Email Marketing – What Is It and Why Do you Need It?

 

E-mail is the #1 most under-used and vilified – but profitable and effective- marketing tools a business owner can use to grow his business.

 

For it to work, you want a website that offers relevant, useful content and makes an offer to trade more relevant and useful content to a visitor of your website – someone who is visiting because they are ALREADY looking for what it is you offer – in exchange for the visitor’s e-mail address. From there, you them systematically and consistently contact them via e-mail with more useful, relevant content related to their interests about your business, along with periodic announcements, promotions and more.

 

Most importantly for you as a business owner – you 100% own the e-mail addresses of anyone who shares them with you. You are building a database of people who have raised their hands and said, “Yes, I am interested in what you are offering”. You can literally contact these people – on demand – whenever you have anything going on with your business that might be of value to them. And you can do this for FREE. Once you have the database, sending e-mail is simply writing it and pushing SEND.

 

Bottom line: you definitely want to be capturing and building an e-mail database of leads and customers on every transaction you can. That database is one of the most valuable assets of your company. The good news is as a Southern California email marketing services agency, we are experts in selling goods and services online via e-mail.

 

 

E-mail is Here to Stay

 

While many so-called “experts” say e-mail is dead, dying, ineffective, annoying, etc…statistics show otherwise as do the cash registers of businesses who embrace this marketing tool. Look at these numbers:

 

• There are nearly 3.9 billion email accounts worldwide

• 247 billion emails are sent daily

• For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $44.25

• 95% of online consumers use email

• 91% of consumers check email once per day minimum

• When marketed to through email, consumers spend 138% MORE

• There are 897 million mobile email users worldwide

• 48% of emails are opened on mobile devices

• Email is almost 40x better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter

• 90% of consumers prefer email over all other mediums to communicate with businesses

• 44% of consumers made at least one purchase based on promotional email received

• Email conversion rates are 3x higher than social media

 

 

Done Correctly, You Build Long-Term Relationships

 

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard business owners say, “I HATE getting spam and promotional e-mails; I don’t want to e-mail my customers or leads too much. I don’t want to annoy them or make them unsubscribe or have them complain.”

 

If every time you contact a customer – regardless the medium – all you are doing is trying to sell them something, OF COURSE they are going to get annoyed; wouldn’t you? But, if you are consistently connecting with customers and leads delivering value first, you start to build a relationship which makes doing business together much easier.

 

As the statistics show, e-mail marketing is extremely effective. We want to focus on how to do it properly so that you are seen as a welcomed visitor instead of an uninvited pest.

 

Permission Based Marketing

 

The first step is to make sure you offer something of value to your website visitor in exchange for their contact information and e-mail. You also make sure what you provide knocks their socks off in the value department. You also make sure that you let them know that you will be contacting them in the future with more valuable content, NOT just promotional offers.

 

This establishes the two things you need most to qualify your potential customers and sell to them in the future – trust and authority. By them sharing their information, you are positioned as the expert and they are going to listen to you – as long as you never violate the rule of delivering value BEFORE selling.

 

Tell Stories and Provide Quality Content – Stop Selling All the Time

 

I once had a person I was training on email marketing who used to work for a world-wide amusement park company that if I told you the name you would instantly recognize. She had been in their email marketing department and she absolutely swore up and down that there is no way you can contact people more than once per month, maybe twice. When I asked her why, she said, “Every time we did it at (insert well-know amusement park brand here), we would get a massive amount of unsubscribes.”

 

So I asked her, “What were you emailing about?”

 

She said, “Promotional offers, things that they might like to buy.”

 

I said, “Well, if every time they get an email it always a pitch to buy something, I would unsubscribe, too.”

It was hard for me to believe that a company of that history and sophistication hasn’t grasped that simple concept. If every time you email someone you are hard-selling something or just telling them your latest-greatest offer, they are quickly going to unsubscribe.

 

But, if you e-mail with stories about how your service helped someone, shared stories of happy customers, maybe sent some useful tips on how to use your service or product more efficiently and THEN – every once in a while – mixed an offer in there, you would be amazed at how powerful this is.

 

We will show you how to deliver relevant, useful and entertaining content to your leads and customers so that they look forward to getting an e-mail from you.

 

 

Put Your E-mail Marketing on Autopilot

 

One of the best things about this kind of marketing tool is the ability to create groups of emails that go out at pre-described intervals, based on the action of the end user. You can make it so that once someone takes on action, they go into an email series that sends them follow up emails, all related to the first email and action they performed. Best of all, you can set this up once and it runs on autopilot from then on.

An example would be, let’s say you sell someone widget A; as soon as your system registers the sale of widget A, it starts to send a three to five email sequence of stories about other products or services that compliment widget A, that they just purchased. The customer is already a buyer (they already made one transaction) so they are conditioned to do business with you again. If the emails deliver value and show how the related items can help the customer get more out of widget A, a large percentage will buy the recommended add-on items.

 

And that is just on ONE item. Services are no different. And, even if they don’t buy anything, you can create a series for people who visit and give you their email address but don’t buy anything. Once you get something like this setup, it is amazing how much profits you will find you were leaving on the table by NOT having a powerful automated follow-up system in place.

 

This is how you can automatically generate more business from new customers and existing customers, all using the power of e-mail.

 

We have been using email marketing systems to sell goods and services both online and offline for over a decade, generating hundreds of thousands in sales and profits. Let us build one for your business.

To find out how one of these systems would look for your business, go to the Discovery Form and fill it out as completely as possible. We will contact you in 24 to 48 business hours.