Orig. Post June 3o, 2015 by Matthew Paulson, Argus Leader | Re-Post July 2, 2015
Have you ever wondered why cashiers at places such as Kohl’s and Victoria’s Secret are increasingly asking for your email address at checkout? You probably know that they are going to email you coupons and ads, but you might not know that the email advertisements they send are wildly profitable. A business will earn an average of $43 in new revenue for every $1 invested in email marketing, according to the Direct Marketing Association.
While email marketing is incredibly effective, very few small businesses have developed an email marketing strategy that works. Some small-business owners simply don’t know how to do email marketing. Others implement an email marketing campaign, but quickly abandon it because they don’t see immediate results. Email marketing is a long-term play. It takes several months to build a mailing list and develop a strategy that works, but the return on investment over time will be well worth the effort.
At the core of your marketing strategy will be an email service provider, or ESP, such as MailChimp, Aweber or Constant Contact. For a monthly fee, an ESP will maintain your mailing list, allow you to email subscribers and automatically remove invalid addresses. Your ESP also will provide opt-in forms to place on your website and help ensure that messages don’t end up in subscribers’ spam folders.
Once you have an ESP, try to collect the contact information for as many of your customers and prospects as possible. Consider offering a coupon, free report or some other piece of content in exchange for their email address. By offering something of value, you will receive much higher opt-in rates.
Send your new subscribers a series of pre-written emails that provide helpful content, information about your brand and ads for your products and services. You or your copywriter will write 10 to 15 emails in advance, and your ESP will send them to new subscribers automatically over several weeks. You’ll also want to send a weekly or biweekly newsletter to generate sales and keep your subscribers interested in your brand.
My digital publishing company, MarketBeat.com, has used website opt-ins and digital advertising to build a list of more than 250,000 stock investors who receive our free daily email newsletter. By developing an email marketing strategy over several years, our company has been able to build a profitable subscription products business.
The shape of your email marketing strategy might look very different depending on your industry, but the biggest mistake you can make is not having any email marketing strategy at all.