Automated email marketing hints and tips

The aim of automated email marketing is essential to build a list so that you don’t have to worry about getting traffic anymore, as your list is essentially all the traffic you’ll ever need. When you want to promote a product you have created or an affiliate product, all you need to do is send out an email and you get more money than you used to get paid in one year, in one day!

Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight and you need to look after and nurture your list so that they are happy to act on your recommendations (with the added incentive of fabulous bonuses, which they won’t find anywhere else). You’ll need all the website traffic generation techniques we’ve talked about so far, to build up that list into the 1000s and beyond, where the real money in your list comes apparent and automated email marketing is the name of the game.

So what do you need to build a list?

You need an email marketing service, like Mailchimp, to store all your subscribers as they sign up. You’ll need a squeeze page or sign up box on your blog to encourage people to sign up to receive emails from you. Lastly, you’ll need an incentive to make people want to sign up to your list, which is most likely to be a free gift of some sort.

Your email marketing service will have a place where you can create the signup form to place on your squeeze page or blog, which will capture and store their details so that you can contact these people in the future. To conform with spam laws, you will need to create a double opt in list, so that your subscribers have to confirm that they want to receive emails from you before they get the free gift.

Once you have a new subscriber on your list, there are a number of routes you can take. You can email your subscribers every day with a sales pitch (not recommended, as you will have a higher unsubscribe rate than subscribe rate), or you can look after and nurture your list by sending them good content, good freebies, and the very occasional sales pitch. You could also go down the road of creating a fortnightly ezine issue and sending the odd sales pitch in between.

So, where does the automated email marketing come in?

You can create a sequence of messages that goes out to your list on specified days, so that you don’t even have to log into your email marketing service, except to track your open rates.

Yes, tracking is an essential part of successful email marketing. You need to get to know and learn the types of emails that people are most likely to open and the types of titles they click through to read. Also, you want to know how many of your subscribers click on the links you put in your email. These are important statistics to know, as they can help you improve your emails and also you can use these statistics to convince people to create joint ventures and ad swaps.