As business owners, we’re all looking for perfection: the best, most efficient and most cost-effective tool available to us. We’re all so busy with so many things, that our time (and cash!) is often very limited. When it comes to marketing, we want the tool that will convert the most purchases than the rest. After all, we have at least 10 ways to get found online and generate leads. So where should we put our energy?

There’s a myth that email is dead. No one opens our emails and no one wants to sign up for our newsletters. Right?

It’s true that people are reluctant to hand over their precious email address to your email list. Even if they do, they have twitchy unsubscribe fingers, and one little thing can send them scattering to the wind. Email relationships have to be nurtured, fed and cared for. There’s no doubt about that.

If you have an open rate of 20% or 25%, this is typical. That seems dismally low, but the reality is:

  • Probably more than 25% are opening your email, especially if you’re sending out a regular, valuable newsletter, not just hype. However, if they don’t download your graphics, it counts as unopened. So do everything you can do to get them to download the graphics!
  • If you have 1000 subscribers, a 25% open rate is still equal to 250 engaged prospects who are interested in your stuff. That’s a pretty significant number of interested people who may want to purchase from you in the near future.

Having an Email Marketing System

Hopefully, you have a good system for btringing people into your website with SEO, blogs and social media. But then you have to get visitors to take the next step in a micro-commitment: give you their e-mail address.

The process looks like this:

  • Attract people using the above tools or some kind of lead magnet
  • Engage them with good content
  • Offer a small incentive to give you their e-mail address and possibly their name (or even other information)
  • An auto-responder e-mail series that further engages them
  • A regularly scheduled newsletter that provides value on an ongoing basis

Email is cheap, easy to implement, and 91% of us open our email every day on our various devices.

Most of us look at our phone over 150 times per day. Every time it beeps or buzzes, we’re compelled to see who is messaging us. We just can’t help it. So your email needs to be in their inbox on their phone, and be optimized with a mobile-aware email template.

Most people aren’t ready to buy the first time they see you, so you have to nurture that trust.But nurturing your email list, using it to build trust with your potential customers, educate them, and provide value or even deals to them, is by far the best marketing tool you’ve got. Studies have shown that the average return on investment (ROI) for each dollar spent on email, is about $44.

Furthermore, people who have opted into your email list have given you their permission to send you their marketing materials. This, of course, comes with some responsibility to deliver valuable information, and not just spam them with sales hype.

Building your email list takes time, patience, and you’re going to lose 30% per year just to attrition (opt-outs, email addresses going stale, etc.). So just to stay even, you have to keep adding to your list at all times.

Simple Lead Capture Tools Work

I’m really excited for the opportunity to be co-hosting a free webinar in a couple weeks with Tim Paige from LeadPages. I’m a big fan of LeadPages as a simple tool to get people into your system.

LeadPages allows you to:

  • Easily create an opt-in page for your lead magnet
  • Connect and inter-connect your other tools like Constant Contact (email), Goto Webinar, or any other system you’re using to generate leads
  • Drop a single registration into all systems without people having to fill out a form multiple times

We use it for our business, and it’s so easy to use that the time savings alone of setting up one opt-in page will easily pay for itself.

During this webinar Tim Paige will show you:

  • How to Turn Any Business Site into a Lead-Generation Machine:
    He’ll show you four simple steps you can take right now to transform your site into a powerful lead-generation tool that you can use right now to grow your list and boost your sales.
  • The Highest-Converting Landing Page + Lead Magnet (or “Opt-in Bribe”):
    This simple landing page + lead magnet combination has out-converted every other landing page and lead magnet that LeadPages has tested — even though it only took 30 minutes to create.
  • The #1 Biggest Mistake that Even the Best Marketers in the World Make:
    If you make this mistake, you’ll continually ignore (or worse, abandon) your best, hottest leads. He’ll show you how to avoid this mistake and turn this missed opportunity into an entirely new sales channel for your business — in less than five minutes.

I’ve been to several of Tim’s webinars in the past, and they’re always packed with a ton of information and actionable steps you can take to put in place, so I hope you’ll join us! Please share this post with your colleagues too! See you online! [Note: registration is closed.]

(This original article was written by Thomas Petty, appeared here and was re-published with permission.)