Emailing

10 Best Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses

February 9, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

email-marketing

This is a guest contribution from Stacey Marone

If you still haven’t made email marketing a priority for your small business, you should definitely do that as soon as possible. When your email list grows, your potential for sales also grows. You get a chance to attract loyal users to your website, and they get special offers they can’t resist. It’s a win-win situation.

Some content marketers will tell you that email marketing is outdated. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Take your own email as an example. Do you subscribe to lists from the websites you often visit? Do you like getting special offers from your favorite online bookstore? Of course you do!

Through perfectly-designed and written email messages, you make a quick and easy offer. Moreover, you get a chance to improve the traffic at your website. All you need to do is plan and execute a great email marketing campaign and work on the design and content of the website. If you get those points right, you’ll get more traffic and an improve conversion rate.

Coursera, for example, found a great way to attract its users to improve their activity at the website. They constantly get suggestions of courses they would like. The emails are personalized in accordance to their activity and preferences. Someone who likes history and shows such an activity at the website won’t get irrelevant suggestions for psychology courses. The creators of this email marketing campaign also send updates about the progress of the platform and remind the users they can access their courses from anywhere. This is an example of a good email marketing campaign, which provides a lot of value to the users.

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The question is: how do you get there? How do you plan and design the perfect email marketing campaign? The following 10 tools will help you with that.

#1: Constant Contact

This is one of the fastest growing services for email marketing. It is very user-friendly, so it’s the perfect choice for those who are making their first steps with email promotions. The mailing lists are very easy to manage.

The strength is the great choice of templates that are very easy to customize with drag-and-drop actions. You don’t need advanced design skills to use and customize a template in a way that would look appealing to your potential customers. Through Constant Contact, you can send personalized welcome, anniversary, and birthday messages that will make each subscriber feel special.

If you haven’t created an email list, you can easily upload it from Gmail, Outlook, Excel, and other services. From then on, it will grow. The platform will handle the bounces, unsubscribes, and inactive emails so you won’t bother with those details.

#2: Zoho Campaigns

This email marketing tool is focused on building last relationships with the subscribers. You can achieve that with the right design, content, and response to the actions of the recipients. The campaign tracking and reporting features of Zoho Campaigns are extremely valuable. You’ll be aware of the way your audience reacts on your messages, so you’ll constantly work on the improvement of your campaign.

You can use a template, but you can also create your own design if you want to be extremely unique. With Campaigns, you can create landing pages for your Facebook audience.

#3: ConvertKit

You’ll notice how this service is described the moment you land at its website: email marketing for professional bloggers. Why would a small business need an email marketing tool intended for bloggers? Well, if you have a blog at your website, then ConvertKit can really make your content marketing campaign more effective.

This tool is different from all others on this list because it focuses around content. You’ll be sending automated emails that invite the readers to read more at your website. When people want to get tips and solutions (and they do), that’s exactly what you need to deliver.

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#4: GetResponse

This is a tool that not only helps you deliver great messages to your target audience, but also educates you on proper email marketing. The emails will look great on any device; and guess what: you don’t need any design skills to achieve that. The HTML code editor is suitable for people who have some skills, but you can always use a template if you don’t belong in that category. GetResponse also gives you over 1,000 free iStock images to use in your designs.

You will get access to webinars that teach you how to boost the conversion rates. In addition, you’ll get tools that help you build great landing pages that lead to conversions.

#5: Campaign Monitor

This is a complete email marketing and automation tool that allows you to address each recipient personally with the messages. That’s an important effect to achieve. With Campaign Monitor, a high level of personalization is possible because the tool allows you to use important data from any third-party apps, such as Salesforce and Shopify.

The fact that you can control the time of sending email messages is also important. The last thing you want is wake up the recipients from other time zones with notifications in the middle of the night.

The design of your emails will be great with Campaign Monitor. The drag-and-drop builder works perfectly well.

#6: SendinBlue

This platform supports more-or-less the same features that all other tools on this list provide. Its advantage, however, is in the SMS marketing tools, which you can combine with your emailing campaign. You can reach the relevant audience with messages triggered by their interactions with your business.

You will get personalized email and phone support by the SendinBlue team, so you can always find solutions to the issues you face during the campaign. The free plan is another huge advantage. ALthough it gives you only 9,000 emails per month and not many other features that are available with the paid plans, that’s still more than enough for the beginning.

You can try the free plan and see where it takes you. As your campaign grows, you can get a Micro, Bronze, or Silver membership. Advanced users can make progress to Gold, Platinum, Diamond, or Atomic membership.

#7: AWeber

From all email marketing tools on this list, this one is probably the easiest one to use. It’s perfect for a small business that wants to get attention through an emailing campaign. With AWeber, you can rest assured that the messages will end up in the inboxes of your subscribers. They won’t be lost in the spam folders.

The templates look great and are pretty easy to use. You can design appealing messages in a matter of minutes.

Small business owners love AWeber because of the rock-solid support system. When you’re dealing with an email marketing campaign for the first time, it’s important to get tips from someone who understands your struggles.

#8: MailChimp

If you’re looking for the most popular email marketing platform that most people use, this is the one. It’s strength is individuality. It enables you to design unique email messages that convey the character of your brand. In an email marketing campaign, personality is an extremely important feature to keep in mind.

The features of MailChimp are great for small businesses, but they will remain relevant when your company grows, so you won’t have to look for another tool that meets your marketing campaign’s growing needs. You can connect your store with MailChimp’s ecommerce integration. This feature enables you to connect the email marketing with the conversion process in a seamless manner.

#9: Infusionsoft

The moment you land at the website of this tool, you’ll notice its strength: design. The platform provides solutions for sales and marketing automation that are exclusively designed for small businesses. These are the things you’ll get with Infusionsoft: improved conversion rates, more leads, sales process management, master ecommerce experience, and automation of tasks that are holding you back.

As you can see, this is much more than an email marketing tool; it’s a solution that takes care of multiple aspects of your small business. Still, the plans are relatively affordable regarding all features you get.

#10: ActiveCampaign

This is a classic email marketing tool. It helps you design beautiful campaigns through templates, so you can send newsletters with no effort. You can automate your marketing channels when you import personal and behavioral data about the contacts.

The platform supports free image hosting, so you won’t bother looking for free images all over the web. You can easily find a suitable image to fit into the design of the free template. The good thing about the templates is that they help you create a mobile-friendly design.

Added Recommendation: Engage Bay

Engage Bay is a powerful, affordable, all-in-one marketing solution for SMBs. The company presents itself as a more affordable version of HubSpot which provides capabilities for email marketing, marketing automation, CRM & sales, and the Help Desk

In Conclusion

The success of a small business is practically dependent upon the online reputation it builds. For the sale of building a great online reputation, social media platforms are not enough. You have to find a way to communicate with your audience and send your personalized message directly to the potential customers. Email marketing is the perfect solution. Make your choice from the tools above, and you’ll be on your way to a successful email marketing campaign.

About Stacey

Stacey Marone is a freelance writer for essays.scholaradvisor.com and a social media marketer working part-time on contract for a large consultancy firm in the US. She creates magnetic content optimized for search. In her free time she also does volunteer work and organizes some activities for children. You can follow her on Twitter.

6 Tactics To Avoid Inbox Fatigue and Write Better Emails

January 21, 2017 by Marc Guberti 8 Comments

Your inbox can be full of opportunity or endless distraction. The inbox is addictive. Unread message notifications attract our attention like puppies, irresistible and impossible to ignore.

But a few minutes in your inbox can easily turn into hours while your projects are left waiting in limbo. To avoid falling into this continuous trap, follow these six tactics.

#1: Hire A Virtual Assistant

Do you find yourself responding to emails the same way to save time and energy? Do you spend too much of your day reading and responding to guest post submissions? If so, consider hiring a virtual assistant.

By reading through your emails and prioritizing which ones need your attention, a virtual assistant will help you resist the urge to incessantly check your inbox

If a virtual assistant cuts through just half of your emails each day, you’ll have more time to focus on your projects and feel less anxious about responding to every inquiry.

#2: Set Time Aside To Send and Respond To Emails

While outsourcing some of your email tasks frees up time and energy, it’s important not to forget that your inbox can present you with valuable, and often unexpected, opportunities.

In your quest to spend as little time as possible in your inbox, be sure you (or your virtual assistant) can spot those opportunities when they arise.

Some opportunities just randomly appear in your inbox. For example, once I got featured in The Huffington Post simply because I read and responded to an email immediately. I spent some time on a thoughtful submission that ended up in this HuffPost article.

Indeed, if I hadn’t checked my inbox, I wouldn’t have become a HootSuite ambassador, a Power Of Broke ambassador, or an affiliate for some of the top courses around — all of which have directly influenced my success.

And if I hadn’t allotted a portion of my day to writing emails, I wouldn’t have guests for my podcast, written guest posts, or achieved many of my goals (a lot of things come together for any individual’s success).

You don’t have to send and reply to emails every day of the week. I prefer to send and reply to emails 4-5 times per week, and I never leave email unattended for more than two days in a row.

I’ve found it’s better to address your inbox several times throughout the week than to choose one day to attend to your email. That one day will be rough, believe me, and you might miss out on time-sensitive opportunities.

Plus, if something comes up that day, you’ll find yourself overwhelmed by two weeks of email waiting for you the following week.

#3: Remove The App From View

I often find myself in a staring contest with the Mail icon on my Mac Book Pro. When the app is visible on my computer’s dashboard, it usually wins, but even the most disciplined among us can get distracted by a “New Message” notification.

When I’m working on an important project, I always force quit the Mail app. This makes the icon temporarily disappear from my computer’s dashboard.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Force quitting the app not only hides it from view, it also turns off inbox notifications. I can always turn the app back on and visible on my computer’s dashboard via the search function.

Once I’m finished working on a particular project, I move the Mail icon back to my dashboard because I don’t want to miss out on a potential opportunity. Sometimes, though, I’ve missed things simply because I forgot to turn the app back on!

#4: Unsubscribe From 1 Newsletter A Day

BEFORE YOU CONTINUE READING: If you’ve heard it here first, don’t unsubscribe from my emails just because you’re following this method.

Okay, here we go.

While people mean well when they email you their latest updates, blog posts, videos or products, these emails quickly become overwhelming (especially if you’re subscribed to dozens of newsletters). More importantly, it’s easy to miss priority emails in the shuffle.

That’s why I recommend unsubscribing from one email list every day. Take a look at whose emails land in your inbox. I’ll bet you’re not actively engaging with many of those individuals, brands or products.

These are the lists you should unsubscribe from. If you’re not actively engaging with email content, you’ll do yourself (and the sender) a favor by unsubscribing.

Why are you doing the sender a favor? Because for every email you pass over — combined with many others who do the same — the sender may be flagged as spammer.

Not only that, it’s better to know when a receiver is not a prospect in order to build an email list of quality leads.

Think of your inbox as a pricey piece of real estate and get rid of anyone who isn’t paying the rent. Even senders you like, but with whom you do not engage, should be shown the door.

#5: Make Your Replies Short

The previous tactic will decrease the number of emails you’ll receive in a given day. However, you’ll still get emails from people making inquiries. They may ask for advice, whether you’d like to contribute to their blog, pitch a story, or something else.

Naturally you’ll have to respond to some of these emails.

But your responses don’t have to be lengthy. The rule I follow is to aim for making my email responses no longer than five sentences. Some of my replies are only one sentence long. I don’t have time to write several paragraphs, and the receiver most likely doesn’t have time to read them.

Many of my email contacts follow a similar mantra. Seth Godin and Neil Patel were both guests on my podcast. To land the interviews, I had to reach out via email, but our exchanges were short and sweet.

In fact, I don’t recall ever receiving an email from Seth or Neil that was more than one sentence. Nearly everything was a one-liner! Neither of them waste time on long emails; they get their message across clearly, succinctly (and politely) in one or two sentences instead of one or two paragraphs.

Why do I mention Neil Patel and Seth Godin? Because I admire them both for their contributions to the entrepreneurial community. Seth has written 18 bestselling books and Neil has founded several million-dollar companies.

Look at how your role models do business and mimic them. Then you’ll become a role model for others. Quick responses free up your time to focus on other things. I go by the maximum five-sentence rule, but when I can get my message across in one sentence, I do.

#6: Ask People To Shorten Their Replies

How many times have you had to read an email more than once to understand what it’s all about? These kinds of emails are annoying in every sense of the word. Here’s the rubric for most of them:

The first paragraph opens by stating credentials. The second paragraph repeats the same credentials. And the third paragraph is a mix of credentials and the actual request.

You’ve lost me after the first sentence. Here are my choices:

Completely ignore the email
Reply to the person and ask him/her to shorten the email to no more than five sentences
Read the last paragraph to see what the person wants from me

Of course, if I receive an email expressing gratitude, I read it word for word. I appreciate those kinds of emails, even if they’re lengthy!

But most people want to receive short emails that get straight to the point. Regardless of whether you make this request to your audience or not, be aware of this tip when you send emails to me (or anyone else).

In Conclusion

The inbox is a double-edged sword filled with opportunities and distractions. To rule your inbox’s world, you must become conscious of how you spend time with it, and monitor how it affects your ability to complete projects and achieve daily goals.

You can’t just eliminate your inbox, but you can’t let it rule your life either. Your inbox is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. You are the keeper of the kingdom, and you must protect it from greedy landowners.

What are your thoughts on managing email and your inbox? Which of these tips resonated with you the most? Do you have any tips to share? Sound off in the comments section below.

Why I Switched From iContact To ConvertKit

October 21, 2016 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Switching from one email service to another isn’t an easy decision. But after using iContact for years, I switched to the rapidly growing ConvertKit. Founded in 2013, the company has quickly become a million dollar business recommended by Pat Flynn, John Lee Dumas and others.

When I decided to take a look at ConvertKit, this is what I found:

No Limit On Emails Sent

One of my biggest pet peeves with iContact was the limited number of free emails I could send. Some of my marketing efforts were cut short because I didn’t want to spend the extra money.

Once I sent an email blast that put me over my limit, and I had to pay an additional $100. Needless to say, I was not pleased when that bill arrived. Since ConvertKit has no limits, I no longer worry about getting hit with those charges.

The removal of this limit has helped me think differently about email marketing and how many emails I should send on a given day. Some of the people I’ve come to admire appear in my inbox more often than others. For instance, messages from Neil Patel and Jeff Bullas show up in my inbox every other day.

With each message, relationships grow. And now I too can send messages every day or every other day without worrying about extra fees. If I tried doing that on iContact, it would have cost me hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

Superior Automation Capabilities

Automation on iContact lets you schedule email blasts, get your subscribers on the right lists and send your subscribers a series of messages in an autoresponder based on those lists.

You can do all of those awesome things on ConvertKit, but with some caveats. For example, ConvertKit lets you create rules that control how subscribers move through your sales funnel.

One thing I try to be careful about is sending additional messages to people who already receive my autoresponder. I am so careful, in fact, that I’ve created a segment on iContact that contains only the people who’ve completed the autoresponder.

The only problem is that I have to remember to manually update this autoresponder. I put people on that segment based on the date they joined my account. I’d have to change the date every week to reflect the additional people who’ve completed the autoresponder.

ConvertKit now does that for me with a simple rule I’ve set up. Anytime someone completes my Twitter Domination sequence, they then end up on my Twitter Domination tag.

convertkit automation

This allows me to identify all of the people who have completed the Twitter Domination autoresponder. I can then email the people who completed the Twitter autoresponder and avoid emailing those who’ve already completed the autoresponder.

Here are the automation options ConvertKit provides.

convertkit trigger

Price

The powerful automation ConvertKit provides is similar to that of InfusionSoft. Before ConvertKit, InfusionSoft was one of the only players that enabled that type of automation.

Two big complaints about InfusionSoft are price and user experience (some see InfusionSoft more as a CRM network than an emailing service). ConvertKit is cheaper and simpler.

But let’s go back to iContact vs. ConvertKit. Which one is cheaper? Well, that depends on your account type. For this blog post, I decided to see what iContact and ConvertKit charge for someone with 10,000 subscribers.

You’ll pay $119/mo for ConvertKit and get all of the cool stuff the service has to offer.

On iContact, you’ll pay $79/mo for a regular account; I used this version throughout my time on iContact but it didn’t have nearly as many cool features as ConvertKit. iContact Pro, however, seems to offer similar features as ConvertKit such as workflows, triggered messages, and more. But it will cost you $189/mo.

The services on both platforms are spot on. But based on price, ConvertKit is the better buy.

Easier Emailing Format

Sending emails is easier on ConvertKit. iContact requires extra steps like choosing among templates whereas ConvertKit sends you straight to a text box similar to a blog post. Just write the email and that’s it.

convertkit-tutorial

Plus, immediately after you create the email, you can see a preview. The best part is that you can click on your links to be sure they’re working. Double checking the links takes only a few seconds and ensures that you don’t make a careless (and critical) mistake.

In Conclusion

Migrating from one email service to another can be a tiresome process, especially when you have numerous landing pages and subscribers. But while the switch may be bothersome in the short-term, the long-term benefits are worth it.

ConvertKit is very promising. I started using it last summer and completed the switch by October. Migrating email lists isn’t the most enjoyable activity, but in the end it was well worth it.

What are your thoughts about ConvertKit and iContact? Do you prefer another email service? Sound off in the comments section below.

What Makes An Effective Autoresponder

April 25, 2016 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Autoresponders are critical for building trust and leading people to your sales page. After analyzing numerous autoresponders, I created this video to share with you how to craft an autoresponder that gets sales.

One way to get more sales with your autoresponder is to make your messages simpler and shorter. Short and sweet is the way people like emails.

In the video, I will tackle those methods and more so you can craft more effective autoresponders.

If you like this video, then I would love it if you subscribed to my YouTube channel and spread the word.

[Tweet “What Makes An Effective Autoresponder.”]

How To Create A Super Awesome Autoresponder

July 29, 2015 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Autoresponder Tips

Your autoresponder is one of the most important parts of a successful email marketing strategy. The autoresponder allows people to know who you are, get an introduction to what you do, and learn about one of your products (and possibly buying that product). Striving to make your autoresponder as close to perfect as possible will allow you to develop a deeper relationship between you and the people on your list, and you will accumulate more revenue in the process. Here’s how you create a super awesome autoresponder:

Start With The Free Prize

Before you can get people to your autoresponder, you must give your visitors a good reason to subscribe to your blog. The best way to entice a visitor to subscribe to your blog is by offering a free, value-packed incentive exclusive to your subscribers. I offer free, lengthy eBooks to my subscribers that aren’t available anywhere else. By offering an exclusive free prize to your potential subscribers, many of them will subscribe for the value they expect and for the exclusivity of the free prize.

Not only does the free prize itself matter, but the way your free prize looks is equally as important. Do you remember the saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover”? Do you remember when you didn’t judge a book by its cover? I don’t. We like to judge the value of a product based on the way it is presented. If the product is presented in a sloppy manner, then we quickly assume that the product must be sloppy and insufficient for our needs. I want you to look at all of the books you bought and read, and I want you to look at their covers. Then, ask yourself which book covers don’t look visually appealing (if any).

The Welcome Email

The first email your new subscribers gets is the welcome email which gets sent a few minutes after the initial subscription takes place. In this welcome email, you must give your subscriber access to the free prize that you promised. You should also introduce your mission in your welcome email so your new subscribers have a better idea of what type of person you are and what you strive to accomplish.

In your welcome email, you should encourage people to reply to the email so you can build a stronger relationship with more of your subscribers. Your autoresponder will help strengthen the relationship, but a new subscriber would feel even more appreciated if he/she personally got an email from you. At the end of my welcome email, I encourage people to ask a question or just say hi, and then I mention that I will respond. This last sentence has been responsible for hundreds of email conversations that I have had in the last few months.

The 2-3 Value Emails

After a subscriber gets the welcome email, the next step is to provide them with free value. Every two days, I send a value email to the people on my list. All of the value emails are about a topic related to the free prize that the subscriber received a few days ago. The value emails allow you to show off your expertise to your subscribers and provide them with value. You can either showcase your videos or some of your older blog posts that are related to the free prize your new subscribers got a few days ago. Just as you do with the welcome email, you should encourage your subscribers to respond to your email so you can know them better and personally respond to their emails.

The Product Pitch

The more valuable your value emails are, the more enticed your subscribers will be to buy one of your products. However, the product you choose to pitch also impacts how many sales you generate. Your free prize and value emails have all followed a very similar theme. The product you choose to pitch should also be related to that theme. In other words, don’t pitch a Facebook training course if your free prize is about getting Instagram followers and your value emails discussed certain tips to take your Instagram presence to the next level.

What Happens Next?

After a subscriber goes through your entire autoresponder, the next step is to send them occasional email blasts. Most of the email blasts you send to your subscribers should be value emails. Only every 6-12 weeks will I promote one of my products in an email blast, and I only promote a product if I actually have something to promote. In other words, I am not going to promote a product just for fun.

If you have never sent your own email blast to your email list using a service like iContact or Aweber, then you should start by sending one email blast per week while occasionally increasing/decreasing that frequency to test how your subscribers would respond to receiving more/fewer emails. By constantly experimenting with your email list and your autoresponder sequence, you will create a better experience for your subscribers, and this better experience will lead to more traffic to your blog when your email blasts promote your blog posts and more sales when you do a promotional email blast.

In Conclusion

Taking the time to master your autoresponder sequence will allow you to build a strong relationship with the people on your email list. Your subscribers will look forward to your emails, click on the links to your blog posts, and buy your products later on. As social media expert Kim Garst says, “People buy from people who they know, like, and trust.” In your autoresponder, you have a chance to present you and your expertise in such a way that your new subscribers will know, like, and trust you and what you do.

How many emails are in your autoresponder sequence? Does your autoresponder sequence generate sales? What tips do you have for creating better autoresponders? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

6 Reasons Why Your Success Is In Your Email List

December 12, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

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I am sure you have heard of phrases like, “The money is in the email list” and “Your blog must have a way to collect email addresses.” When I was a new blogger, I did not fully understand the power of an email list. I initially thought it was just a strategy surrounded by too much hype. I did read the types of phrases I mentioned before, but few articles with those phrases would go deep into why growing an email list is important.

It was just “understood” that a blog must have a way to collect email addresses. Few articles went deeper than that when discusses how important it is to grow an email list, and that resulted in me not taking my email list seriously for a long time (big mistake).

Other than me saying that not growing my email list was a mistake and that the money is in the list, here are six reasons why it is important to grow your email list.

#1: Higher click through rate.

If you craft your emails effectively, you will get a much higher click through with an email list than with a social media audience. Based on the number of tweets I send out, the number of followers I have, and the number of visitors I get from Twitter, my tweets as a lump sum get a click through rate lower than 1%.

Although my Twitter presence does equate to hundreds of daily visitors, my email list is proving to bring forth a greater click through rate. For the typical email, at least 10% of the people on my list end up clicking the link in the email. The higher your click through rate is, the more traffic your blog will get, and emailing your list is a great way to produce a high click through rate.

#2: Scalar traffic

Touching upon higher click through rates, scalar traffic is another great reason to grow your email list. If you get 10% of the people on your list to click on the emails you send, then you would get more clicks as your email list grows.

If you have 100 people on your email list, that mathematically means you are getting 10 clicks. If you have 1,000 subscribers on your email list, that mathematically means you are getting 100 clicks. Just keep on adding the zeroes, and you will quickly realize how powerful an email list is.

One of the most successful marketers in the world is Brendon Burchard, and he achieved a big portion of his internet fame through a big email list. Burchard boasts an email list of over 1 million people, and if 10% of those people are clicking on the links he sends out, he is getting 100,000 visitors each time he sends out another link.

#3: More sales

In order to effectively utilize your email list, you need to interact with the people on that list. One of the ways you can do this is by promoting one of your products. My recommendation is to only have one promotional email every month and make sure the rest are informative, but sending out that one promotional email every month has the power to bring in more sales.

Since your subscribers are seeing you often and reading through your content, it is quite possible to promote one of your products and expect to bring in more sales. All you have to do is send them emails before that point.

Another great way to get more product sales is by creating an autoresponder that sends out a series of emails that are several days apart from each other. Your autoresponder sequence has the power to entice people to buy your products and let them know about your story. Here is the order that you should create your autoresponder to bring in more sales:

An email about an aspect of your story that relates to something your readers may be facing.
An email that provides value such as a lengthy report or blog post for free.
An email about the product itself and what it is all about.
An email that pushes for the sale.

In the first three emails, you should reference the product but not push for the sale. Just include a P.S. here and there about your product and what it has done for others.

The reason the autoresponder sequence takes four emails to pull off is because you want potential customers to be in the right mindset when buying your product. Imagine how likely you would be to buy a product if the salesman rushed over and said, “Buy my product.” Then imagine what would happen if another salesman told you to buy his product who you felt related to and recognized as an expert. You would be more likely to buy from the second salesman than the first one.

#4: Powerful product launches

The product launch is one of the most important phases, and some would argue that it decides whether a product becomes successful or not. Your email list is a great way to get more sales which also means it is a great way to have powerful product launches.

For training courses that you create, this can mean a massive amount of customers quickly buy it, and that means you will quickly get new testimonials. For Kindle authors, a powerful product launch means Amazon will start to promote your book more throughout their site. Having lower sales ranks for their books allow Kindle authors to get more sales.

#5: Word of mouth

In a world filled with the internet, social media, and mobile phones, word of mouth marketing still emerges as a great way to get noticed. High school gossips still go around, and as a student myself, I know that most of those gossips still take place through word of mouth.

In addition to still existing and reaching out to a variety of people, word of mouth marketing is an extremely valuable form of marketing. When someone tells their friend about you, it’s not in Facebook post that can easily get overlooked. Instead, these people are talking to friends, and when these types of conversations take place, each friend is paying more attention than they would be to a social media post.

Sending emails to an email list will allow you to develop the type of bond with your subscribers that results in word of mouth marketing. Think of word of mouth marketing as something similar to click through rate. Although you cannot track word of mouth marketing statistics, it is possible to create an estimate.

Let’s say that 10% of the people on your email list will tell their friends about you. Then, you can play around with the numbers I mentioned when referring to scalar traffic to determine how many people would tell their friends about you. If you have 1,000 people on your email list, 100 people are going to tell their friends about you. That is 100 extra people who know about you and may end up on your email list. Then, some of these 100 people will tell their friends and some of those friends will tell their friends. It is an infinite loop of people telling their friends about you, your email list growing larger, and you getting more traffic and sales.

Growing an email list helps word of mouth marketing and word of mouth marketing helps your email list.

#6: People will remember you

Just because someone reads your blog and enjoys your blog posts does not mean that person is going to be a returning visitor. Some people may forget about your blog while others may get preoccupied by other things. The reason is that there are few visitors who have an extraordinary desire to visit your blog every day, let alone once every 30 minutes.

Since most people do not have this strong desire to visit your blog that frequently, it is possible to see a blog visitor one time and never again. However, if you get a visitor to subscribe to your email list, that person will be able to remember you.

The people will not automatically remember you by subscribing to your blog. Instead, you will remind people of who you are by sending emails to them. If you are someone who cannot remember to all of the blogs you have subscribed to over the years, then you are not alone. I do not remember all of the blogs I have subscribed to since the beginning of my journey, but each time I get an email from that blogger, I am reminded of the following:

Who that person is
Why I subscribed to this person’s blog
The desire to revisit this person’s blog so I can read what I missed

Being remembered is an important way to build an authority on the web, and an email list allows more people to remember you. We are obsessed with our emails. Most of us check our inboxes multiple times every day while some of us are even checking our inboxes once every 15-30 minutes. Insane? Yes, but having your message in other people’s inboxes will almost ensure that numerous people read that message and go to your blog.

In Conclusion

Your email list is where the money is, and it is essential for any blogger who wants to make it big on the web. You may have known that already, but now you also know why growing your email list is important.

Just to know that something is important is not convincing enough to take action. I learned that the hard way by not taking my email list seriously for a long period of time. I only took my traffic numbers seriously, but that also meant some people were visiting my blog and not coming back. Some people didn’t come back simply because in their busy worlds, they couldn’t remember me. Being able to send an email to these people’s inboxes would have resulted in them remember who I am and visiting my blog more often.

There are free emailing options available such as WordPress’ Jetpack option, but growing a big email list requires an investment. That is why I invested in iContact which I use to grow my email list.

Are you taking your email list seriously?