Developing an email marketing strategy as soon as possible will help you to achieve success much more quickly when starting a small business online. As with all elements of your online business marketing, if you’re failing to plan, you’re planning to fail! The technique of "throwing it against the wall to see what sticks" is not generally the best way to achieve success.
The primary aim of your online business marketing is to build up your database, or list, of potential customers. Once you start to have people on your list you can then start creating an email marketing strategy to build a relationship with them so that they start to trust and like you. Over time, as you build the relationship, they will be more willing and inclined to buy from you.
3 Steps To Developing An Email Marketing Campaign.
1. Concentrate On Your Target Audience.
First of all, when starting a small online business, you need to have a thorough understanding of who your target audience is. What is their average age? What is their gender? What are their interests, where do they hang out online, what do they want? Finding out all of these things will be a little time consuming but if you take the time to do it, you will be able to provide them with just what they want, and that is the ultimate secret for online business marketing: find a hungry audience and give them what they want.
2. Obtain Their Email Address.
The next part of creating an email marketing strategy is knowing what you are going to offer your website visitors when they opt-in to your email database. It is very unlikely that anyone will provide their email details to you for nothing in return, particularly if you are an online business startup. A good solution is to give away a free ebook, enewsletter or ecourse in exchange for their email address. It doesn’t matter what you actually give away, provided that it gives your target audience with something that they want and that they will consider beneficial to them.
3. Start A Relationship.
So, what happens now that somebody has provided their email address and you have emailed them the free gift that you promised? Quite simply, the answer is that you carry on giving them what they want. For instance, you develop your ebook or ecourse and send more information and details that will be of value to your subscriber. This can easily be done with an autoresponder which can send out emails automatically on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule.
Now that you have identified the people you want to target, you have figured out how to motivate them to sign up to your list and created an email marketing strategy that keeps on delivering value, what happens next?
Moving Your Online Business Forward.
Now you just have to keep delivering value. Every once in a while you can send an email that promotes a certain product or service where you will earn revenue on the sale. This may be your own product or an affiliate marketing product or service.
Be careful though to not abuse the people on your list. An occasional sales pitch is fine, but it must be occasional and you must provide real value to your list in all of your other emails. This is crucial to the success of your online business.
