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Inner Circle Roundtable of 21st Century Marketers |
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Chapter Twenty-Two The Importance of Email
By Ben Hart
Your email program is a critical link in your Internet marketing program.
Email is how you communicate with your opt-in subscribers. Email is how you bring your opt-in subscribers back to your website time and time again.
Email is how you build rapport, loyalty and your brand to those who have signed up to be on your email list. Without email, it’s very difficult to have an online business at all because you have no way to bring your visitors back to your site.
So your email marketing campaign to your opt-in subscriber list is essential to your success as an online business.
So let’s just review quickly the five critical links in your online business.
1) First and foremost you need a website. Your website is your marketing base of operations on the Internet. Your website is your main sales presentation.
2) You need an ad campaign, a search engine marketing and/or a viral marketing strategy to bring visitors to your website so they can read, see and hear your sales presentation, or whatever it is you have to say.
3) You need to bring your first-time visitors to a landing page that has your sign-up form, where your visitors sign up and agree to hear from you again via email.
4) To be successful getting your visitors to fill out your sign-up form, you need to offer something of value FREE. Some marketers call this “bait.” I prefer to call it my “ethical bribe” designed to give my visitors a reason to fill out my form. Your FREE gift, your “ethical bribe” needs to be of obvious value and must be exactly in line with products and services you are selling. That’s how you build your email list.
5) And finally, you need an email marketing system, because email is how you communicate with your opt-in subscribers – your warm prospects and your customers.
It is this fifth critical link that is the subject of this chapter.
Now, for the purpose of this chapter, I will refer to your buyers as “customers.”
But “customers” can be clients, patients, students – whoever is paying you to do what you do.
For shorthand, I’ll just use the words “customers” to describe all these categories of those who are paying you for something. And I will use the term “leads” or “prospects” to describe those who have filled out your sign-up form, but have not yet bought anything from you.
“Visitors” is the term I use to describe those who have arrived at your site, but have not filled out your form. I also refer to this category of person as a “suspect” – which is a level below a “prospect” or “lead” because you do not yet have your “visitor” on your list.
The moment your “visitor” fills out your sign-up for and opts-in to receive follow-up communications from you, your visitor graduates from “suspect” to “prospect” status.
So, for the purpose of this chapter, you have three basic categories of people:
We can and we will break down these basic categories even further later on.
Your “repeat buyers” and “platinum” buyers are also key categories of people to identify and cultivate and will allow you to multiply your profitability.
But we’ll get to these premium customer categories later.
Right now, we’ll just focus on these three basic categories – your suspects/visitors, your prospects, and your customers.
Your email marketing campaign is for your prospects and your customers . . . because these are the two categories of people who have filled out the sign-up form on your site.
So these are the names you have in your e-mail data base.
I am not going to get into much detail on the physical mechanics of email marketing. This book is not about how to operate your computer or software – because mechanics are changing all the time and are different for every system.
This book is about what’s truly valuable, and that’s your marketing strategy. This chapter is about how email fits into your overall marketing strategy.
The Marketing Power of Email
The biggest differences between offline direct mail and online marketing is the economics of follow-up communications with those on your house list.
For postal direct mail letters, follow-up communications are comparatively costly. You must pay for postage, paper, printing, personalization and packaging. But follow-up email communications with those on your list (sometimes called a “house list”) is almost free. This allows the Internet marketer to communicate with prospects and customers as often as she pleases -- as much as once a day, or even several times a day.
This would be cost-prohibitive for the offline direct mail marketer.
The nearly free follow-up communications for the email marketer allows you to become part of your customer’s or prospect’s daily routine . . . IF your emails are interesting and exactly in line with the interest of your customer or prospect.
The skilled email writer is able to make his emails so interesting that those who are used to receiving them actually become annoyed if their daily email does not show up on time. And that’s exactly the reaction you want to create with your email marketing.
Interactivity
What makes email marketing so different from any other kind of advertising is its potential for interactivity. All other advertising media (including postal direct mail) are essentially one-way communications. Advertising messages are going out and orders might be coming back, but that’s about it.
With email, you can instantly answer the questions of a prospect who is sitting on the fence. You can go back and forth with questions and answers in a matter of minutes. Even telemarketing is not nearly as interactive as email because when a marketer phones someone, he’s always interrupting something -- usually dinner.
So the receiver of a telemarketing call is in no mood to chat. But with email, the receiver can respond whenever she pleases, or not at all. The interruption is not nearly as acute as the telemarketing interruption, especially if you have done the necessary groundwork to build a trusted relationship with your prospect or customer.
Compression of the marketing cycle
Because email is so cheap, and can be so frequent, you can find out who your buyers and repeat buyers are very quickly.
With offline postal direct mail, it takes time to get the mailing out, results back in, and mailings back out. You might mail your postal mailing once a month to your house list -- or at most twice a month. But you can send an email to your house list once a day, or even more often. As a result, with email marketing, if you have not converted your lead into a buyer within 30 days, it’s probably not going to happen. But it might take you a year or longer with postal mailings to uncover this same information.
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