how to become an expert at email marketing
Posted by goodu in expert at email marketing
Becoming an expert in email marketing systems relies on basic knowledge of some general principles and strategies of internet advertising in general.
First a marketer need to know some of the history that has shaped the way email marketing works today, in part to avoid doing anything illegal.
Second, a marketer needs to determine how they are going to get email addresses to market to.
Third, a marketer wants to make money doing this, but hopefully not at the cost of their integrity.
As such, it is important to learn email marketing strategies that have a high CTR (click through rate) on the emails that are sent out - to maximize income and not waste the time of uninterested parties.
Finally, marketers can attract people who submit emails or purchase products in a number of ways, though the best strategies will depend upon what a person is marketing.
Context and History: The current email marketing industry has been largely shaped by FTC and CANSPAM regulations, which stipulate that people are not legally allowed to just go out on the web, find a person's email address and send them unsolicited mail. This came in response to spammers who would simply create programs that automatically searched for and copied down email addresses from all over the web. In light of that fact, email marketers need to find other ways of getting emails of people who may be interested in purchasing the market's or in using their affiliate merchants (which give a marketer a commission for referring customers or clients).
Getting Email Addresses: The best way to get e-mail addresses is with what is called a 'rapid conversion' page, that quickly gets people interested enough to voluntarily submit an email address to a system or website. For example, someone might want to promote or sell X-Box games. They can make a nice-looking but simple site that talks about how neat the X-Box and mentions a company that has great discounts on (or a vast selection of) games. One that person inputs their email address to find out more, a marketer is allowed to contact them. The advantage of this from the marketer's standpoint (and ethically) is that they are not sending out emails about X-Box games to just anyone. Instead, they are targeting only interested people.
Sending Emails: Next the marketer must decide the content of the emails they plan to send. Typically diversification is the key to this. They might have their own game-selling site (using the above example again) but it might not be the best for everyone's needs. For example, the marketer might only sell games, but what if the person they send the e-mail to wants to rent games? This dilemma has a simple solution: a marketer can add affiliate links to their emails as well as product descriptions. Affiliate links work as follows: a person who clicks them gets taken to a page (e.g. Netflix for games). Then, if they make a purchase (or in some cases if they even fill out an informational form or sign up for a free trial) the marketer gets a commission or other reward for just bringing the person there. By splitting targets like this, an email marketer can maximize their revenue and do the most good for their clients. On the one hand, the marketer makes money either way - by selling a product or referring a person. On the other hand, a client has more choices and is more likely to find what they are looking for.
Maximizing Traffic: Email marketers can use PPC advertising (such as Google Adwords or MSN Adcenter) to bring people to their landing page, but these services cost money (from a few cents to a few dollars per click). They can also promote their landing page for free through SEO (search engine optimization) or other techniques, including blogs or forums.
What approach an email markter takes to getting people to a selected page depends upon (1) how much they are willing to initially invest in the project and (2) how much they think they will earn, on average, from each person who visits their landing page or referred site. If they are experienced and quite sure they make an average of $5 per visitor then it is clearly well worth the investment to pay Adwords $.50 to get people to a page in the first place. If they are not as sure about their page's potential success, they should try getting free traffic as mentioned above and see how well it does. If it performs well, they can up the ante and start paying to market the page.