So you've decided to take this course... well done - you are obviously super smart ;-)

But before I go any further I want to make sure you are 100% sold on why email marketing is so important.

Because if you are not 100% sold, you won't give this course 100% focus.

One of the BIG reasons why more bloggers aren't focused on email marketing is because, well quite simply, they don't get it.

They don't get why it's so important.

Maybe they half-heartedly put a sign up box in their side bar and send out an automated email...

But they don't really see any tangible results and so they conclude (wrongly!) that email marketing is a waste of time and instead focus their efforts on social media. THIS IS A BIG MISTAKE!

And here's why...

1. Email marketing keeps your readers coming back

Picture this. A person lands on your blog and LOVES what they’ve found, and they want to remember to come back. What do they do? They could follow you on social media, they could bookmark you, they could pin one of your pins on Pinterest. But the chances of them seeing your stuff again / visiting your site again is actually pretty small.

But if they sign up for your mailing list, they will get regular emails from you straight into their inbox every single week – they are definitely not going to forget about you!

Big companies know that it is far, far easier to keep a customer than get a new customer. And the same logic can be applied to blogging.

After all you are putting an enormous amount of effort into getting new readers... by writing amazing content, by implementing SEO, by sharing all over social media, by pinning like a mad thing on Pinterest...

Why are you not putting in at least as much effort trying to KEEP your new readers?

Email marketing helps you keep readers in a way that no other platform can.

2. Email marketing turns casual readers into raving fans

When a new reader arrives on your blog, they don't know you from Adam. They are only interested in the information you have on one particular post or page - perhaps because a social media post about that post piqued their interest or because that post contains the answer to question they typed into Google.

Once they've got that information, the most likely thing they'll do is leave... and never ever come back. Sad but true.

But what about if you could turn that casual reader into a super-fan? Someone who is passionate about you and your blog, someone who raves about you to all their friends, someone who shares all your posts on social media, someone who regularly comments on your blog posts, someone who trusts you and hangs on your every word... someone who buys everything you have to sell?

How do you do that?

Email marketing!

If you can convince your casual reader to sign up to your email list, and then you pop into your casual reader's inbox every week with helpful tips, freebies, awesome advice, news and exclusives, you'll gradually turn that casual reader into a raving fan!

3. You own your list

Seriously, you could be getting GREAT traffic from Facebook or Pinterest or Instagram or wherever. You could have a million followers...

But did you know…you don’t own a single one of those followers?

And if they so chose to, any one of those social media overlords could just delete your account… just like that – poof!

Or they could go bust or fizzle out… (Anyone remember Friends Reunited? One day your favourite social media platform could go that way too…)

Or they could just have an almighty algorithm update and you could go from getting really good traffic to tumbleweed overnight. And there is literally nothing you could do about it. Depressing, huh?

But the really great news is that you do actually OWN your email list. Yeah sure the odd one or two will unsubscribe from time to time, but your subscribers are not all going to all walk out en mass one day!!

4. You have a lot less competition

Think about it…on social media / Pinterest etc., every time your readers go there they are bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands of messages – from friends, from pages, from groups, from ads – and your little update about your latest blog post gets completely drowned out…and that’s if your readers even get to see your post at all!

Seriously, you could have a really loyal reader who really loves your stuff and really wants to read everything you write… but due to the way the algorithm works, they just never see your stuff!

Email, on the other hand, gets delivered straight into your reader’s inbox. And unless your subscriber signs up for every bit of junk email going, you are going to have a lot less competition for their eyeballs there.

In fact, you may even have the upper hand.

Often email is full of boring things like bills and admin and reminders about dental appointments – so when your email pops into their inbox, full of exciting and interesting things… plus a tantalising headline, guess which email your subscriber is going to open first?

5. It's passive

With social media a follower has to actually go onto Facebook or Instagram or wherever and actively seek out your stuff. And even more so on search engines.

But with email, your latest newsletter just lands in your subscriber's inbox…and most people check their email at least once a day…because that’s where the important stuff comes!

Sure, they might not read your email, or click on your links (that’s why you have to work hard to write enticing headlines and great copy…) but they will at least SEE your email.

And, in fact, your subscribers actively have to do something if they want to GET RID of your email…unlike social media where your new post disappears almost instantly.

6. Engagement is waaay better!

Did you know, average social media engagement is 0.58% - that means each social media post you create will, on average, only reach 6 out of every 1000 followers. That's tiny!

On the other hand, with email marketing, the average figures are:

• 85% will see your email
• 22.9% will open your email
• 3.7% will click on a link in your email

And that's just the average figures. A LOT of people are doing email marketing badly and dragging those stats down... following this course, you should be able to do way better than that!

(Figures taken from this article*)

7. It's a LOT less work that social media

And I mean A LOT…it takes me, what, 5 minutes for a quick email and maybe 30 minutes for a longer one…and the rewards from that are huge.

For the same kind of quality traffic from social media I would have to put a lot more effort in…and a huge chunk of that effort would be wasted on the wrong people.

But if you do it right, the effort you put in on your email list will be directed at exactly the right people…who will be much more responsive to what you are doing and much more likely to buy from you, which leads me on to…

8. You can make good money from your list

The reckoning is that for every 1 person on your list, you should be making 1 dollar per month.

Take a moment to think about that... 1 dollar per month for every person on your email list... If your email list is 500, that's $500 a month. If your list is 5000, that's $5000 per month.

Now obviously that money doesn’t happen by magic. But it is very possible to make good money from an email list…and in a much easier, less stressful and less time-consuming way than making money through leveraging social media etc.