Email Advertising - 9 Ways to Get Targeted Traffic Part 7. The Online Marketing Show Episode 126

Hi, welcome to the online marketing show, this is Joey Bushnell. And welcome to the next episode of the online marketing club mini-series. We’re currently exploring my top 9 ways to drive traffic which are SEO, Search advertising, Display advertising, content marketing, organic social media traffic, social advertising, email advertising, affiliate traffic and retargeting. In this episode we will be looking at Email Advertising. What is Email Advertising? Email advertising is tapping into someone else’s email database. They have a list and you can pay them to send an email either entirely dedicated to you or partly about you. If you want to pay someone for the entire email to be about you, it’s called a dedicated email or a solo ad. That’s the best kind of email ad because the sole focus is on you and the return is usually far higher. Another way to do email advertising is to buy ad space within an email, just like buying banner ads on someone’s website you could have a banner ad showing in their email newsletter. The whole email isn’t dedicated just to you but do have a mention and people who read the email may see it and click it. Why is Email Advertising good? Email advertising can be incredible. You should be doing everything you can to build your own email list, it’s one of your biggest online assets, right up there with your website, in some cases it is the most valuable asset of an online business. When you have an email list you can do frequent email marketing where you can build the relationship you have with prospects and customers and occasionally send them offers to monetize your database. We will be talking more about email lists and funnels in future episodes but the reason I mention it is this... If this is a super important part of online your online business perhaps the most important part, then imagine the power of being able to have access into other peoples email list, their biggest asset. What if you could do this with unlimited people, unlimited email lists? That’s essentially what you are getting with this, you get access to peoples inbox instantly, you are being endorsed by the sender of the email who they already know, like and trust and you didn’t have to spend time building that list, you get access to it immediately. What’s bad about Email Advertising? There’s not too much to dislike about email advertising, the only thing is I would ask the person you are buying an email from about their engagement rates and ask to see proof of them. You don’t want to buy an email from someone who has a poor relationship with their list, or get terrible open rates, that kind of thing. So to save the heartache of an email ad gone wrong, ask about this at the inquiry stage, you’d certainly want to know metrics of how many opens they are likely to get when they send your email before ever coming to an agreement on price. Who is Email Advertising for? This is for everyone, getting into the inbox of a relevant audience works for everyone. How to do Email Advertising? I like to buy email ads privately. Find similar but not competing businesses to yours, its fine if you can get a direct competitor to mail for you but that’s going to be rare! Instead find someone who sells a different product but has a similar audience. For example an SEO company could team up with a web development company, the web developers have a list of people who they have built websites for and then they send out an email recommending their favourite SEO company who can help their clients sites to get found in the search engines. Or maybe a hair salon could send out an email on behalf of the tanning salon down the road. There’s literally thousands of possibilities, find out who has a list that you would love to get in front of and then contact them. Some will be used to doing this and will already have a process to deal with your inquiry, others may not be used to doing this but will be open to the opportunity and others will say no. Don’t worry about that, that business and that’s life, suck it up and don’t let fear of rejection stop you. Remember a dedicated email is the best option and you’ll pay more for it but response rate is typically so much higher. If you buy ad space within a newsletter that’s fine but don’t pay anywhere near what you would with a dedicated email and don’t expect as good results. Ask about their list size, who the typical person on the list is, open numbers, previous mailing results for other people who bought an ad, if they have done any, just fact find to make sure this is a good opportunity for you and likely to get a good ROI. Make it worth their time, they don’t have to send an email for you, after all it’s their list and it’s sacred to them, most people would not want to ruin any relationship with their list for any price. You need to sell yourself. Show them exactly why you can help their customers, why them mailing out for you will make their customers love them and be grateful towards them ...