UNIT 1: AN INTRODUCTION TO EMAIL MARKETING

If you run a business, a website or a blog and you want to increase your audience as well as increasing engagement, then the single most effective way to do that is with email marketing.

If you listen to pretty much any top marketer, then they will almost always tell you this. They will almost always say that the most important aspect of their marketing – the thing that led to their success – was email.

And there’s a very good reason for this. Or ten...

Email marketing allows you to reach your audience in an incredibly direct manner. Unlike other forms of marketing, you’ll actually be able to reach your audience directly in their inboxes without having to go through any third party. That means that you’re not reliant on a platform like Facebook or Twitter, or at the mercy of potential changes to policies that could render your messages unheard. It wasn’t that long ago that Facebook made the decision to change its system so that only a small percentage of posts from pages got through to followers.

With email, your messages are going directly to the users. That means that nothing can prevent you from reaching them and you know that 100% of everything you send is going to reach the recipient.

It means that you don’t lose your long list of subscribers if Facebook decides to inexplicably delete your account (this happens – in fact it has happened to me) or if they decide to delete their accounts.

This is a relationship that is directly between you and the subscribers. But that’s only touching the very surface of what makes Email marketing so useful.

As you’ll see in the rest of this report, there are many, many more advantages to email marketing and tons more reasons why you should invest more time and more energy into email marketing.

By the end of this report, you’ll understand precisely what makes email marketing important and you’ll hopefully be hyped to dive into the rest of the course to find out how you can make it work for you.

First, a Few Stats

First, let’s take a look at a few stats which perfectly illustrate just how impressive email marketing really is and how it is transforming business...

For example, did you know the following figures?

+ Email marketing has a ROI of 4,300%

+ 91% of consumers check email daily (most people check it much more!)

+ When surveyed, companies say that email marketing is more profitable than: PPC, content marketing, display advertising, mobile ads, social media marketing, direct marketing, affiliate marketing...

+ 66% of US consumers aged over 15 have made a purchase as a direct result of an email campaign

+ 1/3rd of consumers say that they open their emails on the basis of the subject line alone

So, what does all this tell us? Why are these stats the way they are?

Firstly, let’s consider the ROI. The reason that ROI is so high for email marketing is actually because the cost of entry is so low. ROI is ‘return on investment’, the amount of money you make versus the amount of money you spent in order to make it!

In the case of email marketing, you only need to pay for an autoresponder. Once you’ve done that, you have the means to collect and send emails, which means the only thing left for you to do is to write said emails. Guess how much writing an email costs? And it barely takes any time either (remember: time is money!). In short, this is an incredibly quick and cost effective way to start marketing.

Another stat that’s interesting is the fact that 91% of consumers check their email every single day. That’s a huge statistic but in reality it’s probably rather conservative. The reality is that most of us check our phones not only every single day but countless times throughout the day.

The reason for this is that we get a notification each time we get a new email. There is no way for us to miss an email, which stands in stark contrast to a Facebook post or a Twitter Tweet which is very easy to miss.

In fact, the main way that you tend to hear about new Facebook posts is via email.

Think about the Facebook pages that you have Liked. Can you honestly say that you get 100% of the messages that any of them put out? The answer for most of us is ‘no’ and the obvious reason for that is that we’ll only check Facebook every now and then and even then, we’ll likely only see a small percentage of what’s on offer because that’s what will make it to our homefeed. The only way we would stand a chance of seeing 100% of the content from a given page is if we were to manually navigate to that Facebook page every single day and scroll down through the posts.

And who cares enough about a brand in order to do that?

With email on the other hand, you not only check your inbox multiple times a day anyway, but you also get alerted each time a new message comes through.

Of course, this is only true of your inbox and not of your ‘social’ mailbox or spam – but using the tips you’ll learn over the course of this... course... you’ll learn how to make sure you end up in the inbox and not one of the other two.

So, that’s what the stats have to say but what about the things that a survey can’t quite capture?

Top Reasons You NEED to Invest in Email Marketing

Here are some of the top reasons that you can’t afford not to invest in email marketing...

1. Email Marketing is More Personal

The first and most important consideration is simply that email marketing is much more personal as compared with other forms of marketing. When you send someone a message via email, you are messaging them in their inbox and that means your messages are going to be placed right alongside messages from their friends and family, as well as all the other things that they signed up for.

All of a sudden, the way that your messages are parsed and interpreted changes. Suddenly, this is in a folder filled with correspondence that demands attention and your email message will take on that same importance as a result.

As a marketer, it’s your job to take advantage of this too – by making sure that your content is written in a way that feels personal and direct – this will have a much better impact on readers and make them much more likely to sit up and take notice of what you’re saying. People like getting messages from people – not companies.

2. Email Marketing is Immediate

With email marketing, you have complete control over your message and that even includes the timing with which your message is sent.

On Facebook or Twitter, you will write a message and then hope that your followers see it at some point in the near future. However, with email marketing we’ve already discussed that your recipients will get a buzz in their pocket as soon as the new message comes through. Even if they have several messages that they haven’t read (meaning that they won’t get notified for each new message), they’ll still tend to check their messages to dismiss those unread contacts at several times throughout a day.

That now means that you can time when your message gets seen and therefore you have some control over what mood the recipients are in when they get your message and how they are likely to respond.

This is crucial because – as with comedy – timing is everything when it comes to marketing. If you can send a message at the right time, then you can take advantage of current events, or of the fact that your subscribers are likely to be tired and thus more impulsive. You just don’t get this kind of control with any other form of marketing.

We’ll learn more about how you can utilize timing in your email marketing over the next several reports.

3. Email Marketing Requires Permission

This is actually a very important aspect of email marketing and it’s one that makes every message much more effective and impactful.

The simple fact is that in order to send a marketing email to someone, you first need their express permission. And that permission requires them to actually give you their email address and contact details. This isn’t as easy as clicking ‘like’ and it’s not something they can possibly do by accident.

At first, you might think that this would be a negative thing. After all, it means that you’re going to have a much shorter mailing list and your subscribers might be less inclined to sign up.

But that is actually a positive thing. A big positive. Why? Because it means that the quality of your contacts is much higher. In marketing, quality trumps quantity every time and by a large margin at that.

If your recipients actually want to be there and if they’re interested in signing up, then that means they’ll actually read your messages and it means they’ll be much more likely to click ‘buy’ or to pass the message on to friends.

And the very act of giving you their email address also increases that trust. When someone gives you their email and invites you to message them, they are showing that they trust you not to abuse that power and that they value your ideas enough to give up some of their privacy. This way, they become ‘members’ of your movement.

Again, we’ll look at how you can ensure your contacts are 100% valuable and the right fit for your list in future instalments.

4. Email Marketing Allows Smart Use of Data

Something that a lot of eBooks and blogs don’t touch on is just how much data you get when you use email marketing, or how flexibly you can use that data. With email marketing, you’ll be able to sort your contacts into categories, so that you can choose to target only the right kind of recipient with your messages. That might mean that you send messages only to people of a certain age, a certain gender or in a certain location – and this can drastically increase your conversion rates.

What’s more though, is that email marketing allows you to monitor engagement. You can use cookies in order to see which of your subscribers are actually reading the messages you’re sending and which aren’t. You can also see which of your subscribers are visiting your site and even whether or not some of them might have looked at your products.

All this means you can see which leads are cool, warm and ‘hot’ and in turn, that means you’ll be able to try and convert only the right recipients that are likely to be tempted and not likely to be frustrated at your contact.

On top of that, seeing this kind of information can help you to design better campaigns – by seeing which types of message get opened the most and which types of recipients are more receptive to your message (so that you can try and get more like them).

In short, email marketing gives you control over numerous very important metrics which allows you to target precisely the right people at precisely the right times.

When you combine all these different factors, you have a method of marketing that is simply unparalleled. Many marketers and business owners will put it off as it seems like a lot of work but in reality, once it is set up and you understand how it works, it couldn’t be simpler. And the pay off is enormous. Email marketing absolutely MUST be a part of your marketing strategy and over the rest of this course you’re going to learn how to take advantage of it in a MASSIVE way.

Buckle in!