If you have read my blog or been on my list for very long you know that I believe in the power of email marketing. Now I’d like to share why I believe in follow up email marketing.

When it comes to follow up email marketing …

• I do it every day.

• I teach it every day.

• It works for me, and my clients, every day.

• I watch it work for countless small and large businesses.

So here are five reasons why I believe in follow up email marketing.

IT WORKS FOR ME

I started working online in late 2000. At that time, I had no list, no site, no business. I was too sick to work outside my home and too broke to NOT work as much as I could to support my family.

Enter the Internet.

Now you might think that me owning the Directory of Ezines turned my life around. And on some level that is true. Owning the DOE gave me many things. But one of them was not time freedom.

When I bought the DOE I bought a 70 hour per week job.

What did give me freedom was putting 6 messages in an autoresponder and asking people to join my list. Prior to adding the six messages I had only broadcast to my list.

That one move toward automation was responsible for a 54% increase in sales over the next 12 months.

All automatically.

Since that time I have seen automated follow up email marketing work in every niche imaginable. From survival to dog training to weight loss to self-improvement, automated email follow up works.

IT WORKS FOR MY CLIENTS

Recently, I did something unprecedented. I made copies of my own follow up system available to people on my list for a modest fee.

When I say “modest” I mean 1/10th of what I charge to write them custom.

It was a popular offer, and I hoped very much for the best for my clients.

Then I received this in my support center.

THIS is why I work online.

Helping real people (his name is blurred for privacy) achieve real results by following a three step process.

1. Being the guinea pig that buys the courses, sends the messages, tests the ideas.

2. Proving what works, and what doesn’t, with my own time and money.

3. And then teaching only the best of the best based on actual experience.

It works for all successful online marketers.

Name a successful marketer online (NOT just in the Internet Marketing space) and you will find an email marketer. We all know the same thing – the money is indeed in the list and what you do with that list.

The wonderful thing about follow up email marketing is that it is a passive selling system. People subscribe to learn more and ONLY then do you send them offers for your products.

And when you do that you do it with permission and using words that tell them what’s in it for them, not 18 reasons why they must “act now or lose out”

Think right now of the people you most admire online. The people you want to emulate. The people you would love to talk with and get help from.

I’m willing to bet that they have a list and that you are likely on that list.

Why? Because you WANT to hear from them!

If so, you are living proof that follow up email marketing works.

IT WORKS FOR COMPANIES AND INDIVIDUALS TOO

The evidence for this is overwhelming. Email marketing is used by Target, Wal-Mart, General Motors, Merrill Lynch and my local pest control company.

And it works for countless individuals working at home in their spare time.

No matter who you are or what you sell, email marketing will provide the highest ROI (return on investment) of any form of marketing, including having affiliates or retargeting. 

IT WORKS BETTER THAN ANY OTHER FORM OF MARKETING, INCLUDING SOCIAL MEDIA

Now that’s a bold statement, so let me back it up. While social media is free, it’s primary purpose is lead generation. Only when people are on your list can you easily sell them something.

And this is where people miss it with social. Social media is fantastic for finding new audiences. But not for selling. For selling, you need to use follow up email marketing.

RESULTS ARE EASIER TO IMPROVE WITH EMAIL MARKETING

Many people try to do follow up email marketing but don’t do it well. That’s a shame because improving results with email marketing is easy.

With paid advertising, it’s hard to get it right the first time. If your ad fails you often don’t have the money to run it again and “get it right” later.

With follow up email marketing there is no additional cost (or very minimal costs depending on your autoresponder company) which means you can fine tune down to the individual message level if you want.

You can start with email marketing and then make improvements as you go.

In my example from 2006 (where we increased sales 54%) we fine tuned each message as we went. It was easy to move messages around, make them shorter or longer and add or remove links strategically.

By so doing we ended up with a powerful system that is still in use today. In fairness, we have modified it but the core messages still exist.

Two ways to instantly improve your own follow up email marketing results are personalization and segmentation.

You know what personalization is – sending an email that says Dear Nicole vs. one that says only Hi. But do you know how dramatic the results can be? Take a look at this.

That’s a 26% increase in open rates for something that cost zero dollars. Woo hoo!

And then there is segmentation.

Too big a subject to cover here, segmentation basically means sending messages only to people who have expressed a specific interest. Segmentation is overlooked by most email marketers in my experience.

That’s a shame because it works so very well. Just look at this when it comes to the power of segmentation.

That is a 760% increase. That means growing your business by over 7 TIMES by using one marketing method alone.

So there you have it. Five reasons why I love to use follow up email marketing.

If you were in my family I would give you this advice.

No matter what else you do, learn how to use follow up email marketing and focus ALL of your efforts on building your list, using content marketing and selling with follow up.

Because when you have those three things working together you have an automated, powerful marketing machine working for you 24 hours a day.

And that means freedom. And freedom is a beautiful thing indeed!