Email Marketing for Long Term Relationships

If you’re looking for a way to build up a genuine relationship with your prospects and customers, you can’t beat email marketing. By sending regular short emails and longer newsletters, you can alert your market to your offers and build the trust needed to get the sale.

You’ll often read that a visitor needs to make seven visits to your site before he buys. This makes perfect sense when you consider how he feels when he first arrives at your site.

Your visitor is uncertain, overwhelmed, unsure of you, and with a nagging feeling that he’ll find a better offer elsewhere. It’s not surprising that fear takes over and he puts his purchase on hold. The trouble is, will be ever come back to your site? Unless he has very good reason to do so, the answer is probably no.

There’s a huge choice out there and unless your offer is very powerful, or you’re lucky enough to get him in a buying mood, he’s probably gone forever and you’ve lost his business. Unless, of course, you find a way to keep in touch and prove your value over time. And the perfect solution is good old email.

The Essence of Email Marketing

Your first task is to get your visitor to sign up for your list in the first place. With so much information around, a simple “sign up for updates” is unlikely to spark much enthusiasm.

You need a bribe of some kind and it has to be something of genuine value. In the old days, you could get away with offering some stale PLR ebook but that’s not going to work today. You need to offer something of real usefulness that’s targeted to your visitor. It could be an quality ebook, newsletter, or access to a hidden part of your site.

Once you have his email address, you can contact him anytime. However, again, one thing you must do is to provide value. You may be tempted to send out a stream of pitches or promotions but at the end of the day, content marketing is about informing and educating, not selling. The great thing is if you do the former well enough, the later will take care of itself.

If you’re a flower seller, for example, you could send a monthly newsletter with details of imminent special occasions that demand flowers, the culture and special properties associated with various types of flowers, and so on. Of course, you offers will be here too.

Supplying your user with a valuable and entertaining monthly or weekly newsletter is one of the best ways to build your brand, prove your value, and keep him apprised of any special offers, discounts or new products. When he’s ready to buy, you’ll be the first person he contacts.

About Nathanael Vanderkolk

Nathanael Vanderkolk is the Director of the Smart SEO Company, a SEO Agency in Sydney, Australia. Smart SEO Sydney has a keen awareness of the latest approaches to online marketing. Follow him on , Facebook and Twitter.
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