
Likewise, your website should be filled with amazing high value content because this is what will get people interested in subscribing in the first place. Make sure your content is unique and offers something new.
Promote Your List!
Finally, make sure you are promoting your list! That means you should feature it prominently on your home page, it means you should mention it regularly in your content and it means you should talk about it when you meet people in person. Don’t just leave your opt-in form there and hope people find it – really push it!
If you do all those things, then you’ll quickly learn why a highly targeted mailing list is one of the most valuable things that any business can invest in. You’ll have directly contact with a highly engaged and relevant audience and from there the possibilities are endless!
Your Email Marketing Cheat Sheet!
If you’ve read the Email Marketing Master book, then you should by now have a full, comprehensive idea of how best to approach building a massive, highly targeted list and getting them to listen to your recommendations and buy your products.
We covered nearly everything there is to discuss in that email, but some people may have found it all a little bit too much to swallow in one go.
Never fear though, for here you have your email marketing mastery cheat sheet! Here you’ll find the secrets to mastering email marketing distilled to its essence. You can check back here every time you need inspiration or a nudge in the right direction…
The Set-Up
To set up your email marketing strategy, you’ll first of all need an autoresponder and an opt-in form. The autoresponder is what you’ll use to manage the contacts you get and is what you’ll use to create your opt-in form. Common autoresponders are:
- Aweber
- GetResponse
- MailChimp
The opt-in form meanwhile, is the form itself that people will fill in when they want to join your mailing list. This can be embedded where you need it.
And where will you use it? Most likely in the following places:
- On your homepage – here the entire website should essentially point towards the mailing list. This is the ‘objective’ of your website.
- In the sidebar as a widget
- On a ‘squeeze page’ – an entire page dedicated only to getting emails. This will use persuasive writing and a narrow layout.
- Within your content
- Pop-overs
Use a free incentive to encourage more people to sign up. Just make sure that this doesn’t inadvertently encourage people to sign up only for the freebie, or put them off buying from you. The best incentive is the email itself!
Marketing
You’re now going to use PPC, social media marketing and SEO to drive people toward your mailing list and your content. The content itself is going to act as a ‘free taster’. This should show people the quality of content you’re capable of delivering, motivating them to join your mailing list.
PPC can be used to target very specific people while CPA through Facebook Ads means you’ll only pay when someone signs up.
You can also use:
- Solo ads
- Ad swaps
- Guest posts
- Your own contacts
The Emails
The key for your emails themselves is to offer great value. This is how you build trust and it’s how you get people to actually listen to you. Make sure that your emails use engaging subject headings that won’t get filtered by the spam filter. Avoid using more than 50 characters and avoid marketing talk.
Most important is once again to offer unique and meaty content.
From here, you can then move on to selling. You’ll likely do this with an autoresponder series that will use a sequence of emails to get your buyers interested in your product and then ultimately sell to them.
Remember AIDA.
- A: Awareness
- I: Interest
- D: Desire
- A: Action
Email Marketing Mind Map
Email Marketing Resources
Now you know everything you need to know about email marketing, you should be a one-man (or woman) list-building machine!
But even a list building machine can benefit from using some additional tools and resources to enhance their effectiveness and productivity. Here then, you’ll find a wide selection of different tools you can use to grow your list faster and further and to enhance your marketing skills.
Some of these we mentioned in the eBook, others you’ll be encountering here for the first time.
Autresponders
- MailChimp www.mailchimp.com
- GetResponse www.getresponse.com
- AWeber www.aweber.com
Volusion – www.volusion.com
Volusion is an interesting alternative to the other three autoresponders. This one comes with a built-in ecommerce section, affiliate marketing option and more. It’s an ‘all in one’ marketing product, which will appeal to a certain type of business/marketer.
Listwire – www.listwire.com
Listwire is a free alternative. This has obvious appeal but as you can imagine it is also a little underpowered compared to the paid options.
Tools
SumoMe – www.sumome.com
SumoMe offers a range of different services but the one we’re interested in here is the pop-over. Use this to create your pop-overs with your optin forms and make sure they don’t keep showing.
OptimizePress – www.optimizepress.com
This is a great tool for creating landing pages and squeeze pages. It’s a simple theme that you can use alongside WordPress.
Rapportive – https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rapportive/hihakjfhbmlmjdnnhegiciffjplmdhin?hl=en
This is a great tool that lets you see the LinkedIn profiles of anyone who emails you. This is an excellent way to find out more about people on your list who communicate with you.
Articles and Information
http://www.digitalmarketer.com/write-better-blog-posts/ – A great article on how to write better content for your blogs. This is important because it’s going to help you to sell your emails.
http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/07/21/harrys-prelaunchr-email/ – Blogger and author Tim Ferriss discusses how to gather 100,000 emails in one week. This is a great resource as it also contains a lot of templates, code and more.
http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/07/21/harrys-prelaunchr-email/ – Some beautiful examples of e-mail marketing that will show you just what you can do with a quality email campaign. And guess what, Brain Pickings is on there! (You may remember we discussed Popova in the book).
http://unbounce.com/email-marketing/33-new-email-marketing-resources/ – Have we not provided enough resources for you? This is a massive list of 33 more resources for you to dig into. That should keep you going for a little while!
Keep reading because when it comes to email marketing, knowledge is very much power!
