Email marketing can create demand with the touch of a button. If you use this low-cost marketing powerhouse consistently, it can help you to keep your business at the forefront of your customers’ minds as well as land keep every inch of your pipeline full, so you’ll never run out of prospects and customers.

While email marketing isn’t an especially new addition to the marketing scene, it is a very, very effective one. Once you have access to the inboxes of customers, clients and prospects, you can use that privilege to earn trust, loyalty, and even affection … all of which translate directly to sales over time. Email marketing is also one of the most cost-effective business generation tactics, since maintaining a quality email list requires nothing more than a good email marketing service (usually not more than $20 or so a month, especially for beginners). If you’re a business owner, you simply have nothing to lose.

What Is Email Marketing?

At its most basic level, email marketing is a fairly simple concept: marketing that happens through email. However, a well-executed email marketing campaign requires a carefully coordinated effort between websites, landing pages, social media and your other online presences. Let’s look more closely.

An email list is a roster of names of people who have already expressed interest in your product or service. Usually they sign up for your email list on your website, though they may also do so through a social media platform or on a separate landing page. By signing up, they are agreeing to receive your emails in a place they visit every single day … their inbox.

What Does This Accomplish?

Many things, depending on your goal. If you’re just getting to know a customer, you can use email marketing to raise awareness of who you are, what you do, what you value, and what a relationship with you will bring to that customer. Over time, you can use your email to build trust by imparting valuable knowledge the recipient can’t get anywhere else. Once they trust and like you, you can begin to promote your products and services and encourage sales. After they become customers, you can incentivize them to buy again or renew contracts. Throughout the life cycle of the relationship, email can serve different purposes, but it is always enormously useful.

The Power of the Inbox

Some people aren’t convinced about email, preferring instead to run their businesses solely through word of mouth, handshakes, phone calls and other antiquated (but still effective!) marketing tactics. Limiting yourself to these tactics, however, has an unfortunate consequence, curtailing your ability to engage with prospects on a consistent basis. While you’ll only physically meet with clients and prospects every month or so at most, you can interact with prospects through email several times a week … as long as you don’t abuse your power.

The magical part is that people will let you. They have themselves invited you in, so your presence in their inbox is a form of proof that you are already trusted. However, that trust has a time limit. Do not let long amounts of time to lapse, after which an email from you will seem random and spammy. Make sure you keep that trust by consistently providing good information and actionable advice.

Launching Your Email Campaign

If you’re a tad overwhelmed, that’s normal. It’s a lot of rules to remember. Getting started with an email marketing campaign requires making a plan for how you’ll use it, deciding on which content or content types to send, and integrating your efforts with other marketing channels (such as social media, your website and your blog).

The good news is that each of these steps follows a specified set of rules that make setting up the campaign much simpler. An expert such as MarketBlazer can clarify all the information out there, distill your hopes and goals to the most important steps to take, and help you build the most effective campaign possible in much less time than you could otherwise. Let us help you.