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Email marketing is one of the most important components of my blogging business
Seriously, if you aren't building an email list for your business, what are you waiting for?
Email marketing is crazy effective. Here are just a few reasons why you shouldn't wait another day to start building your email list:
A message is 5x more likely to be seen in email than via Facebook
Email is 40x more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter
You are 6x more likely to get a click-through from an email campaign than you are from a tweet
An average of 4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media. (Above stats pulled from this article)
Email marketing works.
Notice how stores ask for your email address at checkout?
Email Marketing Conversion Rates
Average conversion rates for email marketing are between 1% and 5%
What does this mean? It means if you have an email list of 1,000 subscribers, 10 to 50 subscribers will make a purchase via your email marketing message. (Note, email marketing is most effective when a special discount is offered).
Scenario:
You run a sale and send an email to your list.
You expect to make $100 from each conversion (based on average order value (AOV) or cost of your single product)
If your email list has 1,000 subscribers and your conversion rate is 3% you can expect your sales driven by that email to be $3,000
( Subscribers x conversion rate ) x sale price
(1,000 x .03) x $100 = $3,000
Not too shabby for a single email, eh? And your ROI should become consistent once you've figured out what emails convert best with your audience. Remember, the same 3% of customers don't have to convert each time (although repeat buyers are a +++++) a different segment of customers could convert each month for a year and you'll still have customers who haven't purchased from you yet. I say this because business owners are often afraid of sending too many emails and annoying their subscribers but most sales don't happen until a subscriber has been contacted a few times.
How to build your email list
Put a signup form on your website
Create a pop up box signup form
Include a signup form in your blog posts
Put a signup form on your Facebook page
Collect email addresses at vendor events
Which email platform is right for you?
As your business grows you'll need more capabilities. You'll want to automate your email sequences, segment customers into groups, tag to customers based on an action, etc.
You need an email system that can help scale your business quickly.
For creating automated email campaigns and sales funnels I recommend Convertkit. You'll be able to create a separate email sequence for each of your opt-ins and move people between sequences easily.