Email Marketing as a Primary Business Marketing Tool

There are individuals and whole businesses using just email to fund their businesses believe it or not. Email is not dead – it never was. It’s effectiveness has dropped a bit over the years as business email with valid messages were diluted with junk – spam mail by companies sending out billions per month.
Here’s how some companies are using email marketing to fund their entire business…

First they build landing pages where they will funnel visitors to. The landing page is focused on a singular goal – persuading the visitor to sign up (opt-in) to their email newsletter. You may have thousands of people come to your website each day but if you’re not converting a portion of them to either sales or leads that you can email later – then you’re just like a free magazine on the street.

Converting visitors to leads that are allowed to be emailed (permission based email marketing) can be quite profitable. One man, Adam Short, has devoted all his time to creating 90 different email campaigns to target niches he found that were in need of someone to create a business around. He’s created these 90 micro-businesses that each make a couple hundred to a couple of thousand dollars per month – on their own. He doesn’t do much once the small websites are up and running.

What we’re going to do is search for books that are selling well and that we could create an e-book about ourselves so we can market it and sell it online through our email newsletter campaign.

Here’s the process:

Go to Amazon.com. Look at the “books” department main headings for products you can search for. Choose another category once in the book section. I chose “Self-Help”. There might be a small and profitable niche market here. When the next page pops up there are sub-categories I can choose from. I chose Eating Disorders. I have a master’s in psychology so eating disorders is something I know about to some degree. I’ve worked with many people that had them. I could probably create an ebook to sell on my email campaign.

I look through the books available and there are many topics.

I decide my ebook will be about eating disorders – and specifically how to conquer binge-eating. I create the ebook on Google Docs (free) and fill it with information – good, solid information that will help someone conquer binge-eating. I’d do a meta topic ebook where I tell something about all aspects of binge eating. The ebook would be about 50 pages long. You can write it yourself if you’re a writer – or, outsource it to a writer in the Philippines – which are excellent. I’d of course review the book and edit it where necessary and presto – an ebook to sell for maybe $200 dollars. Quite affordable.

Then, you go about crafting your email campaign. You’ll need 12-20 short emails that are filled with tidbits about your chosen topic. You’d tease the readers with information they can find in your ebook – and provide a link for them to buy if they choose.

You’re building trust for the first few times you email. On the 3rd email you send them – do a hard sell on your product. For 4th – give information and tease. For 5th – sell. Sixth and seventh – info… 8th – sell. And so on. There have been studies that most sales occur after the 6th email to a customer. That’s important to note because how many of us email more than 6 times? Twice? How many of us craft all our emails to just SELL? Most of us. The key is to give info for free a lot of times during the course of your campaign and ask for a sale only sometimes. Not everytime.

For business email campaigns we use Aweber – which is the standard in the industry.

There are many resources for how to build effective landing pages to help convert visitors to buyers of your ebook(s). Google even offers a page tester where you can compare two or more pages that people arrive on to see which one is the most effective at converting visitors into new leads for your email campaign.

For bringing customers to your pages to buy your ebook try:

• Writing articles about the topic at free magazine article databases. They will funnel some free traffic to your landing page via links on your articles.
• If you’re good at SEO you might try that route.
• Another route a little bit difficult to master is using Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns to send people from ads you place using a PPC service like Google Adwords, to your landing pages.