Welcome to this week’s episode of the online marketing series for beginners! If you haven’t read the previous episodes, please feel free to start with blog post #1, Online Marketing for Beginners: What Is It All About. This episode is about email marketing, a concept that might sound a bit spammy (receiving tons of junk newsletters, anyone??). However, I’d like to show you why it isn’t shady at all, what it is actually about, and how it works.
To recap real quick, these are the steps we have talked about so far:
- Set up your website following a user-friendly and clear structure.
- Apply on-site and off-site search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
- Deliver valuable and relevant content to your potential customers.
- Find out which social networks use your potential customers.
- Share your content on those social platforms, starting with only one.
How does email marketing fit into the online marketing puzzle?
Remember how we were saying that you’ll want to attract any followers or social profile users to your website? And what do you want them to do on your site? I mean, if your site is an online shop, you’ll obviously want them to buy your products, but how are you supposed to keep those potential customers coming to check all that valuable content you’re posting? And how do you make them come back after they’ve been thinking about purchasing your products but didn’t buy them?
Well, apart from paid advertisement, the easiest and probably most effective way to keep your website users coming back for more is through email marketing. And what that means is simply sending them emails to share the content you are creating regularly.
What is an email list and what do you need it for?
Now, obviously, you aren’t going to write an email to each and every website user who gives you his email address – and his consent to receive emails from you. The most productive way of sending regular emails is by creating an email list with all those email subscribers of yours.
You may be wondering how you can get those email addresses, right? Well, you not only need the email, but also the consent to use it to send a regular newsletter. The easiest way to do it is by offering something in exchange, at best a content upgrade, which could be:
- Exclusive additional info, giving a more in-depth insight on your blog post content
- Your blog post content on a .pdf file
- Checklists
- Cheatsheets
- Printables
- Planners
- Blueprints
- Worksheets
- eBooks
- Outlines
- Or whatever other free product that could be valuable to your email subscribers.
These freebies you’re offering are usually called opt-ins, and the only price your future email subscriber has to pay for them is her email address, of course!
Where and how can I offer a freebie?
Are you afraid that this is all going to become too much of a techie talk? Well, I got news for you! Several tools can help you offer your freebie. I have used ConvertKit, which is free for the first 300 subscribers, and Kajabi, which is a bit pricier but offers everything you need to host and market online courses.
Most of these email marketing tools will let you upload your freebie on a landing page (which is a standalone page where you only offer your freebie). There, your people can type their name and email to download your freebie, and they will get a welcome email sequence automatically. The best is that you can create these emails beforehand, and they’ll be sent without you having to do anything at all!
These are some of the pros of using an email marketing service:
- You can create a landing page to upload your freebie using a template, without having to code anything at all.
- Your email subscribers get a welcoming email sequence, which looks very professional, even though you might be sleeping! A welcome sequence is useful to:
- Greet and welcome your new subscribers to your community.
- Introduce them to your know-how and your business.
- Attract more weekly readers to your blog or site.
- They’re usually very intuitive to create, so don’t worry about tech! If you want some help choosing one tool over the others, you can go and have a look at the training videos most services offer.
Once you’ve set up these welcoming emails, the only thing you have to do is to write a weekly email to your subscribers and share all that content you create!
So what do you say? Will you dare and try to go on autopilot with your emails? Stay tuned for the next episode, where we’ll talk about affiliate marketing, the quickest way to earn some money with your online marketing efforts!!
