About | Contact | Newsletter | FAQ | Blog

• Home
• Website Design
• Merchant Services
• Affiliate Services
• Site Marketing
• Educational Services
• Free Resources
• BitCom Blog

Site Marketing

Get a FREE copy of the
Affiliate Masters Course

Ken Evoy's Affiliate Masters Course is the classic overview of how to succeed in Affiliate Marketing. It's FREE when you sign up for our newsletter.

Name:

E-mail:

You don't want just subscribers. You want the right kind of subscribers: active, responsive, engaged, interested, loyal ones. Quality, not quantity.

Mark Brownlow

Email Marketing

Some online marketers claim that email marketing is the best of the three types of email marketing. If done correctly it lets you proactively reach and market to your ideal customer.. all with trackable response rates and conversion optimization.

Anytime you send an email to someone you are potentially doing email marketing. If you include a promotional link in your signature you are doing email marketing. Of course you can use emails for more direct promotion...

• You can send direct promotional emails to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again.
• You can send emails designed to encourage customer loyalty and enhance the customer relationship. Perhaps no direct promotion is included just helpful information.
• You can send emails that place your marketing messages or advertisements in emails sent by other people

Email marketing is probably the online equivalent of offline's direct mailing techniques. They both involve "lists" of prospective customers. There is one major difference with smart email marketing...

The customer has opted-in to receive your email. This gives your email marketing campaign much more credibility and far more effectiveness.

What Makes Email Marketing Attractive?

• It's much cheaper than most other forms of communication.
• Email lets proactively deliver your message to the people (unlike a website, where the people have to come to your message).
• Email marketing has been proven to work.

Types Of Email Marketing

Promotional Emails

Promotional email involves sending a promotional message. It could be a special offer, an announcement of a sale, or new information about a product the customer has demonstrated an interest in.

Relationship Emails/Newsletters

The main goal of a relationship email is to build credibility and develop a closer bond with your customer. It may carry promotional messages or advertisements, but the larger goal is to provide the readers with value. It should contain information which informs, entertains or otherwise benefits the readers.

Using Other People's Emails

If you don't have a strong list advertising in other people's emails can be a great strategy. Some email newsletters exist for this purpose only - to sell advertising space to others.

Issues With Email Marketing

Apart from the complexities of designing and delivering email messages to the right people, getting them to actually read and respond to your message, and measuring and analyzing the results, there are no issues in email marketing. It's a great way to market online! But it has to be done correctly to work.

Get Permission

Responsible email marketing is based on the idea of permission. You need an email address owner's permission before you can send them a commercial email. If you don't have this permission, then the recipients of your mail may well regard your message as spam and your message will backfire. Worse it can jeopardize your credibility and brand in the marketplace.

But the best reason to make sure you get permission is it works better. Long-term successful email marketing relationships with customers and others can only work if they're permission-based anyway.

An example of getting permission is when your customer buys something from your online store and also ticks a box marked "please send me news about product updates via email". You now have "permission" to send that person product updates by email, provided you also give them the opportunity to rescind that permission at any time.

Developing A List

Before you can take advantage of the benefits of email marketing you have to have a list to mail to. Here's some suggestions for developing your list.

• Place the sign-up form prominently on your homepage, "above the fold" (i.e., visible on the first screen without having to scroll). Graphics and placement should draw the eye to this form. Getting subscriptions must be a high priority for your site if you hope to succeed!
• Put a subscription form on nearly every webpage in your site. I've put a subscription form at the end of every article to catch readers when they're ready to take another action.
• Make the benefits of signing up clear and compelling. In these days of information overload, you'll have to explain the benefits of subscribing in a meaningful way.
• Offer a white paper, free e-books, entry in a contest to win an iPhone, discount coupons, the promise of Internet-only specials -- something that your subscriber sees as valuable.
• Ask readers to encourage their friends to subscribe. You can have a reader forward his copy, but you risk the friend clicking on the unsubscribe link.  Better yet, encourage use of the "forward to a friend" function that e-mail management services provide.

The Money Is In The List

Many online marketers feel that an effective list is one of the most powerful ways to market online. Combined with a great website, blog, and paid search it's one of the big three of online marketing methods. If you'd like some more advice take a look at these great email marketing resources...