According to advertising experts, it takes anywhere from 6 to 12 impressions for a prospective customer to become a purchasing customer. What does this mean when it comes to your ability to succeed in the online marketplace? Considering the immense amount of competition on the internet, it means that if you don’t have a follow-up email marketing strategy then you’re always going to be scrambling for new customers. This article will cover some of the basics of email marketing and help you create a campaign that gets results.

The Basics of Good Mail Marketing

A good email marketing campaign offers a combination of valuable content, consistent delivery and tasteful promotion of your company. Too many marketers build opt in lists only to blast them with promotions which causes low readership and a high opt out rate. This has caused many marketers to simply believe that e-mail marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be because of people’s fear of spam. However, if you focus on value, consistency and subtle promotion of your products and services you can at least double your income generation potential with email marketing.

Offering Valuable Content

You’ve probably gotten your share of e-mails from information marketing companies which are only a few hundred words long and which offer little usable information. The common belief is that if you give away too much information to your list that they’ll no longer have a need to purchase your products. However, by making your e-mails 600 or even 1,000 words you add so much value for your subscribers that they begin to recognize you as an authority and look forward to your e-mails.

When this happens, they’re much more likely to purchase your products assuming that if the information you're giving away is as good as it is that the information you're selling will be phenomenal. Offering valuable content also means writing to your subscribers the things that they actually want to read about, which can be accomplished by encouraging them to ask questions and to answer those questions within your e-mail broadcasts. This will help you to connect with your customers and build trust with them faster.

Consistency in Your Email Marketing

Showing your subscribers that you are consistent in offering them valuable material will help them to trust you as a responsible merchant and also keep your company fresh in their minds. There are differing opinions about how frequently you should mail your list, Some companies suggest that once every three days is effective while others suggest weekly e-mails. What’s most important is to be consistent so that your subscribers won't forget you, which considering the high volume of emails most people receive, can happen within the time period of just a few weeks.

When you first begin mailing to your list, begin with a mini-series that lasts 6 to 10 days. This will help you to build a strong presence in the mind of your subscribers and set the pace for a good long-term relationship. After that, it’s a good idea to have autoresponder messages which follow up on a weekly or biweekly basis.

Tasteful Promotion of Your Company

If you’ve been consistent in delivering valuable content to your subscribers, you’ll only need a few tasteful promotions here and there to monetize your list. As a good rule of thumb, make your newsletters about 90% valuable information and 10% Company promotion. In addition to this, send out one e-mail per month which is strictly a promotion. If you’re interested in finding out more about how much to promote your company as opposed to how much to deliver valuable information, simply pay attention to the email lists that you currently subscribe to.

You can tell a lot about how to promote your company by seeing the way that other people do it, especially other e-mail marketers in your industry. The best e-mail marketing promotions often don’t appear as promotions at all, but they are seamlessly integrated within the information being offered. This is the most effective way to promote your company using e-mail marketing and the more you study the way other people do it, the better you’ll get at it.

To assist you in your e-mail marketing, it’s also a good idea to get a good solid email hosting company to work with. At the bottom of this article, you'll find a list of e-mail hosting companies that are dependable and have a high delivery rate. Good luck with your marketing!

Email Hosting Companies


AWeber

Constant Contact

GetResponse

Mail Chimp

 Email Hosting and Ecommerce Solutions

1Shoppingcart

keap

If you understand why collecting emails is extremely important, you have the essential building block to creating a profitable business in virtually any niche.

Thanks to social media, it’s now possible to get traffic to almost ANY website. In the past, depending on your niche, it could be difficult to get the right volume of traffic to really create a business. However, now that social media’s made it so easy to connect with others, we see communities sprouting up for almost any thinkable hobby, skill, or idea.

Bottom line is this: it’s easier than ever to get traffic…

Because it’s easier than ever to get traffic, it’s also—theoretically—easier to run a profitable business. However, traffic alone does not make a profitable business. You need a way to capture that traffic, and provide value to that traffic directly, over time.

After all, if someone visits your website once and then leaves without buying something, if you don’t have any information on them, you’ve got nothing! On the other hand, if someone visits your website and gives you their email address, regardless of what they do next, you’ll have a reliable way to get in touch with them.

Here’s a sales funnel that will allow you to create a profitable business in virtually any niche:

Traffic generation -> provide value -> email capture -> provide value/build trust -> sell products

If this funnel looks familiar, it’s because it’s been used successfully for years. But there are some minor changes. It’s no longer enough to simply generate traffic and sell products. Now, we need to provide massive value to our visitors – both when they give us their email address, and before we pitch a product to them.

It’s no longer enough to get people on your list, then spam them with product offers. Instead, you need to keep your sales pitches to few and far between, and cram TONS of value into the other emails you’re sending. This ensures that your emails will continue to be opened, and that potential customers clearly see the value in the information you provide. When customers see how much value you’re giving them for free, they’ll be much more likely to pay money for one of your products.

For the remainder of this article, we’ll be discussing one of the most basic forms of an email list: the 7-part newsletter.

In this newsletter, we’ll be sending seven emails to our subscribers. One every two days. Six of these emails will be about building trust and authority for your business and brand, with a slight call-to-action at the bottom. The seventh email will be a “hard sell”, talking specifically about your product, and how it can offer value to your reader’s life.

With this format, we have plenty of time to deliver true value to our subscribers. By the time the seventh email comes along, they already view us as a trusted authority who provides value. This dramatically increases the odds of them buying our products.

So what exactly should each email be about? Read on!

Email #1: Brief Intro, HEAVY Value

The first email you send is extremely important. It’s “make or break”. If you send a spammy or thin email the first go around, expect to see the majority of subscribers unsubscribe, immediately.

This is why in our first email, we want to “give away the farm”, so to speak. The most valuable free information you’re willing to share with your subscribers should be in this first email.

It needs to be an email that changes the lives of the readers. For example, if your newsletter was about making money online, your first email needs to be a concrete way your subscribers can start making money IMMEDIATELY, in a way they’ve never heard about before.

It should have an “exclusive” feel to it. After all, if you’re giving out top-quality information to subscribers alone, it IS exclusive information. 95% of this email should be valued. Then, at the very end, you should put a brief call-to-action about the product you sell, and how it ties into the email you just sent. Make it clear that if they got life-changing value from one email, your product will do several times that.

Remember – the point of this first email isn’t to sell your product. It’s to show your subscribers that you can change their lives. And you’ve already done so for free. This builds HUGE amounts of trust and loyalty.

Email #2: New Concept, Related to Brand

For email #2, we’re going to once again give our subscribers great value. But this time, we’re going to frame it differently – we’re going to talk about our brand. This can be a company brand or a personal brand.

One of the best ways to do this is through a story. Simply tell a story about how you or your company made a change that brought you more success, or whatever it is your readers are looking for.

Let’s pretend again that we run a business telling people how to make money online. Well, we could write an article about a Facebook marketing plan we tried that doubled our revenue.

We’d lay out the marketing plan in a way that would be easy to follow for our subscribers. So they’d get awesome life-changing information out of the email while seeing how we work. They see that our business thinks outside-of-the-box, and knows how to create value.

We add to our subscriber’s lives through the lens of our brand.

Email #3: Value-Driven Case Study

This is similar to email #2, but it’s about what we did for one of our customers or clients. Once again, share game-changing value with your subscribers, but show them how you were able to create that value for one of your customers from scratch.

Once again, it’s very important that your subscribers learn from this case study. Talk about what improvements you made to your customer’s lives, and make it clear how subscribers can learn from these improvements.

Similar to our last email, the subscriber’s gained new insight and value, and it’s directly as a result of our company.

Email #4: Valuable Concept #2

In email #4, we go back to the style of email #1. Here we get away from our business and focus directly on a new concept the subscriber can apply to their lives. Now, realize that every email has been about value to the subscriber. That never changes. All that changes is the way we present that information.

The presentation is very important because it’s how our customer views our business. Through this email newsletter style, we’re molding our customer’s perception of our business by providing massive value.

Just like email #1, this email should contain valuable information that the reader has never heard of before – something they can apply immediately after reading.

Emails #5 and #6: Two-Part Guide

Now it’s time to provide a TON of value leading up to our product pitch. In emails five and six, we’ll be discussing one large topic, in two parts. When writing this guide, it’s ESSENTIAL you connect it in with your product. After the two parts, the customer should have a definitive method to accomplishing one of their goals, AND the desire to know how to take the “next step”, which is when we introduce our product!

One of the absolute BEST examples of this guide comes from Neil Patel’s Quicksprout newsletter. He has a two-part guide entitled, “How to Get Your First 1,000 Visitors”. The guide shows you exactly how to get your first 1,000 visitors to your website. This leads up to the next email, where he gives subscribers a free trial to his analytics company – a company designed to show you the best ways to monetize your traffic.

He’s taught us how to build traffic and then given us the tool to move to the next step: his product.

Email #7: The Product Pitch

It’s finally here! Email #7. With this email, you want to be talking about your product. How it benefits your current customers, and most importantly, how it will benefit your subscribers.

Use this email to offer an exclusive deal. If your product has a free trial, give that immediately in this email. Provide your subscribers with an “easy way out”, to ensure that they don’t feel like they’re making a huge commitment by buying your product or service.

Remember, in all the emails up to this point, we’ve had calls-to-action. But they’ve only been at the very end of the emails. This email is different – the entire email should be dedicated to the value your product provides to its users.

The 7-part newsletter is one of the most effective ways to turn traffic into buyers. And, as you can probably imagine, it’s not something that’s exclusive to one niche in particular. No, you can use this strategy in virtually any niche, selling virtually any product.

But the bottom line is, you have to provide MASSIVE value. If you’re not providing value with all the emails, your subscribers will get bored of your emails and unsubscribe. Additionally, they won’t view you as an authoritative source in your niche, making it very unlikely that they’ll buy your products.

Provide value and the 7-part email newsletter will funnel money into your bank account.

How to Write E-mails That Get Responses

Writing a good email is an art – an art that must be mastered if you want to reach the pinnacles of business success.

An email can be incredibly powerful. With the right email, you can get in touch with someone who has HUGE influence and can potentially get you hundreds of thousands of dollars in business. Or millions. The sky’s the limit!

Additionally, good emails level the playing field. Generally, successful business owners will keep in contact with successful business owners. So it can be difficult to get in touch with them.

But if you know how to send the right email, there’s a good chance they’ll open it and respond. Therefore, it doesn’t matter if you set up your business yesterday – with the right email (and a little bit of a number’s game), you can get in touch with big-time influencers.

In today’s article, we’ll be talking about the art of the simple email. Because that’s what it’s all about: simplicity!

Many times, people get scared when writing influencers. They explain their life story to these people, not realizing that these are the exact people who don’t have time to read it! 

That’s the first idea to keep in mind: simplicity is King in the email!

Body of Email

I used to send emails in a specific format. The format was something like this:

“Hey, _________

My name is Mike. Blah blah blah blah life story.

Blah blah blah blah can you please give me value?

Thanks!

-Mike”

I got very few responses with this email. And the reasons are simple. 

First off, look at the first line of my email: “Hey, (first name)”. Sounds friendly, doesn’t it? So what’s wrong?

This is putting a barrier up in the email. If I’m talking to someone face to face, I don’t address them in letter format. An email is not a letter! It’s much more of an instant message/text message than a formal letter!

Therefore, you want to make it sound like you’re talking directly at them. And the best way to do that is to take off your formal introductions and send-offs! 

Starting out the email with, “My name is Mike” sounds MUCH more personalized then “Hey (firstname), (paragraph) My name is Mike.”

Additionally, instead of a formal signing at the email, a simple “Thanks!” accomplishes the exact thing and—once again—sounds a lot more personal!

Now that we’ve got the format, what do we put in our email?

Value for Value

One quick note: keep your email as short as possible. The shorter the better. In my experience working with very successful entrepreneurs, the more successful they are, the shorter the emails they send, and the shorter the emails they like to receive! 

Therefore, it’s absolutely worth the time to shorten your message as much as possible. When they read your email, they’ll view you as someone on their level, instead of someone who’s asking them for help because they’re not on the same level.

Now, in your email, YOU WANT TO GIVE VALUE BEFORE YOU ASK!

If you want a link from an influencer, for example, you could say something like this:

“My name’s Mike – I write for SEOSiteCheckUp.com. I recently wrote an article entitled ‘The Virtual Handshake’. I’ve looked at your audience and feel like they would be a GREAT fit for this article. 

If you’d like, you can have it to publish on your blog. Let me know how it goes. Thanks!”

I just came right out of the gate and offered huge value, and didn’t ask for anything! Now, many people don’t do this because they worry that the influencer won’t “pay them back”. This is the wrong attitude to have! The state of mind you need to have when sending these emails is, “I offer value, and whether or not it’s returned immediately, I know it will be returned!”

In every case I’ve done this, I’ve got a link, even if I haven’t directly asked for one! Not to mention that this email stands head and shoulders above the whiny emails most influencers receive every day.