Email marketing should be a critical component of any online marketing strategy. If you are not marketing via email, you are not taking full advantage of the Internet as a medium to communicate the value of your products or services.

Most online sales systems focus on customer acquisition, but customer acquisition is not cheap. While SEO and PPC advertising is a great tool to find new leads, but email marketing excels at (a) converting them to sales, and (b) solidifying a relationship that will produce repeat sales for years to come.

Some modern email marketing techniques are:

• Autoresponders (Drip Email Marketing)
• Newsletters (Broadcast Email Marketing)
• RSS Feed Updates (blog update subscriptions, etc.)

Autoresponders (Drip Email Marketing)

Email autoresponders are an incredibly powerful tool in your email marketing arsenal. If you haven't set up an autoresponder "drip series," you should do so sooner rather than later. Here's why: You can "set it and forget it."

The downfall of any surefire marketing system is one that requires too much human intervention. Ideally, you should be able to set up a system that almost runs itself. With an autoresponder, you can do that to a large extent. Here's how it can work:

1. A user subscribes on your website (or you add them after a phone conversation)
2. They immediately get an email with a free report or instant download of some sort. For real estate agents, it could something like "How to Sell Your Home in 30 Days or Less." The idea is to create a useful resource that people will be willing to sign up to receive by email.
3. The automatically get a follow-up email an hour or a day later. The great thing about it is that you can refer to "the email I sent you yesterday" because your drip system automatically takes care of the timing of the delivery.
4. Automatically send more follow-ups at key anniversary dates. You can say "A month ago, I sent you a free report entitled...."

Newsletters (Broadcast Email Marketing)

Newsletters are distinguished from drip campaigns because they are sent as a "blast" to the entire list at the same time. Email newsletter marketing is a great way to establish your credentials as a knowledgeable expert in your field, or simply send out product announcements and press releases. You decide what goes in a newsletter. The key is to make it fit the interests of your users as perfectly as possible.

A newsletter email marketing system should allow for email scheduling as well. With this feature, you can pre-write some announcements far in advance and have them repeat each year ("It's January 1st, and it's time to get those tax record together again...").

RSS Feed Updates (blog update subscriptions, etc.)

RSS Feed subscriptions are a great feature for blogs. Browsers like Firefox made subscribing to website feeds easy, but the savvy email marketing knows that most people don't read their bookmarked feeds. But people do read their emails. So if a subscriber is interested enough in your blog content to subscribe to your feed by email, you are much more likely to keep this person reading your blog than if he just bookmarked it his web browser.

Drip Campaigns

If you're looking for ability to automate your marketing with a drip campaign system at a reasonable price, with robust newsletter and list management features, I suggest you check out ProDrip.com. They have plans for every need (including non-profit/ministry plans).

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