Email Marketing for Businesses

September 6, 2006 10:56 am by Jarom Adair

Why You’d be Crazy Not to Start an Email Newsletter

When anyone comes to your web site it is because they are interested in something you have on your site. Whether it’s a product you sell, information you provide, or some sort of fleeting curiosity that brings them to your site for five seconds and then they hit the back button, you have their attention for that brief period of time.

What do you do during that brief period of time? If all you do is sell them a product, give them information, or let them hit the back button, you’re throwing away tons of money. You’re missing out on one of the most productive, effective, and easy to implement marketing tools available. The tool is email, and every business should be collecting email addresses from their site visitors.

Where Money is Lost

Each person who comes to your site is a potential customer, right? Even if your site is just informational, it’s there to support sales in your business. Yet the average web site converts less than 3% of it’s visitors into paying customers. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the bottom line is that you can either let the 97% slip away or you can capture their attention, gain the loyalty, and turn them into future customers.

Capture attention…gain loyalty…convert to customers…this is what marketing is all about. All of this can be achieved in less than 10 seconds using a form like this:

Capturing Visitor Information

It’s very simple–whenever someone comes to your site, you want to get some sort of information from them for future contact. What is the easiest thing to ask from them? An email address.

Everyone has an email address. Email is the #1 reason people use the internet. If you have their permission to send them information via email, you’ve gained access to their attention. Once you have access to their attention, you have the opportunity to gain access to their trust and loyalty.

Permission Email Marketing

People aren’t going to give you their email address for no reason. The form above isn’t going to entice anyone to sign up. You’ll need to give them something of value. If you know why people are coming to your site, offering them something of value becomes easy. My current offering looks like this:

A lot of business owners come to my site looking for a web design and internet marketing expert. If they see that I’m giving out information that interests them via my email newsletter, getting them to sign up is not difficult. You can do the same thing for your visitors. If you can offer visitors a bonus download, a special report, or a free trial of some sort that they can immediately receive in addition to your newsletter, the motivation to sign up is even higher.

Make sure it’s easy for your site visitors to sign up to your email list. Put a signup form on your home page or someplace everyone will see it.

What Would I Email to People?

Worried about what you could possibly offer your site visitors that would interest them? Don’t worry–any business has more than enough interesting information to send out via regular emails to the people who sign up. I’ve collected a list of things you can include in emails in an article titled The #1 Email Marketing Question.

If your emails are informative and interesting, your list of subscribers will grow and people will read and appreciate what you have to say. You’ll benefit from this in a number of ways.

Email Marketing Benefits

What are the benefits when you send out regular emails to a list of people who have given you permission to send things to them? The list of benefits is long, and here are a few of them…

• Top Of Mind

  This is a marketing term for how readily your potential customers recall your business. If you send someone regular emails with helpful information, the next time they need what you offer you will be the first business that comes to their mind.

• Additional Sales

  Not only will you come to your customer’s mind when the need for what you offer arises, but emails become an open invitation for you to inform customers about additional products and services that they may not have been aware of. This could turn one sale into many sales.

• Cross Promotions

  If you partner with businesses offering complimentary services or products, you can promote them through your email list. The better your emails and the larger your list, the higher caliber partners you can attract. This idea also works well for affiliate programs.

• Advertising Revenue

  If another business wants to reach the people you have in your email list, you can arrange to advertise their business in your emails for a fee.

• Trust and Loyalty

  If you send helpful and informative content in your emails, they will get opened and read by those in your list. Those in your list will come to know your business and trust the information you give them. When that happens, all the benefits listed above become even easier and more profitable.

All of this can be had by offering useful emails to your web site visitors. Sure it takes some time to create good emails as well as grow your email list, but what other form of marketing allows you to reach hundreds or thousands of targeted customers for virtually no money with a click of your mouse? Email is fast and extremely cost-effective, especially as your list grows. How much could this email list be worth to you over a lifetime? Now is the time to find out.