The money’s in the list. How many times have you heard this about email marketing?

But, what is email marketing and how does it work? Especially how do you get the money out of your list?

If you don’t take anything else from this blog, this is the most important part: email marketing is the most critical part of online marketing.

This is due to 2 fundamental reasons:

Your email list means you are not building your business on rented land.

You own your email list, even if you move from email provider to email provider you own the list. Keep it safe and treat it nice.

Building your business on social media is a risky business. At any time Facebook or Instagram could shut your account down for any reason. If you grow a business in their space and they don’t like something you do they could shut you down with no warning! Also, if they suddenly decide they don’t like what you do or the message that you share they could decrease your organic reach (even more than already!)

An email provider could shut your account down for an issue too, but if you are smart about backing up your list regularly, you could be back up and running very quickly.

What’s even better, this is a further step into a deeper relationship – once someone gives you their email, they’re asking to know more about what you do!

To sell to a prospective client or customer research says they need to ‘Like, Know and Trust’ you. They need to like you; this will generally be when someone is willing to give you their email address. They need to know you; this is about building the relationship and is best done through email and also with the assistance of social media.

Once someone likes you and feels they know they begin to trust you, and trust that you are as great as you are promoting yourself to be because with all the emails you have sent your have proved this time and time again. This means when they are ready to buy you are at the forefront of their mind and they already trust you.

Yes, but how does email marketing work?

Email marketing is a long-term strategy unless you have some significant dollars to throw behind a marketing blitz it will take time to grow and increase the ROI.

But, let’s talk about ROI, cause about know you might be thinking that it’s not worth it. But the average return on every $1 spent on your email marketing is $44!

Great Lauren, you got all number nerdy on me again. I want to know how it works:

OK, the simplest place to start is in these three steps

Sign up to an email provider.

My favourite is Active Campaign, and we specialise in this provider because they are cost-effective, provide extraordinary funnel capabilities, and they can grow with your business. Setting up your email marketing takes a lot of time, so you don’t want to have to go through the process again in 12 months times because you were trying to save $9 per month

Set up a list.

Once you have your email provider, it’s time to set up a list. Now, I can’t go through step by step for this now because I might send you to sleep with all the content. Most providers have excellent support pages that walk you through getting this working, otherwise.

Get them in.

Then, set up an opt-in form on your website. Opt-in forms are a piece of code that you install on your site that creates a form. It’s where people enter their name and email address and then **Boom** it ends up on your email list.

This is a pretty simplified version of how to get started; there are many strategies that we can implement right from the outset to increase your conversions.

But you don’t need to wait any longer. Because this is the most important key step:

Communicate with your list, and do it regularly! Don’t capture people’s email addresses and then wait a year and then pop into their inbox to sell something. Build a relationship, start to share content with your audience at least every couple of weeks, so your audience begins to – Like, Know and  Trust you!