Email marketing is an organized sending of emails to list of customers who are considered as prospective buyers to a certain product or have indicated interest on a certain niche. Email marketing helps to inform the customers about a certain product, engage their interests to a certain niche and generates sales for a certain product.

Email marketing can be very effective when your email list / subscribed customers finds your emails to be very important or relevant to them without without your emails ending up in the spam.

Pros

1. Low cost in sending out mass emails at low rate.

2. High ROI (returns on investment) of about $42 for every $1 spent.

3. It can easily be automated and personalized

4. It is less expensive than other forms of advertising to reach out to customers as far as you have customers on your email list.

5. It builds relationship between customers and firms/affiliates.

6. Performance data is available for email performance analysis showing you how well your emails are doing, the open rates and link clicks.

Cons

1. Your emails can easily end up on the spam folder for some certain words used for sending emails and also when your list is not opted in.

2. Most people may not open your emails - it is hard to get up to 60% open rates, which implies more time will be needed for such open rate to come through.

3. Some may unsubscribe from your list if they find it irrelevant to them.

4. Poor delivery might affect your emails if you have a fault in your list.

Email marketing has proven over these years as the best medium to reach out to customers in our email list. Being very personalized and automated, it improves the customer to vendor/seller relationship for most brands.

Here is how email marketing works:

1. Start by building an email list :

Email list is very crucial when it comes to email marketing, it is the list of customers interested in some certain products or niche. Email marketing will not be effective without the right people or customers on your list.

The importance of building an email list should not be neglected, giving the fact that you cannot achieve greater results without the right list of customers. For instance you cannot send emails about health products to customers interested in online business ideas.

You can literally build an email list for your email marketing by creating landing page or "call to action" form to products and also using sign up forms in your sites.

2. Using an email service provider :

Email service providers (ESP) can be used to send out bulk emails to your list of customers, it also segments the performance of each email campaign.

Email service providers like convertkit, system.io and sendinblue have funnel builder which is used to create landing pages and forms.

3. What objectives do you want to achieve :

It is not just about having email list to market to, when it comes to email marketing, you need to decide what objectives you want to achieve with it either as an affiliate, seller or firm.

Your objectives may be to drive sales to your business, boost brand awareness or to create customer to seller relationship through email marketing.

Email list is important when it comes to creating brand awareness, generating sales and engaging customers to some certain niche or product(s).

Growing your email list can be achievable through these simple methods:

1. Using lead magnet:

Lead magnet can be a free ebook or resource, a discount to product offers or a free guidance to a particular product. The aim of the lead magnet is to attract potential customers to a certain niche or product to sign up to your email list for an effective email marketing.

2. Using call to action (CTA) or landing page:

This is important when growing or building your list for email marketing. Call to action buttons require a potential customer to fill a form requesting either his or her email, first name or mobile phone number depending on what the brand wants. Same criteria applies to landing page forms

3. Using pop-up forms:

Pop-up forms can be used in place of landing pages in your site. A pop-up form can be used to offer customers an alternative product relating to their interest if they find the previous product not convincing or require to sign-up for newsletters to customer's interested niche.

It is not about growing your list for email marketing. Most times when you do not get high open rates from your email list, it becomes an issue. Open rates are important when it comes to email marketing so as to generate sales and also engage with customers.

There are things to consider in order to improve your open rates such as:

1. Avoid the Spam:

Your emails getting into the customers spam folders are really a red flag when it comes to email marketing because most people will not remember to check or open their spam folders, unless reminded.This is because spam folder is being considered irrelevant by most people. So, emails sent to spam folder is not guaranteed to be opened in the mean-time.

It is therefore important to make sure your customers opt-in to receiving your emails. Sometimes it requires the customers doing a double verification or captcha to avoid the sent emails ending up in spam folder.

You can also ask subscribers to add you to their email whitelist to make sure your emails get to their inbox and not ending up in the spam folder.

2. Clean your subscriber list:

It is important to remove customers from your list if they are not engaging to your email campaigns. As long as you are engaged in email marketing and you are sending out your emails to the right customers on the right niche, form a habit of analyzing your customers, that is how often they open your emails, what time of the day they open your emails and also separating the inactive ones from the active ones.

3. Beware of subject lines :

When you are into email marketing either as an affiliate, seller or firm, form the habit of sending eye-catching subject lines to your customers and avoid using "shocking" words to avoid them feeling unsecured with your words.

Also, when writing email subject lines, make it to appear personal without showing that you are reaching out to group of people, try to be friendly with your words and sometimes inject some humors to your lines to avoid your list getting bored. Avoid long lines of e-mail, be precise and use plain words and words that are not confusing.

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