Years ago, if you wanted to find success with email marketing, all you would need is to buy a bunch of email data and blast out as many emails as you can. You could still do that today, but would quickly find yourself without a list hosting solution, and potentially in a lot of hot water should receive endless spam complaints.
While the concept of email marketing is still the same, the methods and best practices used are slightly different. At the same time, it’s a lot easier find success with email marketing, simply because of the wide range of tools and solutions that are so accessible.
Keeping all of that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the many components that build up a successful email marketer or ad campaign today.
1 – Purpose and Business Model
Before even starting your mailing list, the first thing you need to have is a purpose for contacting your subscribers, and also a business model as well. The ‘purpose’ is the easy part, as you can start a mailing list or newsletter for any reason — but you should have a really clear focus on what value you are providing and how you can eventually make money from your list in the future.
With that said, you don’t need to have a business model right away, as you will want to grow and nurture your relationship with your audience, but it should definitely be in the back of your mind. Some of the best monetization methods include product sales, online courses, affiliate marketing and any specific services you might be able to offer.
2 – Method for Generating Leads
With the focus of your mailing list now in mind, it’s important to have a way to get subscribers on your list. More often than not, this is commonly done through a subscriber or sign up form on a website or blog. If you are going to create a website or blog, your content will act as a great source of traffic, as it can easily be accessed through the search results and also social media.
3 – Quality List Hosting Provider
Starting a mailing list has a few pre-requisites to it, even outside of knowing where you are going to get your subscribers from and why you are going to start a mailing list in the first place. The most important component of a mailing list is who you are going to use as your list hosting solution.
Just like a website needs to have web hosting, a list host will store your email data and allow you to send out mailings whenever you like. List hosts also provide many other features like click tracking, email delivery reports, getting past spam filters, delivering mass emails at a much faster pace, and also providing customer support or advanced features if you require them.
You can see a list of the top list hosting providers here.
4 – Solution for Cleaning Your Mailing List
As great as a list hosting provider might seem, there are some areas that they don’t help with — such as ‘list cleaning’. The reason why many hosts don’t provide such a service is that they make more money when more email addresses are kept on your list. This also counts for any subscribers that may have unsubscribed, bounced, or as simply invalid.
The good news is that there are plenty of other list cleaning solutions and they are relatively cheap. To learn more about this process and why it’s so important, be sure to review our list cleaning resources article.
5 – Internal Tracking System for Click and Lead Reporting
At its most basic level, email marketing is pretty simple. You start a list, get subscribers, and then send out a mailing. At its core it’s all seems easy enough, but if you want to have a very successful campaign or online business, you really need to be tracking everything at the smallest level possible. That is where advanced click tracking and lead reporting comes into play.
Without getting too advanced and in-depth on this section, it’s important to have your own records for click and lead tracking, as you don’t want to leave your numbers for someone else to report. Having such a tracking platform in place will also allow you to split test different headlines, see what links inside of emails people are clicking, and also to track open rates, email conversions, and also match up your data with any advertisers or affiliate campaigns you might be running.
6 – Marketing Automation and Lead Generation Tools
One of the most exciting components of email marketing is that most of it can be automated once it’s properly set up. After all, can you imagine sending out a new email to each subscriber on your list? Of course not!
Through the use of premium list hosting services or third-party solutions, email marketers can set up additional lead generation, mailing, and tracking features. One of the most popular methods would be an autoresponder — which allows list owners the ability to create a series of emails that will be sent out to new subscribers, no matter when they sign up.
Another great application or tool is a popup window that offers a free gift or form of incentivization to get a site user to subscribe to a mailing list. Not only will such applications run by themselves after they are set up. At the same time, these solutions can also split test different ad copy and engage with site visitors in different ways — such as popping up with a newsletter form when the visitor attempts to leave a site.
7 – An Endless Supply of Potential Subscribers and Customers
With everything discussed above now in place, you will also want to consider your options with how you are going to scale your list in size. While there option is always there to wait for your site or blog to grow in size and traffic, this could potentially take weeks, months, or even years!
Another option is to partner with a true email lead generation solution like AfterOffers. We’ve been delivering 100% opt-in leads to our site partners and advertisers for years now. Best of all, not only is it cost-effective, all leads are also verified and confirmed that they want to join your mailing list. This is a win-win situation for both AfterOffers and our site partners and clients, with everyone ending up with the highest quality of service and leads possible.
How to Make 2018 Your Best Year for Email Marketing Yet
Now that we’ve covered some of the most basic requirements to find success with online and email marketing, it’s time to make sure you are already using each of these within your own business. It’s easy to skim through the list above and say these are all obvious, but there is a big difference between ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’.
Putting in the extra time and effort to increase conversions or engagement rates by just 1%, can result in thousands or even millions of dollars in additional revenue over the course of a year. Take a look at your existing email marketing campaigns and how you have your lead generation and call to actions set up, and see where there is room for improvement.