E-mail: The “Undead” Secret of the Marketing World
E-mail: The “Undead” Secret of the Marketing World
Here are the bones of what you will need to build a successful e-mail marketing strategy that will cause your prospects to come clawing at your door:
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Build a List
“If you build it, they will come.” These inspirational words of wisdom don’t just apply to building ghost-inspired baseball diamonds in cornfields. The key to the success of any e-mail campaign is collecting e-mail addresses of prospective clients.
There are countless ways to do this (in this blog we will go over the method of using a registration page) but the bottom line is that without them your campaign will be headed to the graveyard before its heart even starts beating!
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Registration Page
As mentioned above, one of the best ways to collect e-mail addresses is by creating a registration page or a “landing page” as some call it.
This is simply a separate page on your website where you offer a gift such as a discount coupon, an e-book or even a free webinar on a hot topic, all by requiring people to sign-up and enter their personal info (including their e-mail address).
Ideally, the registration page is connected to an e-mail marketing and sales platform, that way the sign-ups are added to the e-mail list the second they sign up and it automatically triggers the start of the sequence of e-mails that they will get.
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Sequences of e-mails
Once you have an e-mail address, the next step is to setup the sequence of what e-mails to send them.
Typically the first one is a simple “thank you for registering” e-mail that contains the promised gift (sent right after they sign up).
This is then followed up over the next several days and weeks by a series of carefully crafted e-mails designed to persuade them to take the next step, escalating in the level of persuasion as they take further interest. They express this interest by clicking on links in your e-mail. These links are known as a “call to action” or CTA. These are simply statements telling the prospect what to do next i.e., “Register for Our Free Webinar! or “Book Your Free Demo Today!”. They are what you will use to direct your prospects to take the next step whether that be the next e-book, next webinar or to straight up buy the product you are offering (whether that be directly as in an online store or through setting up a product demo for larger purchases).
The key here is that you will create CTAs as the “bait” that you will let out to “hook” your prospects into your sales funnel to warm them up and get them ready to finally take that big step – to buy!
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Tracking & Tweaking
An additional step you can take is to add special codes to your CTAs that will help you get a better understanding of the performance of your different offers. With this information you will then be able to tweak them to generate more clicks – based on what is performing well and what is not – ultimately resulting in more engagement (clicks). We will talk more about this in detail in the next blog post, so don’t miss it!
Learn More: Track Almost any Engagement Using Custom UTM’s
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Be Patient!
Finally, as clichéd as it sounds, realize that “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
It takes a dedicated and continuous effort to build up your list and hone your e-mail campaign. So bury any ideas you had about purchasing an e-mail list from some “reputable” salesman who claims they have got the panacea (which is never true trust us).
Stick to your hands-on approach of building your own list through the steps above and moving your prospects along using a carefully crafted e-mail campaign and you’ll be thanking us later when your high-quality “home grown” list nets high-quality results!
