Ibtconcierge Blog

Email marketing as a digital marketing technique in this new age has become incredibly efficient and also extremely profitable. This is primarily because one can sell goods and services directly to their email lists.

In this post you will learn how to build your email list with which you can use to make money.  Once you build an email list, then you learn how to select affiliate offers that you can market to that list and finally how you create and craft the emails that you send to your clients to ensure conversions. I know, it sounds straight forward right, however there is always a method to the madness and I will attempt  to provide you with the knowledge required to ensure success.

These series of posts should help in giving you the tools to achieve the following;

Build a targeted email list

Create emails that contain offers and promotions that you send to your list

Get people to open the emails, click on the links for your offers and promotions

Generate profits from your lists.

Before we start getting ahead of ourselves with profit generation we have to understand the basics, for instance, what is an email list? how do you build one? What tools do you need to build one?

A list is a collection of email addresses that you use for marketing purposes

You build a list so you can send a large number of marketing emails, you also tailor your list so that it targets a specific audience to attempt to ensure sales and subsequently profits.

A good list would consist of loads of email addresses segmented into groups based on niche interest, type of products or services purchased, action to be completed etc.

For example, lets assume you are promoting pet foods for Dogs and Cats. Over time you manage to create a list of 100 people with 75 buying dog food and 25 buying cat food. Typically you would send information about dog foods to the List 1 and cat food to list 2. In other words you would send information relevant to dog food to the dog food list and that relevant to the cat food list ensuring that the right marketing material get delivered to the right audience. It wouldn't make sense to send marketing email concerning dogs to the Cat food list, you will only end up losing clients, which is definitely what you don't want, so when creating email lists one must note the following;

Email lists are comprise of email addresses that one uses for marketing purposes

Email lists should be segmented in order to create specific marketing messages.

There are 3 types of email lists

Optin list

Confirmed Optin list

Purchased email list

An opt-in list is a list that potential customers interested in your goods or services have to opt into in order to receive emails.  The prospect will opt in by providing you with his/her email contact information.This typically occurs when the person fills out a form on a blog, a website, squeeze page, Facebook etc.

Individuals who are interested in your goods or services tend to provide their names, email addresses even their postal addresses and phone numbers, typically however it tends to be just names and email addresses and in some instances just email addresses.

These prospects are essentially giving their consent to receive emails from the sender and are open to receiving these messages as they are coming from a trusted source.

This is the same as an optin list, with added verification. The prospect fills in their contact information, they then receive an email asking them to confirm their optin status by clicking a link in the verification email.

With a confirmed opt-in, you ensure that the person on the list actually signed up to receive your emails.  This will prevent your email address from ending up in a spam folder, it may get you blacklisted from certain email providers.

This is the type of the list you buy from third parties. In all honesty, it is not advisable to buy these types of list, the lists you are buying may not be congruent with the products or services you provide. Also you have noway of telling whether the email addresses on the list are indeed valid. So you find yourself in situations  where you have spent a considerable amount on a list which has a very poor response rate. The purchased list may appear to be the quickest one to accumulate but it is also the most unreliable for conversions or profit generation.

To build an optin list you would need the following;

A Landing Page

A blog

Tools for promoting your list

An Autoresponder

A landing page, also known as a squeeze page or optin page is a one page website.  The page uses sales language to get people to complete a specific tasks. You use the page to gather the email addresses and the email addresses you use to build your list.

The most effective landing pages tend to have professional graphics. compelling narrative, a sign up form and an incentive or what we call a freebie, lead magnet, This in essence is something you offer the prospect for free to sign up or put their contact information into your landing page.

In the past, one would need to hire professional to create landing pages for building lists, these days however that is no longer the case with software applications like ClickFunnels, individuals with little or no technical knowledge can create professional standard landing pages.

If however the idea of doing it yourself does not appeal to you sites like Elance.com, Fiverr, Freelancer.com and Upwork.com can provide you with freelancers who are willing to create your landing pages for a fee.

A sign up is contained on your landing page, the form will ask users to fill out specific information such as name, email address, etc.. You can get automated sign up forms from autoresponders like Aweber

 Once they fill out the form, they will be on your email list.  You will receive notification for the new signup, and the user will receive the emails you send to your list.
 
 The Incentive also known as Freebie, lead Magnet, Premium, is something of perceived value that you give away for free in return for the prospects sign up information. The incentive can take various forms. An eBook, newsletter, report, video. The main purpose of the incentive is to entice the prospect into providing his contact information to receive future emails from the service provider.

A blog is nothing more than an online newsletter, a magazine of sorts. A blog will serve three purposes. First, you can use the blog to build your email list, second, you can use it to sell products and thirdly you can provide educational informative knowledge about your products, service or industry
When you create a blog, you put a sign up form on the blog. The sign up form will be similar to the form on your landing page. However, unlike your landing page, you can use the signup form to enroll people in blog casts. Then people will receive a message every time you post a new blog. This is a great opportunity to communicate with your subscribers and communication should be maintained on a regular basis. [Once a week, Once a fortnight, or Once a month]

Tools for Promoting your list

So you have your landing pages created complete with your lead magnet, you also have your blog created where you can communicate to your list and promote your products and services and impart knowledge based articles, the next step in your list building exploits is to promote your lists.

Some of the main tools are as follows;

Pay-Per-Click [PPC]

Twitter

Facebook

YouTube

SEO

Forums

This kind of advertising occurs when you create ads in Google Ad words or Facebook Ads and you get charged when anyone clicks on your advertisement. This way of promoting your lists tends to generate fast results, you also are able to build highly targeted lists based on keywords you designate.

Twitter is a microblogging site it is also used for generating traffic to a website and building your email list. One can Tweet about topics related to their products, services, or list and include links.  People follow the links and sign up for your list.

Facebook can be used for paid advertising using the Facebook Ads or for organic free advertising using the Facebook fan pages. With Facebook ads you get charged by the number of clicks you generate. You can create campaigns, set budgets etc. With fan pages you get exposure to your posts via likes and shares. As one would expect one builds their list faster with Facebook ads than you would with organic fan pages.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is another organic way to boost your landing page and blog.  It refers to optimizing a site for the search engines.  Search engines crawl sites and rank them based on keywords and metadata. You want to provide them with what they are looking for so you can have a good ranking.  Once you get a good ranking, you will get more traffic, which means you will build a larger email list.

You tube is a free video streaming site owned by google. It uses the same algorithms that the search engines use to optimize videos based on video views.

It is primarily organic traffic and videos are also ranked based on keywords and metadata. If you create a video on YouTube, the viewer can follow the links to sign up to your list.

Forums are areas online where people of similar interests congregate together and exchange information.  People go to forums every day. They visit the forums to communicate with others and find information about certain topics.  You can use this to your advantage. Once you become familiar with the forums, you can use email signatures to direct people to your website and blog.

Last but by no means the least you will need an autoresponder. An autoresponder  can be automated to send out welcome emails to new subscribers, blog posts to blog subscribers, and other emails that you set up.  You can also use an autoresponder to analyze statistics.

I hope you enjoyed the basics and introduction to email marketing, In the next blog post I will delve into autoresponders in a lot more detail and provide tips on how to choose the right one and how to use them effectively.

Have a wonderful week,

Ian.