Susan Gunelius - Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for Business

Entrepreneur Press, Publisher

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Production and Composition: Eliot House Productions

2018 by Entrepreneur Media, Inc.

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ebook ISBN: 978-1-61308-383-3

Table of Contents

Contents

T his book is dedicated to my husband, Scott, and my children, Brynn, Daniel, and Ryan, without whom I never would have started on this journey as an author and business owner. Its been a crazy ride, but I wouldnt trade a day for anything. The best is yet to come.

Id also like to acknowledge my literary agent, Bob Diforio of D4EO Literary Agency, for his guidance and support as well as the entire team at Entrepreneur Press and Entrepreneur.com. This book would not have come to life without every persons help to get it into readers hands.

Finally, Id like to thank my parents for paying for my undergraduate degree in marketing, which started everything, and thank you to my former colleagues who challenged me, taught me, and gave me the tools I needed to be successful throughout my marketing career.

E ven today, decades after emails invention, email marketing remains the most effective medium for reaching your customers, and its an integral part of shaping their experience of your business. While communication continues to evolve, email remains an important part of the mix for businesses. Its a fast, effective way to send and receive asynchronous messages, both personally and professionally.

For a business like yours, its ideal because you can make your email campaigns:

Targeted to your audience. Youre able to send an email to the exact group of contacts who would be most interested. Just as important, this means youre not sending that message to people who would have no interest.

Personalized for each individual. Your message can be dynamically tailored so that different individuals see different message content depending on what would be most relevant to them.

Perfectly timed based on each persons behavior and other insight. Email messages can be triggered to send based on any number of factors, such as making a purchase, clicking a link in a campaign, visiting a specific web page, and more. Marketing automation has taken email marketing to the next level.

These are strengths no other marketing medium offers. You cant do all this with radio or TV ads, search engine traffic, display ads, or social media platforms. Ultimately, these unique advantages are only important because they help you create a better experience for each customer at each stage of the customer lifecycleas someone progresses from new lead and transforms into an outspoken advocate.

Part of creating a better experience is learning about your contacts needs and interests so that you can send better campaigns. A customer is going to have a better experience with your email marketing when theyre receiving content and messages that are relevant and interesting to them. The great thing about these intelligence-driven campaigns is that youll send fewer emails. When you do, counterintuitively, youll achieve better results because youll see better engagement and youll have a stronger relationship with your list of customers.

Unfortunately, customer experience often takes a backburner for a focus on what works. This is unfortunate because what works and positive customer experience work hand-in-hand, and effective marketing is the natural end product of an overwhelmingly positive customer experience. Focusing on creating the best possible customer experience simplifies decision making for you as a marketer. Its a straightforward rule of thumb that applies just as much to marketing as it does to business in generalif you do whats in the best interest of each customer, youll end up with a growing, passionate, and outspoken customer base.

A s an entrepreneur or marketer, your success lies very much in what you can control, and one of the most valuable and powerful things you own and control is your email marketing list. The growing acceptance of permission-based email marketing has turned what was once considered a spammers tactic into a core marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes. You can harness the power of your email marketing list to grow your business, and this book shows you exactly how to do it.

Todays consumers are inundated with messages at every moment of every day. From traditional media like TV, radio, and ambient experiences to social media, online advertising, online video, and, yes, email marketing, the amount of communication clutter people are exposed to on a daily basis continues to increase. Standing out in a crowded worldboth online and offlineis more difficult than ever. Making matters worse is the constant changing of the rules, particularly in the social media and search engine optimization space where players like Facebook and Google seem to adjust their rules every day.

Successful business owners and marketers must be extremely agile and ready to adapt to those changing rules at any moment. Of course, this takes time and money, and with most forms of marketing, there is no guarantee that your efforts will be noticed or effective. But what if I told you there is a way to get your messages in front of people who want to hear from you? What if there was a way to not just get your messages in front of these people but also track how they engage with your messages, which messages drive them to action, and which messages they share with other people? Email marketing is the solution.

The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for Business introduces you to some of the ways you can use email marketing to grow your business. By focusing on building a strong foundation first, youll learn how to develop a comprehensive email marketing program that can evolve with your business goals. From attracting subscribers to converting them into buying customers and vocal brand advocates, youll discover the techniques that email marketing professionals use to derive positive results from permission-based marketing via email.