Every year someone is saying, “Email is dead.” And every year, they’re wrong.
First, everyone thought Facebook would become the replacement for email, then it was Twitter, then Instagram, YouTube, and so on…but email still reigns supreme for online sales. When it comes to online marketing and profits, your company needs email. In today’s market, even companies like clothing companies like Victoria’s Secret, Under Armor, and many other types of brick and mortar businesses use email. It’s a low-cost method to build up a list of interested clients and fans who want to know about upcoming events, special offers, and deals.
According to many marketers that I speak with, email is the best way to make sales. No sales happen on social media – only the traffic the emails happen. While people peruse social media, over 80% of people check email before social media. On top of that, social media is for chatting and being social – while email is primarily used for business, shopping and accomplishing day to day tasks. This means social media can help you enter a conversation, stay top of mind, but it’s with email where people are more likely to click and buy your products.
Since roughly 54% of the world’s population is now using email, it’s a no-brainer for every business to optimize their email game and use it to increase sales. While many companies and entrepreneurs are focused on growing their social media accounts, all of us will do well to remember that social media is for social purposes, and email tends to be more for business and organizing one’s life. Sure, social media counts of followers, likes, and comments look good, it’s email that will grow your bank account in the most optimized way. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t focus on growing social media, by all means, you should, but don’t do it at the cost of ignoring your email list. While social media is clearly growing and will continue to do so, the fact remains, email will continually ‘crush it in sales and customer retention.’
Your Website Needs To Capture Emails, That’s A Site’s Number One Job
In this new year, I suggest you continue to build content that drives customers to your website. On top of that, make sure your website is built to capture emails in the most optimized way. At the end of the day, your website is really just a lead capturing machine. A website will help you get traffic, interested potential customers, but it’s most likely that a visitor will not buy on their first, second or third visit to your website. Just looking at your own use of the internet, it’s pretty safe to bet, you search for information, click on a website, consume the content, then leave. Most of the time you don’t make a purchase and quite often you’ll never come back to that website. This means, that if you can capture a visitor’s email, you can continue the conversation and potentially make the sale at some point later on.
To assure your website is optimized I recommend that you:
Have a pop-up on your website. An email collecting banner and other optins locations.
Let’s talk about popups, as a user you likely hate those pesky pop-ups, but as a website owner, the statistics clearly state – it will help you collect more emails. In fact, email software tests from Aweber found that it could increase email optins by over 1,000% (Aweber, 2012). I know that statistic is unlikely for most online websites, but still, that stat alone should move you to action and make you get an email popup immediately.
Two good options for pop-ups on WordPress sites are:
These two are notably the most respected and trusted, so try one these out and find the one you like the most.
Have Multiple Spots Where Emails Can Be Captured
Good websites, ranging from clothing, online marketing, to health and fitness sites all try to do the same thing:
- Get you on their website via a good product and solid content to attract onto the site
- Once you’re on the site, the next job is: GET YOUR EMAIL
Having numerous places where a visitor can enter their email is ideal. Since most of us visit websites and never come back, getting an email address helps us remarket our visitors – and loop them back to our website and to sales pages where our products are sold.
Some good places to have an email optin opportunity are:
1. A nice banner across the first half of your website where some freebie is given away if the user enters their email.
2. A pop-up that offers something enticing to your visitor, so you can get their email.
3. On the bottom of just about every page of your website, you should also include a small optin box, once again, offering your freebie in exchange for your visitor’s name and website.
Lastly, if you create content on your website – which you should – you can and should have intelligently placed optin boxes throughout the article.
By having multiple places like this placed throughout your website and content on your site – you increase the likelihood of someone not leaving your site before they give you their email information.
Once you have a visitor’s email, you will be able to send them information about:
- Discounts
- Special events
- New product releases
- Social media posts you want them to fan and see
- Product updates
- Annual specials
- Freebies and promotional type campaigns that help drive conversions
…And anything else you see fit and worthwhile for your email audience.
Email isn’t going to die, in fact, it’s only going to grow. The sooner you get the started the better because that means you’ll have more lead time to get more emails and be in more inboxes as time goes on – and once you have that email, it’s now information that you own and info you can use to increase your marketing efforts at in a very low-cost way.
You’ve Got An Email List – Now What
For most companies, it’s not lack of an email list that makes them bad with email. In fact, it’s usually not knowing what to do with the list that causes the biggest headache.
For most business owners it’s not hard to add a pop-up and a few incentives for visitors to give away their email. But once you’ve captured that email, what do you do? How do you capitalize on the list to build more connection, trust and eventually some profits? Well, if your email list hasn’t been producing financial profits for you, or if it has, and you’d like to make money with emails – let me show you the top three ways to makes sales with email.
