Email Marketing Strategy - A 'How To' Course

...This is page 4 of the email marketing strategy course. This lesson is about making money with your email newsletter with advertising and the promotion of affiliate products.

Advertising in Your Email Newsletter

Through effective email or ezine marketing techniques you can achieve a phenomenal increase in sales, commissions, advertising revenue or all three.

These marketing methods help to minimize your total marketing and advertising costs (time to market, outsourcing your advertising, paying for 3rd party list management, or even the cost of purchasing content), while you earn a huge return on investment financially.

Compare email marketing with any other form of advertising and you will realize how easy it is to save money when you have your own list of subscribers.

Off Line Advertising:

If you use postal mail to send flyers, information brochures, etc. to your potential customers, your message not only costs you a lot of money up front, but there's a chance it might not reach the right people!

Similarly, advertising on billboards, flyers, yellow pages or any other off-line means of promotion, costs you or your company in time, materials and distribution charges. Again, with absolutely no guarantee that you'll reach your target market.

Furthermore, in most markets, these old-world methods of advertising only result in one-time only sales.

On the other hand, Email Advertising:

Online email marketing wins hands down as your subscribers can be defined, targeted, and recycled.

One advantage of ezines by email is that you can also sell advertising space to other companies. This is guaranteed revenue, you set the prices and run the ads within your regular newsletter - and reap the rewards instantly.

Another reason to place ads from third parties is to earn affiliate (sales) commissions on every click or product sold as a result of a click from within your newsletter. This is another revenue source that can earn even more income for your business. 

Finally, another great advantage to email marketing is the increase in traffic to your website as a result of publishing a newsletter. How is this possible? As people receive your email message, they will likely click through your links to see any other new content, products displayed or any other pertinent, industry related, information.

Growing Close to Your List of Email Subscribers

If you want to grow a list of subscribers (and therefore be able to charge more for advertising rates, make more affiliate commissions, or add more traffic to your site), you'll have to get personal...

Whenever possible, regularly seek feedback about your newsletter content. Feedback generates a sense of credibility towards your business in your subscriber's eyes and adds accountability to yourself about your content. Your readers will begin to see you as a real person, someone who asks for collaboration. They begin to feel as though they are a part of your marketing and rapport is created. And you will remember that you are writing to real people, with feelings and questions and problems - not just a list of names.

You may ask:

• What type of content they would like to see more of.
• More advertising or less advertising? 
• Full newsletters on one topic or partial content of a number of topics pointing to various pages on your site?
• Weekly updates with advertising?
• Monthly product reviews?

There's no end to the questions you could ask or the type of feedback you might receive. 

As time goes on and you become well acquainted with market trends, appropriate advertising, consumer behavior, and marketing tools, you can introduce surveys, bulletin boards, questionnaires, and contests to your email marketing mix. Each one of these add-on features will encourage more reader participation, and more people to join your list.

This develops community spirit and begins to establish rapport between you and your subscribers.

Let's Getting Publishing that Email Newsletter Then!

You may have multiple reasons for starting an online newsletter, from growing your business, to finding advertising opportunities for other high paying third parties, to selling more of your own products, but you cannot focus on all aspects at the same time or in the same issue.

Keep your reasons for publishing and your mission statement at the back of your mind every time you write or send a new issue, but focus on the primary reason that initially motivated you to start up this aspect of your online business.

Publishing email newsletters requires dedication and planning. There are numerous strategies, tips, and guidelines available on how to be successful in this segment of your business. Some of that advice is very helpful while some advice could dissolve your list faster than you can click a button!

Please don't ever to follow any other marketer's strategy and publishing schedule blindly. Each market is different, as is your own personal style and your relationship with your list. Your readers will know if you are 'faking' it, if you are 'forcing' it, or if you are trying to capitalize on their trust.

To help you determine the best publishing strategy, including your market's tolerance levels, on your own is what you'll be able to accomplish with reasonable certainty by the end of this online email marketing course.

You'll also find many proven techniques based on other's successful models and strategies.

And when you put it all together, you'll have found your comfort level, your target market's expectations, and the 'signs' to read along the way to stay on track.

So let’s get started creating your email marketing newsletter or ezine.

Let's get started by building a list of subscribers.

Let's get started finding some advertising revenue for your business.

And let's get started driving more traffic to your website as a result of all that hard work and extra income!

Next is...designing your email marketing strategy.