Email Profits Basics: Lesson 1

Welcome to the first Email Profits Basics Lesson. In each lesson of this series you will learn valuable information on how you can use email marketing to increase profits for any business. In this first lesson we are going to talk a little bit about how email marketing works so you can use it to your advantage.

Before we jump in to this issues I have a quick question for you, do you really understand email marketing?

Before you begin emailing it’s important to understand the options that are available to you. The most common options include sending out advertising, publishing newsletters and offering information such as reports, ebooks or courses via email.

The advantage to all of these marketing strategies is the ability to reach a mass audience simultaneously. Unlike traditional methods of marketing such as television, radio ads or print ads which only reach an audience in a limited area email can reach anyone with access to the Internet making it an excellent medium to carry your marketing message.

Mass email is one of the most popular forms of email marketing. This includes emails which are sent to hundreds, thousands or even millions of recipients at once. The problem with this type of marketing is the potential for having your emails viewed as spam. This is likely to occur if you send your emails to recipients who have no interest in your products or services and have not expressed interest in receiving emails from you.

Newsletters are also becoming increasingly popular as a form of email marketing. Newsletters can be a simple or as complex as you prefer and may include text, graphics, advertisements, links or any combination of these elements. One of the first decisions you will have to make is whether you wish to make your newsletter strictly text or include graphics in the newsletter.

If you are on a tight budget, it may be worthwhile to only include text to avoid the need to hire a graphic artist. You may be able to incorporate graphics yourself but they won’t look nearly as professional as the graphics provided by a professional. Likewise, you can certainly write your own copy for your newsletter but you will likely create a much better impression if you hire a qualified professional writer to create the content for you instead.

Hiring a professional graphic artist and a professional writer may seem like an extraneous expense but it’s actually quite important. Your newsletter may be the first impression many potential customers get of you and your work so it’s important to make sure everything is of the highest quality.

Reports, ebooks and short courses offered via email is the final email marketing strategy we will discuss. These can be offered for a fee and turn into a source of income themselves or they may be made available for free. The theory behind offering them for free is they often contain subtle advertising urging visitors to invest in the products and services offered by your business.

Whether you charge a fee or offer them for free, care should be taken to ensure the information contained is truthful. This is critical because potential customers who receive these email courses will be judging your business based on the quality and accuracy of these email courses. If they are filled with errors the potential customer may doubt the quality of your work and seek out the products and services offered by others including your direct competitors.

Make sure you look out for the next lesson soon. We will be talking about reaching your target audience with email.