Below you’ll find an unedited version of a chapter from my new book, Email Marketing Demystified. To get your copy of Email Marketing Demystified, visit www.myemailmarketingbook.com.
Most companies use their mailing lists to market their own products and services. If someone comes to your website and completes an opt-in form, they have already
expressed interest in your content and are probably a potential customer for your company’s products and services. Send emails that educate and inform your subscribers about your products and services regularly. Don’t assume that your subscribers already know about what you have to offer, because not everyone pays equal attention to all of the emails that you send and new subscribers are being added to your mailing list regularly.
If you do have products or services that you can sell to your mailing list, you are probably better off promoting your own products than other company’s products that you will receive an affiliate commission for promoting. When you sell your own products and services, you get to keep 100% of the customer’s payment. When you are promoting someone else’s product, you may receive as 10% of the revenue generated by a sale.
If you don’t have any products or services that you can sell to your audience, consider making a course that teaches something to your subscribers or helps them achieve a specific goal. While the product creation and launch process is beyond the scope of this book, read my earlier book, 40 Rules for Internet Business Success, for advice on how to create and market your first product. You can also read Jeff Walker’s book Launch for additional guidance on the process of launching your first product.
Here are some strategies that you can use to generate sales for your company’s product or service.
- Use Your Auto-Responder Series – Sprinkle information about your company’s products and services in your auto-responder series. Subscribers are often most engaged with your mailing list soon after they first subscribe, so don’t wait more than a week or two before sending them sales and marketing material.
- Run a Sale – Periodically, consider offering a time-limited discount to one of your company’s products or services to generate additional sales. Offer a 20-30% discount on whatever you are promoting, but only make that discount available for a fixed period of time, such as 3, 5 or 7 days. Send multiple emails during the sale that extoll the features and benefits of your company’s products and services. On the last day of the sale, send your subscribers an email reminding of the sale and making it clear that the sale is ending that night. By having a hard deadline for your sale, potential customers that are on the fence will be more likely to take action to avoid missing the sale.
- Offer Special Bonuses – Another way to add urgency to the purchasing process is to offer a special bonus to customers that purchase by a specific date. Your bonus can be another one of your products or a small add-on product that you create to serve specifically as a bonus. At MarketBeat, we frequently use a 50-page investment guide that we put together as a bonus that’s not otherwise available. A special bonus campaign will operate very similar to a sale campaign because subscribers will be getting something they wouldn’t otherwise normally receive and have to take action by a specific date and time.
- Re-launch Existing Products – If you have a product that you launched more than a year ago, consider adding some new features and benefits and launching it to your mailing list as a “new and improved” version of your product. The new version of your product will provide a great excuse to launch an email marketing campaign as if you were launching a new product and subscribers will take a second look at a product they might have otherwise ignored. Make sure to give all of your existing customers a free upgrade to the new version to avoid any hard feelings. You can make a re-launch campaign more effective by offering a sale or a special bonus during the launch period to your subscribers.
- Group Products Together – If your company offers complimentary products and services, consider creating a campaign where customers can buy two products at once for a single price. You should offer a slight discount for the combined product offering and consider. Also considering adding some kind of bonus that’s only available to people that purchase both products in a package.
- Create New Products – If your existing products and services aren’t getting the sales traction with your mailing list that they once were, you can always create a new product. At USGolfTV, we regularly launch new premium video training courses so that we have fresh products and content to promote to our audience. When you have a new product, you can create buzz with a pre-launch marketing campaign and generate a level of interest that you might not be able to generate when marketing an existing product.