If you are a marketer looking for sales, you likely are looking for traffic without spending thousands of dollars. It’s easy to build traffic to your opportunity or sales-page, but it’s another thing to build targeted traffic on a shoestring. You have to apply some principles that can drive your traffic. There are many strategies that you can deploy, but we want to look at just one. Email marketing.
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E-mail marketing can be a source of extremely qualified traffic, however it has one big caveat: you have to have already gotten your visitor for them to be at the page where they sign up for e-mails. Most of the methods and strategies in this course are for generating ‘fresh’ traffic; email marketing is for generating ‘repeat’ traffic. In other words, unless your Conversion goal is to get somebody on to your e-mail list, you already have them when they’re on your opt in page.
That said, e-mail provides the opportunity to continue interacting with your visitors, and the avenue to get repeat visitors. If that conversion goal is an email list, then you want to make sure you have a good ‘squeeze page’ – the landing page you send traffic to where the visitor signs up for your list – and that you offer a strong incentive for signing up.
While the most common incentive is a free report of some kind, you might find it more valuable to offer something with continuity, that is, spread out over time. Common types of continuity incentives are ‘mini-courses’, which can be as simple as taking that free report and dividing it up into sections.
Depending on what your niche and end-goal is, you can find or create that opt-in incentive a number of ways. Public domain government reports are often perceived as valuable freebies and are free to use; review reports, tips of any sort, lists of resources, case studies and/or success stories where appropriate, etc. If you’re at a complete loss, you can create a report quickly and easily by grabbing a number of relevant articles from article directories, combining them into some coherent order, and packaging that as your freebie.
You can then use an auto-responder to then automatically send out report sections, ‘mini-course’ segments, etc. By pre-loading an auto-responder series, you automate the process of ongoing communication with that visitor.
Make sure you take advantage of those ‘visitor contact’ opportunities by including a Call To Action (CTA) in every email. While your end-goal conversion might be a product sale, you don’t necessarily want the CTA in every email to be a product pitch, as that will lead to excess un-subscribes. But since studies have shown that on average it takes multiple messages to close that type of sale, you do want to include some “soft” sales pitch. This can be as simple as listing additional features or benefits in each email.
People with a particular interest often know other people with similar interests. You can take advantage of this and solicit new sign-ups just by asking i.e. “Know anyone who might also be interested in xxxxxxx?” or simply “Please feel free to forward this email if you know someone who might be interested”.
The key to success in conversions with email marketing is to insure your emails are opened, and in order to keep them opening your emails, they must find them worthwhile. Avoid any “pitch-only” messages; always include something of value – advice, tips, links to resources, etc., and if appropriate, ‘set up’ the next open with a positive or anticipatory mention of what’s to come.
Remember also that people are bombarded more and more every day with emails, so you need to make sure yours stand out. Experiment with headlines. While it is usually helpful to have some mention of what the email is – after all, you already know their interest is there since they signed up in the first place – you may find that, depending on the niche, ‘getting through the clutter’ requires louder, more creative subject lines.
In addition to funneling traffic to your opt-in or ‘squeeze’ page, there are numerous ‘traffic exchange’ and ‘ad swap’ groups that can help build your list. Traffic exchanges are essentially cooperative lists where you accumulate ‘points’ by viewing other peoples stuff, then use your points to have them view your stuff. An obvious ‘problem’ with this approach is that it incentivizes people to blast through as many views as possible, as quickly as possible, making it very difficult to get any real qualified traffic. However, if you can present something bold enough to stand out, and attach some worthwhile offer, freebie, etc., this can be a good source for list-building.
Ad swaps work in a somewhat similar fashion – you send out an email promotion for someone in return for having them send out yours. In addition swap groups, you can approach anyone with a relevant list and suggest an ad swap or mutual promotion.
Lastly, keep in mind that email marketing is relationship marketing. As opposed to a single-action visit, you have the opportunity to maintain ongoing interaction; in order to do that, you want to build a relationship with the list. You do this by providing useful/worthwhile emails, being respectful, and not overwhelming them with too-frequent emails.
