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!

Essential Plugins Your Blog Needs

Every blog needs plugins to help fortify its functionality and availability for search engines. You can access some plugins free while some others come at a premium. If you are running your blog on WordPress you will have free access to many essential plugins that can add functionality to your blog. Knowing the service you want from plugins is important before you decide on which to install. There are a variety of plugins you can install depending on your blogging experience and the level of dexterity you’ve at blogging. What you choose to install is determined by the type of functionality you want for your blog. That is what digital marketing experts recommend.


 
Here are a few plugins of choice for many bloggers.

Google XML Sitemaps: Helps to develop sitemaps in XML format that has links to all the pages of your website. This is monitored by search engines to make sure all your web pages are indexed. These get automatically updated with links as you publish new posts.
Full SEO Pack: Helps to optimize your blog for the search engines.
Akismet: Helps to prevent spam comments on your blog.
Mashare Social: Helps to show the share count of your articles and add social share icons to your blog.
CSS and Javascript Toolbox: Helps you add Javascript codes like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel that will load on all the pages of your blog.
OptinChat: Helps you add a chat module, which will automatically chat with your site visitors and collect their email IDs to help you build a subscriber list.
WP Time Capsule: Backs up your blog's content and files every day and stores it on Dropbox. It helps to make sure your blog is safe in the event of a crash, security compromise or file corruption.
W3 Total Cache: Helps you create static pages of your web pages to enable your website load faster. Fast loading websites are search engine friendly.

Plugins are really essential to enhance the functionality of your blog. In digital marketing world, the competition is so stiff that any little thing you can do on your blog to give you some edge no matter how little over your competitors is always highly welcome. That is where plugins become really essential. They manage to help out providing such little essentials to enhance your blog. If you want to go far as a blogger, it is wise not to ignore them.