Whether it comes in the form of article marketing, custom blog creation, or social bookmarking, there’s a lot to be said about the power of organic SEO to drive traffic. But some webmasters don’t seem to get the fact that traffic doesn’t equal profitability. Ask anyone who’s gotten fifteen million hits on YouTube for a video that didn’t link anywhere or ask anyone for anything — you can get all of the hits you want, but without a solid endgame, all of your SEO efforts don’t mean a thing.
There are a lot of powerful SEO endgame strategies out there, but only one of them is so powerful that it’s been adopted almost universally by everyone from internet marketers to small businesses to major corporations: the power of targeted Email marketing.
Targeted Email marketing basically amounts to three things: you get someone to give you their Email address (and agree to let you send them Emails), you send them an Email with a strong call-to-action, and they click the link and (hopefully) buy stuff. It sounds so simple, but as with any aspect of trying to get someone to give you money, there are a lot of pitfalls.
The first pitfall is that word ‘targeted’. That means that you have to collect the emails of people who will be interested in your final offer. Anything else and you’ll get a 90% unsubscribe rate the first time you send out an email with an offer in it. Generally, you can successfully target by offering a free information packet about the same subject as your product in exchange for their Email address.
The second pitfall is that word ‘marketing’. People don’t like to be sold on stuff, and unless you’re Ron Popeil, you shouldn’t try to sell people something when you first ‘meet’ them. Arrange an autoresponder to send them information-filled emails for a few to several weeks, without asking anything of them. Only once they’re sure that what you’re sending them is worth reading should you pop the sales link.
Done right, targeted Email marketing not only builds sales, but it builds a solid list of satisfied customers that will look forward to your new offers — and who doesn’t want a crowd of people just waiting for another chance to give them money?
