All marketers want to generate more profits from their email marketing efforts.
It can be elusive and unless you have the right approach your business will suffer.
In this article, we will cover 4 things you need to focus on to maximize your email marketing profits.
Let’s begin by talking about building your email lists. Yes, I do mean lists.
You should be building 3 different lists for your business. You want to build a prospect list, a customer list, and a joint venture or affiliate list.
Each of these lists has a purpose and is necessary if you plan to grow your email marketing profits.
Some so many marketers will send their customers the same emails that they send their prospects. In my humble opinion, this is a huge mistake.
When someone has purchased a product or products from you, the last thing they want to see from you are emails that are intended for your prospects.
The joint venture or affiliate list is specifically for keeping other marketers in your niche informed, sharing information about your products and launches.
Top marketers will tell you that you can recover from just about anything if you have a list.
Your website could be hacked, and you still can recover.
You could get hit by the latest Google slap or have your Facebook account closed and recovering is still possible when you have your list.
The size of your list is irrelevant if the people on your list are not responsive.
If you aren’t making sales every time you mail to your list, something is wrong.
Some marketers will tell you that it’s ok if you are not making money from your list in the beginning. These marketers will tell you it’s more important to build a relationship before you begin to promote products.
DON’T BELIEVE IT!
These are usually people that have unresponsive lists.
When people first sign up on your list, they are the hottest they are going to be. They signed up because they believe you have what they need to solve a problem they are trying to solve.
They took the first step by joining your list, the last thing they want is a couple of weeks of relationship-building emails. They want answers now.
You end up losing the opportunity to help them and make a profit at the same time.
Don’t waste time beating around the bush or,
waste your prospect’s time with partial solutions and don’t waste delay offering our paid product!
By the time you get around to promoting products to them, they will have moved on and found someone who will present products to help them right away.
You can promote products and build a relationship at the same time from the very first touch.
4 Things Needed to Build a Successful Email Marketing Campaign
When you boil it down, 4 things are essential to your success.
- An Autoresponder with loads of good content
- A Great Lead Magnet that entices prospects to exchange their email for it
- A Landing Page for your Lead Magnet. A mini sales page.
- Last but not least, a steady flow of traffic to your site.
The Autoresponder
This is a software program that allows you to preload email messages that will be sent out automatically at specific times.
It’s a hands-free way to start communicating with your list. These first messages should be a combination of relationship building and promoting a product. The product that will help them solve their problem.
There are 2 types of autoresponders, self-hosted and third party.
With the self-hosted autoresponder, you load the software on your server. This means you manage everything.
Trying to manage on an autoresponder on your is lots of work and there are many possible complications. I recommend that unless you are an experienced marketer, you should use a third-party service.
Using a third-party service, they take care of managing maintaining the technology, maintaining and delivering your emails. This is the recommended way to handle your most precious asset, your list.
The good autoresponder companies make sure your emails get delivered, by keeping yours from being blacklisted.
Single or Confirmed Opt-In, which should you use?
Single opt-in is exactly what the name implies. Prospects only have to fill in their information on your landing page and they are automatically added to your list.
On the positive side, this will allow you to build your list quickly. With every positive, there is a negative. With single opt-in, you risk the chance of getting people that will report your emails as spam.
Confirmed opt-in requires the prospect to confirm they want to be on your list. This is done with an email that is sent to them with a confirmation button or link in it. They will have to activate this to confirm they want to receive information from you.
With confirmed opt-ins, you risk the prospect of never completing the confirmation process. Your list will grow slower, but you will know that your subscribers are interested in your information.
Most marketers will have lists that use both of these methods based on what the intentions are for the list.
You Need a Thank You Page
Thank you, pages are sent after your prospect, subscribes to your list. This should be short and sweet and contain 3 things.
- You want to thank them for signing up
- Encourage them to go to their inbox to get their gift
- Provide a link to a related paid product. You can do a soft sell of your product you are promoting be it yours or an affiliate product.
- Encourage your new subscribers to whitelist your email. This is simply having the add your email to their contacts.
Lead Magnet
The key with a lead magnet is you want to create an irresistible offer.
Many competitors are offering a free newsletter. No one is going to pay you any attention if all you do is offer a free newsletter.
You need to create an offer that prospects will want to get their hands on it. It needs to be something a real value, something that someone would be willing to pay for.
Many marketers will just pull some PLR offer their digital shelf and use that as their lead magnet.
Don’t do this, offer valuable content. Your lead magnet should possess these 4 things.
Desirability, Value, Deliverability, and Relevance.
- Desirability – the offer must be a product that your niche audience wants. It should be a product that is similar to a product that is being sold today.
- Value – your lead magnet should be worth something. You will know it is a good offer when you look at it and it pains you to be giving it away instead of selling it.
- Deliverability – it should be easy to deliver; the prospect can download it with ease.
- Relevance – finally the offer should be closely related to the product you are promoting. It’s best if it leads to your paid product.
This approach works well for both your products and affiliate products.
Landing Page
Your landing page must be dynamic and attractive. You can have an awesome lead magnet, but if your landing page sucks, your conversions will be abysmal.
First, you need to think about what you will say to persuade your prospects to sign up to get your free offer.
A Strong Headline – The headline should state your biggest benefit and when possible arouses curiosity. Quickly explain how the lead magnet will solve their problem.
Benefit Driven Bullets – 3 to 6 benefit statements go a long way. Simply list the other benefits that are no in the headline.
Call to Action – You need to tell your prospects what they need to do next. Something like; “Where do You Want to Send the Free Gift”.
Now you have your awesome lead magnet and page ready to go.
Time to Drive traffic to Your Page
To be effective, you need to be consistent in driving traffic to your page. The last thing you want to do is stop once you get started. When you do that, the traffic will stop too.
You may generate a lot of traffic, but if it’s not converting you have trouble.
The top marketers test everything and you need to do this too. But this may not be the thing that comes into play.
Your traffic quality is important. Are the people coming to your page interested in what you are offering?
You must be targeting the right audience. Don’t be too broad when setting up adds. The more you narrow it, the more likely you will have people coming to your page that is interested in your offer.
So, where do you find this?
Here are a few places you can get targeted traffic.
PPC traffic – Google AdWords and Facebook are 2 places for PPC traffic. With PPC traffic you can be very specific targeting. You pay per click based on your bid amount. Choose very targeted keywords. Google allows what your keywords may cost.
Facebook allows you to get very specific using their demographics. Narrow your audience to buy area, income, age, gender and more. They also offer pay per impression, which is the cost per 1000.
Marketing Partners – thing of your Joint Venture and Affiliate partners.
Many will allow you to do guest posts on their blogs. Work with them to do webinars, endorse each other’s products or exchange links on your confirmation pages.
There are many other ways you can take advantage of these relationships, use your imagination to come up with other ideas.
Search Engine Optimization – create keyword specific content for your blog from your research. Find longtail keywords that don’t have much competition for your content.
Create content that is likely to go viral. Engaging posts, mind maps, software WordPress Themes and plug-ins are all good for this.
Novel and engaging videos.
Media Buys
You can purchase ad space on high traffic sites in your niche. Talk to other website owners or ad brokers like buysellads.com.
When working with this method, start small and test.
Again, these are just a few of the ways you can drive traffic to your landing page. There are much more available both free and paid.
In Summary, you want to work with a third-party autoresponder service. I recommend Aweber. It’s the one I use. Create a rock-solid attention-grabbing lead magnet that prospects in your niche will want.
Create a dynamic and enticing landing page and send targeted traffic to your page regularly. Make sure you are testing everything to improve your conversion rates and watch your business grow.
To learn more about email marketing techniques to boost your profits, check out the eMarketers Club. Grab your free membership while it is still available.
