As a follow-up to our last post on The Power List Marketing Tool For Your Company Website, this post will identify the strategy behind your list marketing plan. While many companies use an email campaign to try to create more sales, very few have developed a long-term strategic intent for delivering the potential that list marketing offers.
First of all, if you have not read the article on the 3 Buying Stages On The Internet, I would recommend you read and understand what this report shares about how visitors to your website will arrive. Most do not show up ready to make a buying decision, so prudent businesses have learned to use list marketing as a way of maintaining contact with the valuable “early arrivals” at a company website.
A Strategic List Marketing Plan
The primary goal of list marketing is to increase sales. Most people understand that right away. But the best way to go about list marketing usually eludes most brick and mortar businesses. Rather than create “an auto-responder” that “goes for the throat,” the best use of list marketing involves a long-term approach designed to increase interaction between the prospective customer and the company website, where the actual sales are made.
Think of your lists as large pools of people who have some level of interest in a problem that your product or service can solve, then everything you do with your list marketing plan is to provide more information that these types of people will need in their process of making a buying decision. If increasing sales is the primary goal of list marketing, then the primary purpose of list marketing is to drive your subscribers back to your company website where an eventual sale (or sales) can be made.
Think about list marketing as a long-term, sequential infomercial, where you send short emails containing questions and information about typical consumer concerns, and include a link to the relevant page on your website that contains “more information” for the consumer. If your website does a good job of providing brilliant content, then the subscriber will most often see value in your emails and will be willing to continue to receive them.
Do not be tempted to “sell” very often from your emails, perhaps just one in every five emails at most. What you want is the subscribers on your lists to remain engaged, and this will only occur if they see value in what you are sending. The big temptation is to sell too often, and all that does is increase your subscriber cancellation rate.
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