Email marketing is still one of the most effective forms of online marketing. It’s one of the few marketing methods that gets you up close and personal with your audience on an individual basis. Some marketers think they should give up on email marketing, but nothing could be further than the truth. The money is still in the list, and that’s not changing anytime soon. But, there are some tricks of the trade.

Know Your Audience

Study your target audience so that you can create personas that describe who your individual audience is. For instance, maybe your target audience are mothers of children between the ages of 11 and 14, who home school and are housewives with a family income of $80,000 per year. If you know this information, you can know a lot of things about your audience, such as the types of products or services they need, as well as how much they can afford to pay for them.

Understand the Point of Your List

Is the point of your list to sell a particular product? Is the point of your list to teach and inform your subscribers about your services and how they can benefit from them? Do you know the point of your list? If you do, stick to the point of it, so that your subscribers know what they’re signing up for. You can segment your audience as they purchase something or take various actions so that you can market other items and services to them.

Build Your List

In order to build your list, create a checklist or an ecourse, or give away something like a special report, or simply create a sign-up form and ask visitors who come to your website to sign up to stay up to date. Promote your list at every opportunity in order to get targeted subscribers. Ensure that the information you provide speaks to your audience in a way that resonates with them that this is something they need.

Send Your List Members Regular Information

Once you have members on your list, it’s important to be consistent in sending them information. The information you send them must be relevant, targeted and useful. It must also be sent on a regular basis. If you don’t communicate with your list often, they might forget that they signed up and then think you’re sending them spam when you’re not.

Also make sure the information you send to your list has a meaning. It should lead your subscribers back to content on your website, or to products and services that you recommend or created.

Check Your Metrics

Pay attention to the numbers. Check open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates of every email that you send. Every email that you send needs a reason, and that is how you know what metrics to look at. If your reason is to send them to your website to read an informative blog post, check to see if it worked. If your reason was to tell your list about an affiliate product you believe your audience needs, check conversion rates.

Repeat

Keep doing what works, and change what doesn’t. You can know what is working by studying the metrics and testing out different scenarios. This is called A/B testing. For instance, you might send the same email with two different subject lines to half of your list, or a small portion of your list, to see which one gets opened the most. Then what works the most should be done over again.

As you build your list, and use your list, your traffic will go up – as will your engagement with your subscribers. Keep building your list with your targeted audience; keep sending them relevant information, and you’ll soon discover that your most valuable online asset is your email list.