Marketing tests have proven it takes a person more than 7 contacts with your product or service, before she becomes ready to buy. It takes that long to build trust and influence a buying decision.
What this means is, a major portion of the first time visitors to your website are not going to buy anything. They will browse around and look at your offers, hopefully save the link to your website somewhere, and then click away to some other part of the internet.
How do you then contact them again to refresh their memory about your product?
The answer is simple – through email marketing.
When a person visits your website, you need to entice them to join your mailing list by offering them a free report or any other similar goodie. Then slowly build a relationship with your subscribers by sending them quality information through your emails. Sporadically, you also mention about your product and extol its qualities to them.
This buildup of trust and repeated exposure to your product helps in converting the visitors into paying customers.
The best part is, you can then again and again promote different but related products to your subscribers over time, and increase their lifetime value to your business.
There are a few caveats, however, to make sure you do use this powerful marketing method in the right way –
1. No spamming. Period.
Email marketing should be by consent only. This means only if the visitor allows you to send them emails, should you send any. No emails should be sent if you do not have their permission.
2. Use interesting subject lines.
If your prospect does not even read your email, then you are never going to get that sale. That's why you need to be creative with your subject line and arouse the curiosity of the reader to force them to open your email.
Just make sure to backup whatever you say in the subject line, in the body of the email to maintain your credibility.
3. No tall claims.
Do not make bogus claims in your mails just to get that sale. Remember, we want to sell to these people for a long period of time. To be able to do this, you need to maintain your credibility intact. So market your product alright, but do it in a believable manner.
4. Do not sell, sell, sell.
You need to keep a good balance between promoting products and providing value to your subscribers. Constantly pushing them to buy something in every email, is the fastest way to getting them to unsubscribe from your mailing list.
As a rule of thumb, for every promotional mail, there should be at least 3-4 informative mails.
5. Keep them updated
Out of sight – out of mind. This is as true – if not more – in the online world, as in the offline one.
If you go too long without mailing to your list, they may forget about you and lose the relationship you would have formed till that point. So keep them updated about what's happening in your market and your business and do not let them forget you.
Now it's time to start putting this into action and build a list for your business. This would be a solid anchor for those troubled times that are sure to hit any business sooner or later.