Why Email Marketing Is A Must For Your Business

Why You Should Get Them On Your List First 

It can safely be said that one of the most important things you’re going to do for your business is to build your email list. When people tell you that, “the money is in the list” they’re not just blowing smoke or using keywords. They are telling you the truth. Think about the fact that when you build an email list you have access to your audience 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and that you own the list. Keep reading to learn Why Email Marketing Is A Must For Your Business.

Why List Building?

If you build a strong email list you can almost give yourself a raise whenever you want. That is, as long as you understand your audience fully, know their problems, and know great ways to solve them. But, you need to do it right so that only targeted list members are lucky enough to be on your list. Be sure to only choose the right products and services to market to them while also providing a lot of value outside of what you sell to them.

What Email Marketing is About

Email Marketing is about using cornerstone content to build your email list with in-content opt-in offers, also called content upgrades. Cornerstone content also has other names such as “epic content” and “pillar content”. This is to say that it’s in-depth but broad content that covers a lot of material and helps bring your audience to you, keep them on your site, and educate them about the things your audience cares about. By keeping it broad you give yourself more opportunity to include in-content offers to build your list.

Why List Building Needs to Be a Priority

When you make it a priority to get your audience on your email list you can bring them back to your site again and again while you also make offers, educate them, and provide a lot of value to them without having to constantly chase customers. People who sign up for your email list, assuming they’re targeted, and your offers are consistently awesome can also help you spread the word about new offers helping you get more buzz.

How Content Plays a Role in List Building

Content plays a role in list building in many ways because it’s content that brings people to your website, and content that they’ll download onto their computer when they get on your email list, and content that you’re going to send in email to add value to their lives and make offers that help them solve their problems.

List building is so important that you should think of it as your main goal when working on marketing, brand awareness, and adding value to your audience. While your website is the hub of operations your email list is the foundation for the longevity of your business.

What Is In-Content List Building

List building is an important part of building a successful business today. Whether the business is online or offline, bricks and mortar or completely digital doesn’t matter. Every business needs to focus on list building to ensure they have an active and responsive audience that is building so that they can keep their business going and even somewhat predict their income as time moves forward.

Building your email list with opt-ins, freebies, or lead magnets is common terminology that you may have heard of. In-content list building is simply putting the freebies within the content of your website. They can live on your blog posts, within cornerstone content, on your about page and elsewhere.

Let’s look at a few examples:

The best way to explain how this works is to give you a few examples of in-content opt-in offers that help build your list.

Example #1: 

Your website is targeted toward people who are on low-carb diets. You write and publish cornerstone content about several different types of low-carb diets and the reasoning behind them. Within the content, you can link to an opt-in offer that gives even more in-depth information about the low-carb diet. For example, you could offer a “low-carb diet starter kit”. The kit could include a 7-day menu, a shopping list, and recipes along with tips to stick to the diet.

Example #2: 

An individual blog post that you write is about how to choose a good web host. Your opt-in offer could be an extensive comparison sheet of the various type of hosts, their pros, cons, costs, and whether they have good customer service or not. 

Example #3: 

Your website is directed toward mothers who are homeschooling elementary age children. You write a blog post about teaching letters and numbers to your children. Your freebie linked to within the content of that blog post could be coloring sheets with letters and numbers on them that your audience can download, print, and let their children color.

As you’ll see, it’s still a freebie, opt-in, or lead magnet, it’s just presented in a new way instead of sitewide it’s included within the content the potential customer is reading at the time. Offering additional information that adds value to what the viewer is consuming at the moment makes it more likely they’ll sign up because they want that freebie because it’s so relevant to them right at that moment.

By having several in-content opt-in options you not only give your general audience more opportunities to get onto your email list, but you give different segments of your audience an even better reason to sign up. In-content offers, due to how laser targeted they are, make these types of list members even more valuable and typically more responsive to your offers.

In-content list building is an effective way to ensure that your business keeps growing while you continue to add exceptional value using and reusing the content that you create for them. It may seem like a lot of work, but the truth is, it’s more effective than almost any other list building method and will build your list big and healthy if you keep in mind your audience as you create content and opt-ins for the content.

A Quick Way To Get Started: Add Opt-In At The Bottom Of Your Posts 

Now that you know about in-content opt-in offers let’s get started quickly creating a quick one so that you can get started. There are several high converting spots to add an opt-in outside of your sidebar, slide, or pop up offers. 

One way is to add an opt-in at the bottom of every blog post. The idea is that if someone reads all the way to the bottom of a blog post they are interested and will likely also be interested in an offer.

This type of offer is considered a site-wide offer even though it appears at the bottom of each post. Althoughyou can, if desired put a different opt-in at the bottom of each post you create based on the category that you use.

The Technology

To add opt-ins, you’re going to need to create a download / thank you page where you add the opt-in as well as a sign-up form. You can do this in a few ways but at the absolute minimum, you need to purchase email autoresponder software like Aweber.com, Convertkit.com, or Drip.com. This is what allows you to create the form that you use to collect an email address to add to your list. I personally started off with Convertkit, and then eventually transferred to Infusionsoft by Keap. Keap has 4 different levels of products and services to choose from to fit everyone’s price points.

You’ll need to create at least one landing page for the opt-in offer, the thank you / download page. You can do this easily by simply creating another page on your website that is not added to the menu and is not indexed for search. Another way you can also accomplish it is with specialized landing page software that works with the email autoresponder software such as leadpages.net, instapage.com, and ConvertKit.com has landing page ability too. For my landing page builder, I use Clickfunnels, and I have been very happy with them. Not only am I able to create my landing pages, but I’m also able to create my funnels

Plugins that help automate some of the processes might be necessary, especially if you have numerous opt-ins created that you can add to a blog post based on the category that the blog post appears in. This can make it a lot simpler and faster, but you don’t have to have it. There are several such as Thrive Leads put out by Thrivethemes.com and Optinmonster.com.

You’ll also need to create the opt-in for downloading. The easiest is to create something in Word and then turn it into a PDF file. You can make it look really professional using the software you already own, or you can hire someone to lay it out for you using software like in-design to make it really stand out. It’s up to you how you do it but for the most part, people are used to getting PDF documents as downloads.

Choose the Right Blog Posts

Before you create your opt-in analyze your blog posts to find out which blog posts already get the most views and comments. Even though this opt-in may end up being a site-wide opt-in you want to reach the most active and engaged part of your audience by creating something for the most read posts on your website.

Finally, once you’ve decided what opt-in to create, outline it, and create it. Once you have created it, use the software to get it up on your site so that it can be downloaded, and you can start building your list as soon as possible. The faster you get it up the faster you’ll start building your list.

Why In Content List Building Works

When you’re focused on list building it’s better to have many points of entry to your list, just like it’s best to have many points of entry to your website. You can earn more points of entry into your website via your social media activity, guest posting, and even via paid ads. 

The more points of entry you have, the more traffic you’ll receive to your website, which means more of your audience will also see the in-content lead magnets that you’re offering, and the more who will sign up and end up on your email list.

Ends Side Bar Blindness

Consumers are smart and can block out the information on your sidebar to read your content. The fact is, most people don’t want to be sold to. That’s why they become blind to offers. In fact, when you use the word offer they often just stop looking. But, putting your offers within the content of your blog or website will help avoid this problem.

Grabs Your Audience’s Attention

When you put additional information especially free information within the content of your website be it on a blog post, as a content upgrade to give additional information, or under your blog posts it’ll become more apparent to your audience that this is something they should pay attention to.

Provides Relevancy

Putting an opt-in within the content of your post or website also helps provide relevancy. When creating a freebie this way, you’re forced to be laser targeted so that it has something to do with what the audience member is currently looking at. That makes it more likely that they’ll download it and get on your list.

They’re Already Interested

Another reason in-content lead magnets work so well is that the person reading the content that the lead magnet exists in happens to already be very interested in what they’re reading. This makes them much more likely to download the lead magnet and sign up for your email list.

Gives Deeper Understanding

This type of lead magnet is very laser targeted and designed to give a deeper understanding of your customers’ problems and pain points as well as the solutions. It also helps them understand what type of quality you provide to your audience.  

Provides Multiple Points of Entry

When you put several in-content lead magnets on your website based on your goals and objectives it gives your audience multiple points of entry into your email list. You can service several segments of your audience due to this.

Offers More Opportunity to Show Your Expertise

Another factor with in-content email list building is that the more opt-in offers you provide it also gives you more opportunity to show your audience your expertise level. The deeper you can go with the information the better. 

List building is an art form that you may need to shake up every now and then to get your audience’s attention. If you look at the large websites such as Hubspot.com and others, you’ll see a great example of how they use in-content opt-in offers to build their email list.