The Money Is In The Mail

Someone who visits your website for the first time is unlikely to purchase anything and chances are they will never come back.

Yet it is a fact that the more they are exposed to your product, the higher the chances are that they will buy. Permission based email marketing is the sales mechanism of getting your website visitors names and emails with the purpose of following up with them.

Your online profits depend on how successfully you follow-up. To reiterate, your strategy is not just about getting an immediate sale from the hot customer but also capturing the names and emails of prospects that need a little more convincing before they decide to buy.

This follow-up process is described as Lead Generation or more precisely, List Building, as it implies the adding of leads (anyone interested in a product) to an online email database.

Email marketing is sometimes misunderstood because it is confused with spamming. However, the two are very different, as we shall see.

Among the many advantages of responsible email marketing are;

Its low cost and reliability as a method to build business very quickly. Using regular mail to send out new product offers, customer surveys, or information on specials & sales can become very expensive, very quickly. You can avoid spending on stationary, printing, mailing, and postage. Additionally, your expenditure on mailings increases in proportion to your mailing list. In contrast, the costs for emailing do not escalate as the list gets bigger. Having a user base and not churning it for sales opportunities is a waste. Email marketing allows you to experiment with different offers to see which one gets better responses. Doing this in conventional mailing is much costlier because you need to spend on stationery, postage and manpower. Not only that, you stand to lose money if your offer fails to generate enough interest. Preparing a mailing campaign also involves time as you wait for the printed material to be ready. You can also build rapport with your user base by sending them newsletters or product updates. Providing valuable information or content instead of constantly bombarding them with call to actions will lower their resistance to buy from you. This means you cannot ignore them for long as they will interpret your silence as indifference. To send out physical mail this regularly can be crippling to a small company. Recipients can accept your offer just by clicking a few buttons in most cases, which makes it easier for you to get the sale.

Large businesses have also come to realize the effectiveness of email marketing in generating revenue whether for big one-off purchases or small repeat orders.

With that said, you should not just jump into it, as there are rules and protocols that apply. Not playing by the rules might get you labeled as a spammer.