2. No email marketing strategy
This could easily have been Top 10 Online Marketing Mistake #1 – except you can’t have an email marketing strategy unless you have a website or blog – or can you?
Let’s start with the basics.
Why is it such a mistake to not have an email marketing strategy?
The answer to that question depends on whether you’d like to save up to 50% of your advertising budget and market more effectively at the same time. My feeling is that I’d rather have the money in my pocket. How about you?
There’s been a lot of discussion among online marketers about the falling effectiveness of email marketing. Most of the problem centers on the Internet marketing industry itself, where people get dozens or emails per day touting the same promotions by one of the “gurus.”
If you are on several of their mailing lists, whenever a “guru” has a product launch, you can count on being bombarded with numerous pitches by their affiliates. I’ve often sat at my keyboard with one finger on the “down” key and one on the “delete” key so I could quickly delete dozens of messages for the same product – without reading 99% of them. It’s the electronic equivalent of sorting your snail mail while standing over a waste basket.
And here’s a tip on “open rate,” one of the most overrated statistics in marketing. If I click on an email, even if I don’t read it, I have “opened” it and it gets counted. That’s like saying you “read” the newspaper lying on the seat next to – and you’re paying for that phantom reader as well.
But that is not the kind of email marketing strategy we are talking about here. We are talking about a list of confirmed subscribers – ideally customers who have bought form you before – but minimally those who have jumped through a hoop or two to get on your list.
Involuntary subscribers – those who made no conscious effort to be on your list – are about as productive as one of those legendary snail mail lists made up of addresses in the local cemetery.
But a list of current customers and those who’s like to be your customers is gold – real gold. And your cost of acquisition and retention is incredibly low. When you analyze the numbers involved, a local business without an email list is blinded to astonishing opportunity.
If you aren’t actively collecting the email addresses of all of your customers right now, every day is costing you money. We have some great strategies to turn one-time buyers into repeat customers and repeat customers into life-long clients.
No matter what your business is, it can be marketed much more effectively via email if you know what you are doing. If you don’t have a clue, it’s alright. Get with someone who does and who can guide you through it.
Let’s go through the bullet points:
- You need to have an email list
- Your list needs to be made up of “confirmed” subscribers if you want it to be effective
- A small, targeted lists beats a large untargeted list hands down
- You need to be able to incentivize your customers to both sign up and confirm the sign up
- You need to find ways to make results “trackable” in better ways than falling back on “open rate”
- What you do with list after collecting addresses is just as important as collecting them in the first place
- An effective email marketing strategy could save you up to 50% of your traditional marketing expense
- Email marketing is still the most effective type of online marketing and will be for the foreseeable future
- Get started today
You actually don’t even need to have a website to use an effective email campaign – but it is much more effective if you do. Ask us about how you can start up a supercharged email marketing system.
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