Any organization that wants to succeed online need to do everything they can to increase traffic to their website, build a community, and encourage new customers/students to enroll. If you are part of a school/business that wants to succeed on the World Wide Web, that means you not only have to have great employees, teachers, an excellent curriculum/product, and something that makes you and your school/business different. It also means that you have to have a solid web presence, positive press and media mentions, and glowing testimonials from past and present customers/students.
But when it comes to e-mail, many people just shrug their shoulders.
“What does e-mail have to do with us?” they often say.
A lot!
Organizations like yours generally take a lot of time, energy and money to produce content for your website and other marketing materials. The problem afterward is usually, “How to we get people to actually read it?”
Many believe that “pull” marketing is all they need. Pull marketing is the idea that if you build it, they will come. An example of pull marketing would be posting a new article on your website, but not telling anyone about it. That’s fine, but it’s only half the equation.
The other half is “push” marketing. And one of the best ways to push is with e-mail.
Email marketing allows you to build a list of addresses you can use to push messages out to your audience in order to drive traffic to your website, promote events, provide services, enroll new clients/students, or whatever else your organization might require.
So what does it take to start using e-mail in your organization? Here are a few pointers:
Offer your RSS feed as e-mail.
Some people prefer to use a newsreader (RSS), but you’d be surprised how many people will subscribe to your website by e-mail if you make this an option. If you use FeedBurner, for example, you just cut and paste a different snippet of code to provide a link to the e-mail signup.
Start a simple opt-in e-mail newsletter.
This is a far more powerful way to build an e-mail list. While it’s a bit more work, it provides a means of connecting with people outside of your website and expanding your reach. Of course, your newsletter must offer valuable content and can’t be purely self-serving. Your newsletter can be short or long, but to get and keep subscribers, you have to offer real value.
If you don’t have an e-mail management company yet, I strongly recommend AWeber! They are by far the best e-mail management company out there and I use them for Social Media Schools as well. Click Here to set up your account today!
Post a subscription box on your site.
Whether you’re offering your RSS feed by e-mail or a dedicated newsletter, a sign up box where you can enter an e-mail address usually works better than a link to a sign up form on another page. You may want to reemphasize the orange RSS button and highlight the e-mail feed option. If you’re offering a dedicated newsletter, you’ll certainly want to feature a sign up box in a prominent location. The best place is either in the upper left or upper right-hand corner of your website, depending on the design of your site.
Encourage subscriptions everywhere.
Don’t make the common mistake of putting an email sign up box only on your website’s home page. You never know where a visitor will enter your site, so your box should be featured everywhere. If you have a standard website design, this shouldn’t be a problem, since your masthead and sidebars will probably be the same on every page and post. But if you use a more elaborate content management system or have a standard HTML site, be sure your subscription offer is on every page, ideally in the same location.
Manage your e-mail list efficiently.
Feedburner will show you those who subscribe by e-mail, but it doesn’t give you any tools for using those addresses, so you’ll need to export them in order to do mailings (not the best choice). If you offer a newsletter, you’ll also need a means of managing your list. There are several options out there, including Constant Contact, Aweber, and iContact. (I highly recommend AWeber. It is by far the best service available in my opinion. It is the service I use at Social Media Schools and a number of other online businesses I manage.) The fees are reasonable and each provides simple e-mail tools to track and manage your list and the e-mails you send.
Use your list to drive people to your site.
If your goal is to build website traffic and get your community to actually read the content you are producing, use your e-mail to link back to recent content on your website. When you look at your website statistics, you will be able to see a traffic spike when people receive the newsletter and click to the site to read articles.
Send “alerts” or special offers.
You can also use your email list to notify people in your community about business/school events, offer additional services, drive traffic to other community websites, or whatever you want. Remember, when people subscribe, they’re telling you they want to hear from you about a particular topic. So as long as what you’re sending is relevant, people will usually welcome additional contact from you. A few will opt out with every mailing you send, but if you’re doing everything else right, your subscriptions will always be on the rise.
Avoid spamming.
This is a big no no. Don’t add people to your list if they don’t request it. Give people an easy way to opt out. Make sure your feed or newsletter is designed so people know what it is and who it’s from to keep them from reporting your e-mail as spam. Don’t abuse your list by mailing multiple times a day. It’s e-mail, not Twitter. Spam is a hot button for most people, so go out of your way to avoid doing anything spammy.
There’s a lot more to making e-mail work, but this should get you started. Just remember that while there’s a lot of buzz about how e-mail is a dinosaur and that social networking is the way of the future, take it all with a grain of salt.
E-mail is a powerful tool. It’s not as sophisticated as some of us would like, but it works, virtually everyone uses it, and it will be around for a long time.
If you don’t already have a email management provider for your organization, go to www.aweber.com right now to sign up for an account and learn more about the power of email marketing.
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