An Introduction To Email Marketing
by Mark Favin

Did you know that less than 1% - yes, a pathetic percentage - of your prospects will decide to buy your product on the first contact? By first contact, I mean the very first time your prospects will get to read your sales page and the very first time your prospects will be introduced to your online business. The internet, for all its glory, is still a place where anonymity - and the consequential distrust - reigns supreme. People will naturally feel hesitant trusting a business they have just encountered.

On the other hand, more than 70% - yes, a vast majority - of your customers will come from prospects on the third to eighth contact. This means that your prospects should encounter your business for the third to the eighth time before they can be made to part with their hard earned money in exchange for the products you’re offering.

Question: how can you contact your prospects more than once?

The answer: by establishing an effective email marketing campaign.

What Is An Email Marketing Campaign?

An email marketing campaign is a strategy you can employ that will help you convert visitors into leads. It’s an ongoing campaign that should never cease. The aim is to warm up your signups so that trust can be built while you inform them of your offers.

An email marketing campaign can be broken down in the following phases:

1. setting up a capture page which will allow your visitors to sign up to your mailing list 2. sending the members of your mailing list a series of messages with the end goal of making them trust your business and ultimately, winning their favor for a purchase of your offerings 3. sending the members of your mailing list your offers, whether they’re affiliated products you are promoting or your own products which you are selling

An email marketing campaign should not be composed exclusively of messages that will try to convince your subscribers to buy what you’re selling. Your messages should impart something of value in between your offers, otherwise, your subscribers will just view the entire series as one continuing sales pitch.

The Heart Of An Email Marketing Campaign

The heart of an email marketing campaign is an excellent autoresponder service. An autoresponder service is the engine that makes an email marketing campaign possible. Here are the functions that a good autoresponder service will fulfill for your online business:

* Create an unlimited number of mailing lists for different categories of prospects * Allow prepared messages to be loaded in the system and to be delivered in stated intervals * Allow the capture of your visitors’ contact details as a condition for their subscription * Allow mass-sending of messages, or the sending of personal messages to particular recipients * Anti-spam features that will improve the deliverability rate of your messages and protect you against spam complaints * Double opt-in feature, if desired, to strengthen your case against potential spam complaints

Simply put, no email marketing campaign is possible without procuring an autoresponder service.

Content

So what should be the content of your messages?

Let me tell you this before anything else: though the ultimate goal is to bag some sales, it will be fatal to send your subscribers messages offering a product, one after another. There is a science to what kind of messages you should send your mailing list.

Try the most basic setup first: deliver three messages that will give your subscribers something valuable. This may be a freebie, or informative content that they will appreciate. On the fourth message, make your first offer. You may or may not bag some sales. The fifth to seventh message should likewise be emails that will provide them with more freebies. The eighth message can be another offer.

This pattern can go on as it is.

The point here is that you shouldn’t drown your subscribers with mini sales page after mini sales page. Take time to warm them up for a sale. Win their trust. Let them have a taste of your generosity.

Soon enough, they’d be faithful to your online enterprise, and such fidelity will allow you to win some customers.
About the Author

Increase Website Traffic using Mark Flavin’s very own personally developed traffic methods. These methods are extremely underused & will drive thousands of targeted visitors to your website for free. Click Here Now