Having a solid email marketing strategy right from the start will help you get better results much quicker. As with all aspects of your business, some planning can pay off big. When it comes to building your business the "throwing it against the wall to see what sticks" method is not generally the best way to go.
Finding and using a proven method for generating more people on your list will allow you to get the most out of all the traffic generation techniques you use.
First of all you need to have a thorough understanding of who your target audience is. What is their average age? What is their gender? What are their interests, where do they hang out online, what do they want? Finding out all of these things will be a little time consuming but if you take the time to do it, you will be able to provide them with just what they want, and that is the ultimate secret: find a hungry audience and give them what they want. Talk about easy.
So, once you know who your target audience is and what they want, you can craft all aspects of your email marketing strategy. Start with your optin enticement. What are you going to offer your website visitors if they optin to your list? Hint: it can be free but it must be something that they will consider of high value to them.
Most people give away a free ebook or ecourse. As long as it provides your target audience with something that they would really want to have it should work just fine.
OK, now that you have gotten them to optin to your list, now what? Well, now you want to continue to give them what they want. Take your ebook or ecourse and expand on that. What other knowledge do you have (or can you easily find) that will benefit your list? Put that together in bite size snippets that can be sent out in emails on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Now that you have identified the people you want to target, you have figured out not only what to offer them to sign up but also follow up emails that just keep on delivering. Now what? Well, from that point on you just have to keep delivering. Every once in a while you can send an email that promotes a certain product or service (one that you will get paid for if they buy).
Be careful though to not abuse the people on your list. An occasional sales pitch is fine, but it must be occasional and you must provide real value to your list in all of your other emails. Doing it this way will go a long way to keeping the people on your list happy.
If you follow all these tips you will be able to establish a sound and profitable email marketing strategy. This isn't theory, it's a proven method for turning more of your website visitors into paying customers and keeping more of your customers for a lot longer.