If you want more recurring traffic to your website or blog - and, in turn, more sales - email marketing might just be the ticket, people are often so caught up in trying to get traffic to their site or blog; they don`t realize that what they really want is to increase the recurring visitors by building an effective email campaign through email marketing | Why is this important? People aren`t always "sold" on the products or services that you are promoting the first time that they visit your website. It may not even be until the third, fourth, or tenth time that they decide to purchase something from you. This is why you need to build an effective email campaign – if you structure your email list and email marketing right, your visitors will "stay tuned", eventually leading to increased sales.

Where and How to Obtain Email Addresses

An email subscription form on your website or blog is one of the most effective ways to build a loyal email list and kick off your email marketing. Place the email list subscription form near the top of your website, in a prominent spot where visitors can plainly see it, and mention that they will be provided useful tips and tricks or other valuable information and offers if they are on your email list. By incorporating a form that requires the visitor to enter the address twice, you ensure that you will receive an accurate email address for your email marketing. When subscribers add their name to your email list, it’s called "opting in".

You can also incorporate your opt-in within the signature of your regular emails with a link straight to your email list opt-in form on your website. You will also want to make sure that you are clear about how often you intend to contact your email list subscribers and the type of information that they should expect to receive from you. To get a quick increase in subscribers to your email list, you can offer a giveaway to a random subscriber or hold a contest.

The Welcome Email

The Welcome email is your first – and maybe only – chance at building a relationship with your visitors through your email marketing. What can you say to make them want to continue to stay on your email list? Keep your first email simple and be sure to include some of the following tricks:

Catchy Headlines (Or Subject Line) - It’s a toss-up as to which element of email marketing is the most important and effective, but we’ll start with the headline. In order to get people to open an email, you need to catch their attention with a headline that they cannot resist. Make sure that it is related to the topic of the email so that you do not come across as deceptive. When it comes to email marketing headlines, the shorter the better is normally the best.

Valuable Content - If you are going build an effective email campaign, send only valuable content to the people or organizations on your email list. Insert hyperlinks within the text with a compelling, but soft, call-to-action to maximize click-through rates. People are quickly turned off by the large-lettered "Click Here" emails which arrive in the inbox and are likely to delete messages that offer no information or value. Step into the shoes of possible subscribers in order to come up with ideas and content that they will be interested in reading.

E-books and articles – People love e-books and articles, as long as they are relevant and offer new information that they haven’t already heard. Maintaining an ongoing article base or blog on your website will help you come up with the subject of your emails for your email marketing and will also provide you with URLs to link to in your emails.

Giveaways, Prizes, and Freebies – Who doesn’t love free stuff? Companies use freebies and giveaways in their email marketing to grab the attention of previous customers and to gain new customers as well.

Managing the Relationship

We’ve covered the basics of starting up your email marketing campaign; now it’s time to continue to harvest the relationships with the people on your email list. Put your feet in the shoes of your email marketing recipients and send timely emails that you would open, read and find informative on a regular basis. Provide an opt-out option to your email list recipients within every email that you send out; this is considered good practice when it comes to email lists and also shows the integrity of your email campaign. You also may want to send out periodic feedback forms in order to find out whether information, amount of emails and the offers that you send out in your email marketing are informative and relevant to the people on your email list’s needs.

If you follow these fundamental steps of email marketing, you can easily build an effective email campaign. You will also find that your email marketing is an integral tool in your entire marketing strategy, similar to direct mail and advertising, but without the enormous costs. Although it may be time consuming to get visitors to join your email list and build an effective email campaign at first, you will find that your email marketing takes less time to maintain once you have your email list organized and your email marketing on track. When done right, email list building and email marketing can maintain customer retention and loyalty, gain email list subscribers and customers and build brand awareness, which generates traffic and leads to sales for your business.