How Email Marketing Works

Email marketing is also known as opt-in marketing and is indeed straightforward. It’s one of the most stable, long-term revenue generating techniques used for online marketing. Email marketing is the collection of data such as an email address and also other attributes like a name and the country they are from for example, in exchange for something like a gift or offer.

A visitor may be willing to give you their email address and name in exchange for a course on “making money online” for example…or to sign-up to a newsletter with the hottest dating tips, or an ebook with growing organic food tips. It could be anything of value to the reader, digital or otherwise.

Nowadays, consumers are overwhelmed with marketing messages that cause interruption as when you watch the television. BAM! You are interrupted by advertisements. As when you listen to the radio, you hear about the latest and greatest gadget promotion and again when you are reading your newspaper.

Large enterprises may have big fat budgets to allow this type of advertising and therefore connect with thousands and even millions of people. However, it’s hard to weigh up the achievement or success of this scale in an advertising campaign, and you only have a single opportunity to make your impression felt!

Unlike traditional forms of advertising, email marketing gives you the ability to invest just once to get the reader’s email information, then also provides you with the connection to make contact with this person over and over again, potentially, forever. But instead of it costing you over and over again, you only have to get the first subscription then you can contact that client at no cost!

Email marketing is pretty simple really as shown broken down here. It works like this.

A Run-Through Summary on How Email Marketing Works

Here are the basic steps for carrying out an email marketing campaign and one of the most effective approaches used by successful online marketers.

1. The opt-in page is to entice the reader with a GIFT also known as a ‘hook’ such as an ebook, in exchange for their email which is added to your email list.
2.  Your email list grows as more and more people give their email in exchange for the gift or offer.
3. A thank you and a confirmation letter are emailed using an autoresponder, and the offer or the gift (if digital) is attached to this email. You also remind the person to ‘keep an eye out for your emails’ (with other offers).
4. The gift is then emailed out (if it is digital) or sent out through the post such as a hardcopy book.  This email should also have your brand and links pointing to your website.
5. Pages, posts or articles with bigger offers are now able to be emailed out on a schedule to those on your lists. The email schedule might be for every 48hours over 14 days resulting in 7 email offers every other day for example.
6. Email offers are scheduled and automated using an autoresponder such as Aweber.

Automate The Process With An Autoresponder Such As Aweber

Aweber is an autoresponder that will automate your emails as and when you require it to. A free trial version is available, and there are many other autoresponder tools you could use as well.

You just need one autoresponder that will do the job for you, so you don’t have to. With an autoresponder, you don’t have to wait around every time someone subscribes to your offer! All you do is prepare the email offers, and then Aweber will do the rest!

Opt-In-Page Samples

An opt-in page contains the offer to the reader to which they must provide at least their email in exchange for the offer.  Here is an example of what an opt-in page with an offer can look like.

The Offer – Giving value to the reader

It’s important that the gift or offer is adding value to the reader in exchange for giving you their email address. The gift or offer could be a report, an ebook or even a cheat-sheet similar to the following sample which offers a video about ‘How to Find Your Niche Keywords in Seconds’.

Although it sounds straight forward, it does require a good amount of thought, strategy and automation to get it right. Email marketing is a great strategy for your online marketing ventures but can take a while to get right if you are not aware of the online marketing strategies in the first place. Alternatively, there are other marketing strategies you can use to get you going with your own online business.

Alternative to Email Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is one of the quickest ways to getting an online business started. This is how I started and I still think it is the best way to get going. It’s also a very affordable way to get going. There is some great training as well and you won’t need your credit card. Go here to start your own gig.