Attention has been drawn away from online email marketing toward blogging, social networking, Web 2.0 and the like – certainly we have focused on these new technologies as well – as an example a recent video on blogging in a couple of days ago.
In general, the benefits of these new techniques have more to do with getting traffic to your sites than they do with direct sales or marketing messages. For sure, they can be used as communications and marketing tools as well, but there is still a very real need for online email marketing strategies within your internet business.
Interesting though that when you ask most people how they use online email marketing, it comes down to a newsletter, set of autoresponder messages or "push" sales messages out to their subscribers.
What if there were some other ways – better ways to use online email marketing in your internet business with much more potential benefit?
3 WAYS TO ADD TO YOUR ONLINE
EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGN
1. Use online email marketing to test new messages, product ideas, and commercial viability for your business. One of the most challenging aspects of any online business is a) understanding what products your market desparately want now and 2) discovering the best possible message to market match that will compell them to push the order button. With email marketing you can cultivate a relationship with your subscribers allowing them to share in your product and marketing campaign development. Have them vote on message options, even create their own. Run some product ideas or benefits by them with an incentive for early opinions.
2. Collaborative product development. Even the most passionate researcher or content developer gets tired of digging up content for their information products, websites and other internet marketing tasks – a better way is to build a rapport with your subscribers through online email marketing so they share experiences, case studies, opinions, stories and other content with you so you can use this in future content projects.
3. Product and service feedback. I absolutely love using online email marketing to get product and service feedback from my customers. We market many different products and services online – not a single product is sold without a follow-up email asking them specific questions about their experience with the product, how they used it, recommendations for improvement and solicitation of testimonials.
Try using online email marketing for these alternative uses and you’ll find that the work building your list and managing your subscribers will pay off handsomely.
Jeff
