Owning Your Traffic: The Basics of Email Marketing

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. It is one of the key ingredients to making this online advertising stuff work:

Email marketing.

Doesn’t sound too magical or exciting does it? Well it should, because email is the one form of online marketing that will allow you to exponentially multiply your business’s revenue without spending a dime on paid advertising. There’s a reason just about every successful larger company tries to get your email address every chance they get. The smartest, most successful businesses are even willing to lose money and give away free products just to capture your email.

Owned Traffic

When you pay for online advertising, you CONTROL that traffic. Meaning you decide how many people you reach and drive to your website, products or services based on how much you’re willing to spend. But when you capture emails and build a list of leads, you OWN that traffic. Meaning you can reach and contact them whenever you want to without having to pay an advertising network.

A brilliant marketer named Jim Rohn once said “The fortune is in the follow-up.”

People aren’t going to buy from you the first time they see or hear about whatever it is you’re selling. One of the most fundamental, important skills you can learn in digital marketing is the process of converting traffic you control into traffic you own so that you can then follow-up with them to promote your products or services free of charge. Once they are on your email list, there is no more “customer acquisition cost.” Anything they purchase from you from that point on is pure profit.

Providing Value

As you’re reading this, you’re probably instinctively associating email marketing with spam. Chances are you’ve probably hit the unsubscribe button to get off an annoying email list a time or two. We all have. As with anything, there is a right way and a wrong way to approach email marketing. The reality of marketing and business in general is that consumers have to know, like and trust your brand before they even consider making a purchase. Seeing massive success with email marketing requires providing massive value to your list.

What exactly is “value?”

It can be anything from an industry tip, to a solution to a frequent problem in you industry, to an entertaining, funny story about something that happened at your store or office recently. Pretty much anything relevant to your brand and what you do, without being salesy. Your goal should be to educate and entertain your list while introducing them to your brand and company culture. You essentially want to create your own little community of valued, loyal customers. The more of your personality that comes through in your emails, the more successful they will be.

If you’re engaging with your list and providing real value, they won’t mind it at all when you shoot them an email promoting a new product they can buy, or letting them know about the holiday sale you have coming up. They’ll actually look forward to it.

Balancing value with promotion is an art form that requires constant practice to master. If you feel like you just don’t know where to start building a list or how to follow-up with them, we would love to help you succeed. We are email experts with the skills to grow your list and create strategic, value-loaded email sequences that turn curious consumers into lifelong repeat customers. Get a hold of us here to discuss our email marketing services.