Email marketing is one of the most powerful strategies you can incorporate into your business. Through intelligent use of email you can potentially turn a stone cold lead into a hot buyer. How is this possible? By building a relationship with your leads.

A case study may help you to appreciate the benefits of incorporating email within your business:

“Sally plans on getting married next year and is exploring the idea of hiring a wedding planner. She finds a wedding planner company through Google that has a form on their website for her name and email address. The form promises that in exchange for her details they will immediately email her a checklist of 7 things she needs to know about wedding planner companies before she trusts one with organising her big day. How can she refuse? She doesn’t want to be ripped off.

Sally enters her name and email address and checks her email immediately. As promised she has an email with a link to a PDF which she can print and use to help her decide on a wedding planner. Immediately her barriers begin to reduce as she starts to trust the impartial advice she is receiving. The relationship has already started to build.

Sally is sent an email every day over the next 10 days with more tips and advice on how to make her wedding day as special as possible. In these emails are links back to the company website explaining the benefits of arranging a free no obligation consultation with them. She has been so happy with the advice she has received from this company already that she gives them a call…”

No matter what kind of business or website you run, whether you sell a service or product, the number 1 way to increase your sales is to start building a relationship with your potential customers and follow up with them on a regular basis.

It is human nature to want to reciprocate any help that we receive whether from a friend helping us move, or a business that is helping us plan a wedding. Sally trusts this wedding planner company now, so why would she then go somewhere else. Human nature will kick in and she will want to reciprocate the good deed they have done for her.

A Personalised Email To All My Leads? Who Has Time For That?

What if you get a lot of traffic to your site and get 100 people to give you their name and email address in one day? There’s no way you could sit there and send a personal email to all these people.

The good news is, you don’t have to. When Sally enters her name and email address into the web form that is on your website, her details will get stored into a database through use of an email autoresponder. Attached to this database will be all the emails that you want to send, and when you want to send them. So if you want to send Sally an email telling her to give you a call 4 days after she signs up, you can upload the email ahead of time and set it up to go out 4 days after someone signs up. Much like a mail merge, you can also set up your emails so that the person’s first name is at the top of every email that goes out.

The potential for queuing your emails is huge. You could potentially pre-write 52 emails and load them all up to your autoresponder to go out every week. So that when a potential customer submits their name and email address, you have an automated system that will follow up with them for a whole YEAR building a great relationship with them overtime.

Now imagine you have a list of 5,000 subscribers – which actually won’t take as long as you think to achieve. You have just developed a new product or service so send out a broadcast email to all these 5,000 people of whom you have a relationship, imagine how many of these people will buy from you.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the sheer power of email marketing, and setup correctly, it can increase your sales exponentially whilst building a valuable asset (your list of subscribers) in the process.