Often discarded as an old and outdated method, Email marketing is arguably the most important medium of constant communication with your readers, prospects and customers. As a matter of fact, if you don’t have an email list, you are missing out on the most valuable asset of your online business.
Blogs, social media networks and online traffic: everything has a lot of value when it comes to building a successful online business. But when you start depending too much on external sources – especially after you have established your business – you know you are on the wrong path. Conversely, you should start building your audience without being dependent on any external platform. That’s when you’ll start enjoying true, long-term and sustainable success.
Is Building an Email List Really That Important?
Pat Flynn, who owns the famous blog, www.smartpassiveincome.com says:
“One of the biggest mistakes I have made since being in this business was not building an email list right from the start. I waited over a year to finally put an opt-in form on my blog and I missed out on huge opportunities to connect with my audience and engage with them in ways that no blog post, video or podcast can ever do.”
A lot of other famous bloggers, internet marketers and content marketing specialists share the same views. When guys – who earn over $25,000 – $50,000 per month – say that they missed out on huge opportunities because of no email list, its significance requires no further explanation.
Email List vs. Social Media Profiles
What would be your choice if you have to trade one thing for the other?
Ask any professional internet marketer and they will instantly choose their email list over any social media account. Why? It works. Simple as it is.
But what about the social media profiles? They do fine, right?
Yes, they do. Social media profiles are, no doubt, great assets for any online venture – especially the internet marketing business. You gather your fans and followers there, and get connected with them. However, when compared to a well-developed high-quality email list, social media profiles are hardly of any match.
Ask yourself. How many followers do you have on Twitter?
Let’s say, for example, 2,000.
Now, how many of those 2,000 followers actually interact with each and every tweet of yours? The numbers start to diminish, right?
It’s simple. Status updates and tweets can be ignored, but it is much harder to ignore an e-mail that was directly sent to you.
There are dozens other key-points as well that signifies the value of a high-quality email list. Following are a few of those reasons why you should start building your email list right now – in case you haven’t already.
1. The Most Effective Method of Building Trust and Relationships
The entire idea of internet marketing lies in a very simple concept – building trust and relationships with your prospects.
If you successfully build a level of confidence and trust with your prospects, you can easily market and sell them products and services. And what better way to build that level of trust and confidence than to personally connecting with them?
Connecting via emails is arguably the most personal and effective method of building trust and relationships with your subscribers. You personally greet them, send them useful content, seek advice and leverage your relationship for marketing products.
Always be aware, though, that email list building doesn’t equal email harvesting, which is quite popular among spammers and doesn’t imply any trust, relations and mutual respect. There’s a recently written article that covers proper email list building techniques.
2. Just “Effective”? No. It’s Also the Most Profitable Method
It’s not a vague claim. There are many statistics to back this up. Email marketing is easily the most profitable online marketing method – much more than SEO, SEM and SMM.
According to a study, email marketing has the best return on investment (ROI). For every $1 spent, it gives you a profit of $40. While the second best method is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, with a ROI of $22.
3. The Ultimate Source of Recurring Traffic:
Do you know that it is the recurring traffic that every online business values the most?
You have already sold the idea to those users and they already trust your services. Now, as you are done with the hard work, you should focus on how you can repeatedly bring them back to your website.
Always remember this very simple rule of internet marketing: once a prospect quits your website, assume that you have lost him.
It takes a lot of hard work to bring readers back to your website, and building an email list takes all the hard work away. It is the easiest way of doing that. For instance, whenever you publish a new post to your blog, you can send an email to notify all your subscribers of it and they will visit your blog to read that post.
4. The Perfect Tool for Lead Nurturing
Not every prospect is ready. Most of them require proper lead nurturing. In fact, statistics reveal that approximately 50% of the leads are not ready to make the transaction. They should be properly nurtured for that.
Having an email list provides you the best opportunities to nurture a lead. If you start building your email list now, you can easily get those 50% prospects to buy your recommended products and services that you otherwise couldn’t.
More on lead nurturing here.
5. Sponsors Love Huge Email Lists
Establishing an online business can be a tough thing to maintain if there are no income streams. This is one of the reasons many online entrepreneurs seek sponsors and advertisers. And those sponsors love huge email lists.
It is absolutely simple. Your email list generates money. If you have a high quality email list, you can easily get money out of it. This is why advertisers prefer businesses that have huge email lists.
You can see on many well-established blogs how they clearly mention their number of total subscribers on their webpage for advertisers.
Network Solutions is a domain name registrar that has been in the business from the last 30 years. Apart from domain name registration services, the company also offers web hosting and email marketing. There are a number of Network Solutions coupons available online to get great discounts on its services.
If you would start building your email list now, you can grab a good sponsor deal in a few months.
Featured images:
License: Creative Commons image source
License: Creative Commons image source
License: Creative Commons image source
My name is Jeff. I am an email marketer.