While it’s good to have a website, your website won’t go forward without effective marketing.
In 2013, content/inbound marketing has been proven to be more effective and cheaper than traditional forms of marketing; of all inbound marketing techniques, email marketing is perhaps the most effective. This was recently proven in a 2012 study by the Direct Marketing Association that revealed that “email provided $39.40 in sales per dollar of advertising this year, followed by $22.38 through Web search, $19.71 from Internet display ads and $12.90 from social networks.”
In other words, not only is email marketing very powerful but it’s much more powerful than search and social media. Here are a few reasons why you should use email marketing with your website:
1. It gives you special access to your readers: While the inbox of most internet users is getting overloaded, most people will still scan the emails in their inbox before deciding to read or not to read, depending on the sender of the email and other factors, but this isn’t usually the case with social media.
I follow around 60 people on my Twitter account and only check out the most recent updates like once in a week, I can’t remember when last I spent more than a few minutes looking at the most recent Facebook updates in my stream but I check my emails several times a day, every single day.
You can reach significantly more people on social media than via email.
2. It’s flexible: There’s more than one way to do email marketing. You can build several email lists or segment your existing lists and you can create several email marketing campaigns; for example, the most common way of doing email marketing is to offer an incentive, build a list and then constantly connect with your subscribers with the hope of making them customers.
You can approach email marketing in other ways, too; for example, there’s the example of Movies Unlimited, a website dedicated to helping people find hard-to-find films, that was able to increase sales by 1.5% just by sending an email to those who abandoned their shopping carts after 24 hours.
In other words, not only can you use email to turn raw visitors into customers, you can also use it to convince people who abandoned the checkout process on your website to reconsider their purchase.
3. It’s cheap: Almost every other form of marketing is about paying to constantly reach the same people and it probably gets expensive over time. Not with email, though; with email, you just have to build a list of subscribers and you can consistently get in touch with them in the future at no additional cost.
It only costs around $10 monthly to start an email list with most providers and even if your list grows to 100s of thousands of subscribers, you’ll still be paying under a thousand dollars monthly to an email service provider; compared to the kind of results you can get from a responsive email list, that’s significantly cheap.
You can take things further and have your own email software and pay no additional fees as a result.
Start your email list today!
You can start with an email service provider like AWeber or Mailchimp; it’ll cost you a few dollars to get started and you can invest into bigger packages once your email list begins to grow and you’re starting to get results.
