The 3 Pillars of an Effective Email Marketing Plan
Re-thinking your email marketing strategies for better web traffic conversions
Are you making these mistakes when creating your email marketing plan?
Email has been around for over 40 years now. The first email was sent way back in 1971. Incredible isn’t it?
The invention of email brought in a whole new world of how we communicate. For example, did you know that it was email that triggered those cute little smileys that are still used widely today?
Unfortunately, as with pretty much any concept that is successful, it was also email that triggered SPAM and a whole lot of copycats.
In business, things always seem to follow the same pattern.
Someone comes up with an innovative concept or idea and he or she launches it successfully. The faster the success is diffused across the world, the faster the birth and proliferation of me-too products.
And it’s no different with email marketing. Once upon a time, it was literally a piece of cake to get people to open your emails. Seems unbelievable now, but people were actually excited when they got mail – yes, even sales mail!
That’s all changed now.
So in order to be successful with your email marketing strategies today, you’ve got to make sure that you’re basing your efforts around what I call “The Three Pillars of an Effective Email Marketing Plan”.
No, you don’t just collect an email list of potential clients, start emailing them your ezine with all sorts of promotional offers and expect them to respond favorably.
If you're new to all this, you might be asking yourself "What is an ezine?". If you don't know the answer to that question, click here for a simple explanation of what an ezine is and three solid reasons why you need to start one today!
Does your email marketing plan revolve around the 3 pillars?
PILLAR #1: TRUST
This is pretty straightforward. People buy from people they like and trust. There’s no going round it.
So if you’re sending out the wrong (or dubious) messages via your website, email, social presence or any of your off-line marketing strategies, you will most likely fail.
Maybe not in the short term, but you will eventually, just as soon as your customers figure out what you’re trying to do. It’s really quite easy to understand why, because who likes getting scammed?
PILLAR #2: CONTENT
Mind your content. Don’t treat your email marketing campaign as just some other “thing” that you have to write copy for.
Low quality content is useless and a waste of time and money.
Not to mention a fantastic way to piss off your existing and potential customers.
And who wants to do that? It’s all about quality content.
Quality content starts conversations. It makes you want to share it with like-minded friends and acquaintances.
Let’s face it. Few companies and business owners are re-inventing the wheel these days and coming up with new products and services from scratch.
Your content has to serve as the excitement trigger. Quality content gets people excited about a brand or business. It’s your content that will help you stand out and make your product or service shine.
But be careful, content that is full of false promises and hype will not get your customers excited. It might for a short while, but things can get ugly pretty fast.
PILLAR #3: RELATIONSHIPS
Building a solid relationship with your customers is crucial to succeed.
A lot of your customers may not be in “buying mode” when you first reach them.
Don’t ruin your chances of success by bombarding them with regular sales messages in your emails.
Build and nurture your relationship, by offering sales-free advice and information that relates to your product or service.
Building loyalty and visibility is a great way to create top-of-mind awareness, so that when your customers are ready to buy, they will come to you.
New to Email Marketing?
No problem. I've created a comprehensive guide that details the do's and dont's of email marketing.
This is important stuff because when it comes to email marketing, if you break the rules you could end up in big trouble.
Go read my free guide on Email Marketing Best Practices here.
Effective List Building Methods
So how can you build your list? And more importantly, how can you get targeted subscribers?
As I'm sure you realize, having hundreds or thousands of subscribers that are not interested in any of your products or services is pretty much useless!
So where can you find people that have a real potential of becoming your customers?
Go to my Top 3 Email List Building Methods page to get an idea on where to find your ideal customers.
If you're eager to make your email marketing plan work for you, make sure to sign up for updates below, where I share the same tactics that I use for my own online businesses.
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