Email marketing systems can easily increase your conversion percentage from perhaps 1% or 2% way up to 10%, 15% and even more.
That’s not chump change.
And why are they so effective?
Because…
Email marketing systems sell over time…
And take the pressure out of buying for your site visitor.
Consider: a typical online sales letter converts at maybe 1% to cold visitors. That’s on a good day. Over time with lots of traffic and lots of opportunity to test and tweak, you might get that up to 3%. Hell, you might be a complete and utter genius copywriter and get it up to 5%. Highly unlikely, methinks, but let’s be generous.
But none of that’s going to be quick and none of it’s going to be easy.
Why?
Because the point at which you make the sale is a special moment – meaning your sales letter has to giving the right message at the time the person reading it is ready to buy or at least willing to be persuaded to buy.
You’ll see some copywriters (a few dickheaded individuals spring to mind) claiming they can “compel” readers to buy, but if you actually believe that, then I have just found £100,000,000 in a misplaced Nigerian bank account I’d like to share with you.
Trust Is a Big Part of the Success of Email Marketing Systems
And that’s why conversion rates for cold visitors to sales pages are so low – you naturally catch only a small percentage of them at the time they’re ready to buy and put the right message in front of them. And there are loads of reasons people won’t buy from you even if they’re ready to buy from someone – lack of trust being perhaps the most important of these. I’ll come back to this in a moment.
But email marketing systems go a long way to overcoming these problems
How?
Well, first, by continually putting your message in front of your reader you vastly increase the chance of catching him or her at the right time and with exactly the right message he or she needs to hear.
For example, an email tying in your whizzbang product to picking up chicks is much more likely to appeal to a young man with testosterone swilling around in his veins; but a marketing email about making emotional connections and thus having more loving relationships is more likely to appeal to a woman.
The product can be exactly the same, but the message is different. Email marketing systems give you the chance to put these different messages in front of your reader.
And this isn’t just theory — Sarah has become an expert at doing this and she emails her list every day with stories, anecdotes, metaphors and analogies and not only are sales up by 114% (thanks in large part to Ben Settle’s Street Smart Email Secrets) but she gets loads of emails from buyers saying, in effect, “I’ve been thinking about buying this for a long time… and your message today really made me realise…“.
And the trust thing?
Buying something online is no minor thing. How realistically you look on the whole identity-thesft thing is moot, because the important thing is the perception of how trustworthy you are. And the key to trust is the relationship.
And the key to the relationship is contact. Because you can’t really have a relationship with someone through the medium of just one letter (this is why proof elements are so important in your sales letters — they grease the wheels of trust).
Email marketing systems allow you to develop this trust over time. Your readers get to know you. They get a glimpse into your life and learn something about the man or woman behind the keyboard.
Now, all this presupposes you’re implementing your email marketing systems the right way.
If you’re using corporate emails with those hideous HTML templates that look like a dog’s dinner at the other end, and stuffing them with boring, crap copy just begging for sales once a month then don’t be surprised to get a relatively poor response.
You’ll still probably beat just a cold sales letter, but as email marketing systems go, this kind of things is pretty low on the evolutionary scale.
But if you’re writing, say, a couple of times a week or even every day as I and others do, then you’re going to build a great relationship with your readers. And these are the best and most profitable email marketing systems you can get.
Yes, some won’t like it and they’ll unsubscribe, especially if you up the frequency of your emails out of the blue (it’s an idea to email them and tell them this is what you’re going to do and what they can do if they don’t like it — don’t be afraid of unsubscribes. rather, welcome them — because it means your list is getting cleaner and more targeted. It’s also an idea to make it plain on your optin box they’ll be getting emails every day, too).
But most will love it. They’ll look forward to your daily emails. They’ll be entertained, informed and engaged. And over time, they’ll build that trust and buy.
Don’t underestimate the power of this.
We’re not talking just one or two percent for the most part. As I said in the beginning in comparison to a sales-page model, you can quite easily get 10x the sales; and by using email marketing systems with daily emails, you can increase it even more (Sarah’s conversion rate was 11.34% but shot up by 114% as she mopped up the latent fence-sitters on her list when she started emailing daily. I expect it will stabilise at around 17%).
Fact: even half-arsed email marketing systems will generally convert at a higher rate than even the best sales letter (and put the two together and you’re in clover).
