email marketing | AltusHost

Email marketing is undoubtedly amongst the most cost-effective marketing strategies that you can employ to expand your reach. It’s not hard to manage and it provides you with the ultimate control over the processes. It will also allow you to properly establish direct contact with all of your customers. Of course, there are quite a lot of different things that have to be taken into account when it comes to it.

You need to:

– Grow your email list and acquire contacts which are relevant to what your business covers. You won’t talk about new iPhone 8 with your grandma, who doesn’t even own a smartphone, right?

– On top of all, you need to make sure that your content is flawless.

– Employ some of the best email marketing tools there. And this is where this blogpost truly begins to unravel itself.

With this in mind, we’ve taken the liberty of providing you with some of the best tools available.

1. Constant Contact

Constant Content is the main competitor of MailChimp when it comes to email marketing and both of the solutions offer the highest deliverability rates – 97% for the former and between 96% and 99% for the latter. This is a productive spar as we all get from it is improved and better functioning tools.

This is undoubtedly one of the quickest growing tools on the market. It is also one which is easy to use and comprehensive. One of the things that you will certainly enjoy at least as much as I did was the fact that you can easily track and report with this tool. There are additional perks too. I was happy to see that there are incorporated social media sharing options. There is also an image library as well as 1GB storage for your very own stuff.

This is also a tool which comes with comprehensive support with email, live chat and tremendous community support as well. You can also take advantage of their online training. You don’t need anything to start – it’s easy to use and you will see it’s quite intuitive as well.

2. AWeber

This is another particularly popular email marketing service. They are going to offer you a significantly wide range of tools for medium sized and small businesses. You can easily manage your email marketing on your own.

For starters, I was able to initiate the tool easily without any issues. It connects easily to most of the platforms, I tested it out with Magento and WordPress – there were no problems at all.

You will get access to a lot of list management tools, autoresponders alongside email tracking and email templates with insights which are particularly effective.

3. Convert Kit

This is another robust marketing platform for email which is usually used by professional bloggers, marketers and authors. It is particularly powerful and incredibly easy to use.

There is no one one-size-fits-all solution – that’s their main policy when it comes to email marketing. This is the main reason for which they thrive to make their product better as the trends and tendencies change as we speak. Convert Kit is also one of the not so many solutions which lay a tremendous amount of personal experience in everything they do so their platform is particularly well-thought out and provides quite a few small but notable features.

This is a product which allows you to rely on constant content upgrades as well as incentives which are particularly effective. The auto-responder is also rather easy to manage and you can easily send out drip emails. What is more, you could quickly segment your contacts into ones who are interested to buy and those who are have already bought.

4. MailChimp

MailChimp has been around pretty much since the beginning of 2001. What started as a side-project is currently a platform used by more than 15 million people throughout the entire world. Whoa! This is something absolutely substantial.

Obviously, one of the classics in the industry, MailChimp is a service which has quite a lot to offer. It’s one of the email marke

ting tools which are going to ensure that everything is handled as per the highest standards. Of course, it’s an expensive option but if you want to get things done, you should.

This is a tool which integrates flawlessly with WordPress, Shopify and Magento alongside a range of other platforms as well. It’s something which will allow you to use segmenting apps, autoresponders, email creators and merge tags conveniently and easily. Furthermore, there are simple tracking and analytics capabilities which are going to allow you to keep proper alignment on your processes.

5. Assignment Helper

Here the team of professional writers can help you to find the right words for your email. There are quite a lot of helpful tips about the writing that you can find here.

What is more, you can easily personalize every single message, using the tremendous amount of rich customer information which is available to you.

6. Campaign Monitor

Speaking of popular email marketing solutions, Campaign Monitor is something particularly effective. It will provide you with a way to run smooth email marketing campaigns. Some of the big players using Campaign Monitor include MAHALO Digital, Core77, Big Sea, Epic, The Orchard, Reach Beyond Marketing and others of the kind. As they say, this brand is loved by over 2 million people at 200,000 businesses around the world.

The interface, though, is what truly makes a great impression. They have a very beautiful drag and drop ema

il builder which is particularly convenient. It will allow you to use email templates professionally and make them pretty much your own.

Another quick note here that you should account for – there are certain Campaign Monitor plans which are cheaper in comparison and would still enable you to host the same quantity of emails as some of the more expensive ones. However, they would limit your e-newsletters so it’s a matter of weighing in your preferences when it comes to it.

So, let’s sum up. Email marketing is important. It still rocks the marketing ground. But before you go for it, you need to ensure that you are well aware of how to engage your customer base. This is something absolutely tremendous. If you start sending out blank emails, you will essentially lose a lot of opportunities. Why? Well, people will assume you are spamming them. It’s the same thing that everyone does, so that’s something that you need to account for.

You need to understand that working with clients is individual. Of course, when you have pools of people towards your website in the form of traffic you won’t be able to afford to get to everyone individually, right? Sure, that’s where analytics come. Use scalable analytics in order to ensure that everything is handled as per the highest standards.

Email automation and marketing is something particularly effective but it should be used carefully. You don’t want to end up filtered in the spam folder as this is the end of this customer. With this in mind, make sure to approach the matter particularly carefully and with the proper tools in hand. This is the only way you can actually make the most out of it.

Lucy Benton is a marketing specialist, a business consultant who finds her passion in expressing own thoughts as a blogger, and currently works at Awriter. She is constantly looking for the ways to improve her skills and expertise. If you’re interested in working with Lucy, you can find her on Facebook and Twitter.

Nowadays, the secret every business owner knows is: Content marketing.

With great content, you can build your brand’s online reputation.

Have you ever wondered what was the most important element of content marketing?

It’s the website. It has to be fast, good-looking, and powerful. It needs to invite the potential customers to take action and make the purchase.

If you want more sales, you need more traffic. If you want more traffic, you need a better approach to content marketing. Do you see the connection?

How exactly do you direct your content marketing strategy towards the goal of getting more traffic? That’s what we’re here for today.

Your Way to Improved Traffic

1. It’s Not All about the Quality

Brian Dean, the person behind Backlinko, struggled for years before making a website successful. He started by publishing high-quality content in the nutrition niche. He cited research studies and made sure to deliver value to the readers.

There was a problem: no one cared. He was not publishing the right content; the kind that readers would care about.

What’s the right kind of content, you might ask?

What do people search for on Google?

What’s the most popular content for the keywords you aim for?

What kind of content gets comments, likes, and shares?

When you take these answers as the foundation for providing high-quality content, you’ll be on the right track.

2. Host Webinars

Why do people use the Internet so much? This would be the answer of many: “for fun.”

Learning, however, is also an important reason for people to hit Google. If you meet people’s need to learn through fun and effective webinars, you’ll be on the right track.

Send out emails at least a week ahead, so your subscribers will sign up and plan their time.

You should also archive that content for later viewing, since some of the recipients will be busy at the scheduled time.

Don’t forget about social media promotion.

3. Contribute to Influential Websites

More content. This time, it won’t be for your own website.

When you contribute high-quality content to other sites that have gained authority in a relevant niche, you’ll drive many visitors your way.

It’s not easy to become a featured contributor to top-notch websites, though. You’ll have to start small and work your way up. In other words – you’ll be writing content every single day. That can be a problem for a business owner. If you can’t invest that much time and effort into writing, you can always rely on a writing service like Australianwritings.

4. Invest in Paid Advertising

You may be writing the best content in your niche. You may use all the right keywords and write on topics your audience is interested in. Will that be enough? Not quite.

The promotional steps you make are crucial. If this is a new business, it’s important to invest in paid advertising on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other channels.

The best thing about paid online advertising is focus. Your ads will be seen by people who are interested in the products or services you deliver.

5. Get Inspired by Influencers

When you want to see what your audience is interested in, you clearly check out the stuff influencers are writing about. You observe their style, but you’re mostly interested in the topics they cover.

Get inspired by those topics! Do not copy them, though. Find your own twist and deliver something different to the same audience. Offer new solutions to the same questions and issues, and make your content easier to read. That’s always a bonus.

6. Videos!

Text-based content is still important. That’s how you infuse all the right keywords and attract traffic via search engine.

However, it shouldn’t be the only type of content you’re publishing. Video is a valuable addition that will make the website more engaging. One study showed that 3 days after watching a visual and verbal presentation, people remembered 65% of the information. They were able to recall only 10% of a lesson they read.

Videos are a great way to grab attention, especially on social media.

7. Improve Your Email Marketing Approach

Newsletters are awesome for driving traffic towards your website. Make sure to elevate your email marketing campaign. How do you do that?

Make a special offer for people who subscribe. It may be a free eBook, a promise for special offers, or valuable content they will get on regular basis.

The email newsletters have to be great. You need to feature high-quality content and make it visually-intriguing. Needless to say, these newsletters need a call to action, since you want the recipients to visit your site.

Automate these emails! You can use a tool like Mailerlite, MailChimp, Hatchbuck to do that.

8. Try Podcasting

We made it clear: textual content is important, but it’s not the most engaging kind of content for most users of the web. They are looking for something they can see and hear.

Images and videos are already a standard in content marketing, but here’s another type of content you can use: podcasts!

Busy people like listening to podcast when they’re driving or working out. This kind of multitasking allows them to achieve few goals at the same time. If you can turn some of your content into a podcast, that would be great.

9. Make the Content Shareable

When you create content that gets tons of shares, you’re not the only one promoting it. You’re getting audience-driven promotion.

How do you create shareable content? Well, people like to share things that make them look good. If the content is funny, smart, shocking, or unusual in any other way, they will share it.

Don’t forget to add the call to sharing action at the end of your post.

Feature sharing buttons for every piece of content at your site. It’s important to make it easy for the visitors to spread the message.

10. Feature Internal Links

Getting backlinks is important. That’s how you get audience from other websites. You’re getting those backlinks through guest posting, and some bloggers feature your links in their posts just because you give high-quality content that’s worthy of a link.

Internal links are just as important. When a visitor lands at your site for a particular piece of content, you want to keep them there for as long as possible. Link to your products or services, and other content they might be interested in. Don’t go overboard with the links, though; that may lead to a counter-effect.

There you have them – the 10 simple, but important content marketing tips that lead to website traffic boosting. Every business owner can benefit from those actions. Where will you start?Jessica Freeman is a blogger and freelance writer from Sydney, Australia. She enjoys covering various topics, from education and technology to motivation and productivity. Check out her new post about freelance writing. Follow Jessica on Google+ and Twitter.