For any business looking to build an audience, develop relationships, increase trust and authority, and ultimately sell products; email marketing is an absolutely essential activity.
Email marketing often takes a backseat to other forms of marketing, such as SEO and social media marketing. That’s a shame, as it does in fact have even more potential than either of those when it comes to building and reaching a massive number of people.
Not convinced? Then just take a look at the blog of any big e-mail marketer. Almost all of them will describe their email marketing and list building activities as the single most important aspects of their business.
One such blogger is Michael Hyatt. He had the following to say about email marketing and list building:
“I have literally built a multi-million dollar business on the strength of my email list. Ninety percent of my income comes from it. Even today, my email list is still my number one business priority and asset.”
Meanwhile, Douglas Karr from Marketing Tech Blog said:
“Without a doubt, our email list is the best investment we’ve ever made.”
And Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner says:
“Email is the most important channel for you to cultivate.”
That’s from a site about social media; and yet the owner is recommending email marketing above that very tool!
The list of big names who claim email marketing is their most important tool goes on.
And the statistics back this up too.
For instance, did you know that 91% of all consumers check their e-mail daily? Or that surveyed companies rate their email campaigns as more profitable than PPC advertising, social media marketing or content marketing?
Did you know that 66% of US customers over 15 have purchased at least one product via an email campaign?
Or how about the fact that email marketing has a ROI of 4,300%? That’s an absolutely gigantic figure!
Why Email Marketing is the Bee’s Knees
So what is it that makes email marketing such a powerful option for bloggers, businesses and marketers? How does it offer such incredible ROI and lead to so many sales?
Well the ROI of course is due to the simple fact that email marketing doesn’t cost anything. This requires very little work on your part while still yielding incredible results. You’ll only need to send an email once a week or once a month, while your mailing list will build itself once you’ve set everything up properly.
From there though, you can reach your audience directly in their inboxes – which is something you can’t achieve through Facebook or even through SEO. People carry mobile phones on them 24/7 these days, which means you can reach them right in their pockets any time of day and when they’re likely to be most receptive to your marketing message.
This also means that you aren’t going through a ‘middle man’ or a ‘gatekeeper’. Building a massive Facebook Page following is great, but ultimately you are always going to be beholden to Facebook. If Facebook decides to delete your page (which isn’t unheard of) then you can lose all that hard work and investment with no explanation. And recently, Facebook changed their policies so that a post to your Facebook page would only reach about 10% of your audience.
You see why it’s worth having your own audience and direct access to said audience?
Email marketing also lets you send multiple messages and time those messages perfectly. This means that you can build anticipation for a product launch, you can generate interest in a new project and you can discuss matters with your audience. You have complete control over your marketing message and that’s incrediblypowerful.
Essentially what this all means, is that you can use email marketing in order to create and manage a sales funnel. We’ll talk about this more later, but essentially a sales funnel is a series of communications that gradually draws in a reader. This is what leads someone from being a cold contact, to being interested in your product, to being invested in your brand – to making a purchase.
