I've been talking a ton about our new white label email marketing system. For a few months I've been promoting the new near-free service powered by Amazon's cloud-based whitelist email service. And so far, it's been going well. We have many SEO resellers jumping on-board with Amazon and getting their private label portal juiced-up with email templates. For those who don't have the time, we've been actually giving them free email marketing support to get their email program running. We have all read about how critical email marketing is to small business, but I wanted to dive into some real data and set expectations for what could happen if you really give this the college try.
Building your list is critical
It goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway. Your white label email marketing system is only as good as the list that is loaded into it. In other words, marketing tools are just that - tools. Similar to PPC, SEO, Social Media and all the rest, you can't expect your email marketing module to jump off the screen and start dumping business in your lap without some efforts on your part. Yes, this means building a solid white email list that you can market to. We've blogged about this a bunch and our Account Managers also have great ideas for how to get these emails (often for free) that will turn into business. But there is a critical step required between new email acquisition and closing business. And this is the essence of the email nurture program.
Nurturing your email leads is critical
Here is a screen shot from our private label SEO reseller portal showing the email sends and opens going back to the beginning of the year. The first point to note about email nurture programs is that you need to run them for some length of time. This marketing tool, like all others, adds to the trickle of leads. If you look at any marketing channel in isolation, it may not be bringing that much business, but all the little trickles of leads add up to a large river of business over time. Email marketing follows this rule as well.
For this program, I selected to space out my emails at day 1, 2, 4, 6, 9 and 14. I need to write more as this is a fairly bad distribution. However, if you study the open-rates, you can see there is decay - but it's not that bad. The first nurture email sent on Day 1 has the strongest open rate (notice the blue bar). The open rate then drops off for each email, but not drastically. I'm okay with these numbers for the type of website that is collecting these email addresses and the audience I have.
Give your readers a clear call-to-action
Just like PPC, you need to make sure you are clear in your head what you are trying to get your readers to do. Orient all the email templates toward this action, and then measure the outcome. As you tweak things in your email nurture program, such as the spacing of the emails, different call to action buttons and the number of emails, you can track which combination is working best. You will probably never feel that your program is perfect, but just do it. Get the email nurture program up and running and contributing to your lead growth today. Our program runs on Amazon's cloud based email delivery service and we don't mark it up. If you are a reseller, watch our Reseller Video to get a preview of our technology.