E- mail marketing is powerful and effective, and a targeted e-mail-marketing campaign can drive traffic to your site, put your name in front of qualified prospects, and turn leads into sales — for much less than a traditional direct-marketing campaign. However, building your email list of prospects and potential customers can be difficult and cumbersome, but there are some options and strategies to simplify and improve the process.
However, before even considering how to gather your prospects’ contact information, you must figure out how to get visitors to your site in the first place. Don’t have Google’s marketing budget? Well the good news is that there are several economically efficient ways to drive traffic to your site, increase your visibility and encourage visitors to opt in.
PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising)
Fundamentally, pay per click advertising is a relatively low cost method of generating increased traffic to your website. With PPC advertising, advertisers pay their host site when their ad is clicked by a visitor to that site. Advertisers pay to have their link appear in search engine results when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Websites that utilize PPC ads will display an advertisement when a keyword query matches an advertiser’s keyword list, or when a content site displays relevant content. The principles of pay per click advertising are simple – a company willing to place the highest bid for a keyword will be ranked the highest on the search results page. Additionally, Pay per click advertising can give an immediate return on investment – especially if your website can process business/sales online.
Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing promotes websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. Search engine marketing increases traffic to a website by moving the site to the top of the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This is done through both the sponsored listings and the non-sponsored (free) listings.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO improves the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “organic” or un-paid search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.
Social Media
Social Media is a catch all name for many different internet and mobile tools designed for sharing information with other people. Social media is exciting for businesses because it provides new channels and methods of reaching consumers. Giving your business a profile on a social media outlet is free, can help you connect with passionate users, and provides potential customers the opportunity to interface with your company on their own accord. This new form of communication was seemingly a fad when it initially emerged, but quickly gained momentum as Facebook and MySpace dominated the social web space. Today the social conglomerates have a combined membership of over 250,000,000, and Twitter is adding around 5,000 members a day. So what’s the hype? “Organizations now have the opportunity to collect detailed information on users and their habits, elicit real feedback and suggestions, and refine their offering and messaging to better suit user demands. Although there are trade-offs with this new way of communicating, the opportunities for companies to understand and work with their customers have never been as great.” (smashlab.com2009)
Once you’ve begun to successfully drive traffic to your site, the most effective method of building your email list beyond your existing clients and contacts is to encourage visitors to your website to opt in to receive a useful piece of information, receive a discount or a newsletter, or any other benefit to giving you their email address. Including many different “contact us” forms throughout your website gives visitors an opportunity to “opt-in” at any point they may see something of interest.
There are also ways to encourage visitors to give up their email address without a sales pitch or discount offer. Offering a sneak peak at your new product, getting VIP access to an event, useful tips on certain products, reviews of online tools or white papers relevant to your products or services, subscriber-only products, the chance to participate in future product development through subscriber-only feedback channels, extended warranties etc. All of these offers add value to being part of your email list, without building an audience that has been trained to buy at discounts rather than at full price.
Co-registering is another way to build your email and opt-in list. Co-registering is including your opt-in offer as an extra check box on another site’s registration page or order form. Then, the other site sends you the names of everyone who checks that box so you can add them to your email list. You can pay on a per-name basis, or in some cases run the campaign as an exchange.
One last thing to remember, to avoid being blacklisted and considered SPAM, only send email marketing campaigns to recipients who have opted in, or given you their email addresses willingly, as you will create a bad reputation for your organization or brand, limiting future traffic and opt-ins to your site.
