Originally published at: https://community.envato.com/the-one-marketing-strategy-that-works/
Daniel Futerman (aka AmigoProductions) is a Videohive author with 8 years of experience in video & motion graphics. He works from his home office, sets his own hours and does business with clients worldwide. In this series, he’ll be taking us through the pros and cons of social media marketing, and provide alternative actionable strategies to help increase your sales and revenue.
In the last post I concluded social media marketing isn’t worth it for authors. Trying to win people’s attention within a heavily populated, constantly updating social stream is tremendously difficult.
In this edition of the “Marketing for Market” series, I’m going to take you through a strategy proven to work. In fact, this strategy works so well, I doubled my earnings on Videohive this year as a result of using it.
Email marketing
Okay. I know what you’re thinking.“You’re kidding, right?”
“Do people even have email anymore?”
“Is it 1994?”
But, let me tell you something that might surprise you. Email is, and always has been the number 1 marketing tool in the world. And, there’s no sign of that changing anytime soon.
In fact, one could argue that email is the largest social media platform available right now.
I mean, let’s put things into perspective…
According to The Social Media Hat and About.com
- Facebook has 1.5 billion active users
- Twitter has 288 million active users
- LinkedIn has 187 million active users
- And, email has 2.5 billion active users.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is sending a commercial message straight to a group of people via email. These people are subscribers who have signed up to your mailing list and have opted in to receiving marketing messages from you.Here’s how it works:
- Let’s say you have an email list of 2,000 people interested in After Effects templates
- You launch a new product on the Envato market
- You send an email to those 2,000 people saying “Hey, I have a new template and I think you’ll love it! It does this and that. Check it out here.”
Sounds familiar right? In a way, it’s similar to how we share things on social media. But there’s one huge difference…
Email marketing is king
How many emails do you get a day? 15? 50? 100?Compare that to how much content is shared on social media every day. Let’s take Facebook alone. You would see over a thousand posts pass by you on a daily basis.
Doing the math, it’s pretty easy to see that when sending an email, you have a much better chance of your content actually being seen.
And there are a multitude of other reasons why emails marketing works so much better that social media:
- Emails are personal and directed specifically at the reader (e.g. “Hey Daniel…”).
- Email allows you to form a relationship of trust and build credibility with your audience.
- Email marketing return on investment (ROI) is measurable (more about that next time).
- You can dig deep into analytics and see exactly who opened your email or who clicked on a link.
- You can send emails to specific segments of your audience (e.g. only people who purchased an item, only people who’ve opened your last campaign).
- Emails are customizable, meaning you can design your message, you can add branding, and you can even send more than one link in each email (surprise!).
Traffic + targeted audience = sales
The first major step of generating more sales is getting as many targeted people in front of your product as possible. That’s where it all begins, and that gives you the best chance of turning those glances into clicks, and potential sales.Regardless of whether you have the best product in the world, if no one knows about it, no one will buy it. As an example, take a look at this thread in the forums:
A Videohive author called @Anton_and_Friends released a new after effects template, and lacking a better option, he chose to add his item to the Miscellaneous category. During the first few days while the item was visible on the front page of Videohive the item got 5 sales, but after that period sales came to a stop.
Why? Because people no longer knew about the item.
Anton decided to share his situation on the forums, and @scotwills from the Envato community team picked up on the thread. Since Scott thought the item had serious potential, he reached out to the relevant team and recommended featuring the item on Videohive.
Guess what happened after that? Sales skyrocketed into the top selling charts.
While the quality of your item is important, if it’s not seen by the right people you have no chance of it selling.
Scott did @Anton_and_Friends a huge favor by getting his article on the featured items page, because it put his product right in front of a targeted audience. And email marketing can enable you to do the same for yourself.
Email marketing engagement rates
Last time I mentioned that there’s a way to net 30% engagement rate on the content you share. Now it’s time to back those numbers with facts.
These are stats from a campaign I recently sent out to a segment of my 2,261 subscribers.
32.3% of recipients opened the email, and 9.2% clicked the link. That’s huge because those 726 people who opened the email were highly targeted, therefore the chances that a significant portion of those 206 people who clicked the link will buy the product are high.
And that’s just one email I sent.
These figures are in stark contrast to my social media situation.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I have 4,000 Facebook fans, but I’ve been struggling to get them to engaged.
As matter of fact, my last post got an embarrassing 0.0697% engagement rate.
Email marketing offers a much higher likelihood of recipients engaging with your content. And on top of that, there are ways to automatically send a sequence of marketing emails to your audience, without you doing a thing.
But, how do I build an email list?
After reading this column, you surely have no more doubts about email marketing. But you’re probably wondering how to get people to sign up to your mailing list. In fact, some of you may not even have a mailing list at all yet.In the next “Marketing for Market” column, I’ll take you through the basics of setting up a mailing list, increasing signups, open rates and click-through-rates!
Read it here…
Check out Amigo Productions’ profile on VideoHive
), but I will say that there are a number of very effective ways to get your targeted audience to subscribe to your list.
