The Basic Essentials of Email Marketing

Email marketing is an essential and highly effective component of digital marketing. This is exactly why many digital marketers depend hugely on it in their blogging efforts. Email marketing is readily one of the most reliable ways to reach out to a large audience without having to go through any intermediary. It slightly falls short of one on one physical meeting with prospects and that accounts for its relative effectiveness even though some marketers now believe it is getting out dated. Depending on what you are marketing, emails are still very reliable to get your message across to people in their privacy and convenient time. That is one way of bypassing direct intrusion into people’s private lives as in most other marketing efforts. Prospects access emails at their convenience, spare time and even in the right ambience of their homes or offices.


 
To get involved in email marketing, the first thing you do is to build your own email list. This list over time will become a very valuable asset in your email marketing efforts. The real reason you must start building one right away if you don’t have one yet. Here is what to do. Set up a call to action for a token giveaway prize on the homepage of your website. Some marketers like to refer to this arrangement as “lead magnet.” To encourage your reading audience to willingly submit their email ID, you must give them something of value in exchange. They will be of the view that they are leaving their email ID with you to send them something of value they need. That is how you can be collecting their email ID to grow your valuable email list for future use in your digital marketing activities. It is a way of giving something and taking something back both actions appearing normal and effortless. You can do this easily by setting up a premium WordPress plugin like OptinChat.com or OptinMonster.com on your blog to start collecting email IDs. OptinChat uses an AI chat module to talk to your visitors, get their email IDs, and deliver the “lead magnet”. OptinMonster uses exit popups that interrupt the user when they are exiting the website. Both of these plugins help you collect email IDs from your blog visitors seamlessly. That is how it works. Over a period of time and with sustained efforts, the email list will grow in size. The larger the list is, the more valuable it becomes with time.

With your email list in place, you now have a direct access to all those persons with email IDs on your list. With the push of a computer button, you can always dispatch a promotional message to all these persons all at once. Depending on how large your email list is, it could run into hundreds of thousands in some cases. Giving a prudent allowance of say about 20% of the messages landing into sperm folders, the remaining 80% will be “seen” by the targets of your message. That is a very good reach by just one email broadcast. Getting out these messages at periodic intervals greatly enhances the results you get from your promotional efforts.

You must first learn what your audience would want and value in your niche before you develop a “lead magnet”. Depending on the niche of your blog and your own capabilities, you can decide what your “lead magnet” is from the range of eBooks, how-to videos, digital marketing courses, music download, motivational quotes download, exotic images/pictures, digital plaques etc, etc. A large email list combined with a valuable “lead magnet” properly used can turn out to be the best traffic generation asset for any blogger. If your blog readily converts 2-5% of your blog visitors to subscribers, you’re doing great. The numbers do pile up with time engendering good traffic generation.

Traditionally, email traffic sources are self-feeding. Anytime you email a post to your email subscribers, a good percentage will visit your website. Your website may benefit from link backs as a result. Another benefit is that some recipients of your post might share it in other platforms particularly social media. This will help bring in a new set of audience into your blog, and some of them might become your email subscribers too. Real viral effects could be set in motion as a result of all these consequential actions and that translates into good inbound traffic for your blog.


 
For ease of use and convenience of deployment as a steady digital marketing tool, you will need a CRM tool like MailChimp or Aweber to manage your email list. You may need to incur some costs with CRM tools as rental fees but the costs are affordable in comparison to the services you’ll be getting. Your fees will be based on the number of subscribers you have and not on the number of emails you send. That from my own experience is fair enough because as your income grows, your subscriber base will grow. With that, you can invest more on your email marketing tools to further enhance your subscriber growth. That’s great for your digital marketing efforts no doubt!