What is happening to email marketing? Does it still work?
Should this still be your goal, to build a strong list of subscribers to whom you then market your products?
First, my own opinion is that email marketing is still an incredibly powerful tool that you must use as part of your overall marketing plan.
After several years of marketing online, what works today is a pull-push-pull method of marketing. What do I mean by this?
First, you pull subscribers to you via various methods including Organic Search Engine Optimization (a fancy way of labeling the techniques you use to optimize your sites to list highly on the major search engines), writing and submitting articles, ezine advertising, pay-per-click advertising, joint ventures, viral marketing, etc…
With a strong value proposition (free report, audio, or other content), you pull people into your subscriber pipeline.
Second, you push information out to your subscribers on a regular basis. This should be valuable, timely and well presented information that helps to build a community and brand your unique ability to inform your subscribers.
Third, you continually pull your EXISTING subscribers back to you with additional content such as blogs, forums, podcasts, video podcasts, articles, etc.. This is the secret marketing tool many marketers are not using properly today. Since email open rates can linger among 40% with response rates in the 5-10% range, its important that you continue to pull subscribers to additional information – you will notice a massive difference in your results following this pull-push-pull approach.
Finally, recent results I have observed show that smaller, more focused lists have higher read and conversion rates (on average) than larger, less focused lists.
So, in this case, smaller really is better. Think in terms of building multiple, focused lists – even segmenting existing lists along the lines of particular buyer motivation will often result in much higher read and conversion rates.
Jeff
