Yesterday I talked about how your e-commerce platform needs to have a blog because it will bring thousands of visitors to your site organically (without paying for ads). When you start making sales that's a huge win. Give yourself a big pat on the back and reward yourself (watch a TV show, go shopping, or – if you're like me – pledge way too much money on Kickstarter projects). After rewarding yourself let's talk about how you can do even better.

To get more sales you'll either have to get more traffic (which you should be working on every month by writing new content), or you can increase your conversation rate. One of the best ways to increase your conversion rate is to earn the users' trust. People want to make sure that after they give you their money you'll give them a positive return on investment. This is hard to do via 140 character tweets. It's actually best done through the medium that everyone uses and is often underestimated. I'm talking about email newsletters.

Why Newsletters Work

Newsletters Build Trust

Imagine we meet on an elevator for the first time and I find out you want to build a WooCommerce site and I immediately try to sell you my book about WooCommerce – how effective would that be? Not very. You have no reason at all to trust me. The same is true with your store. If someone clicks on your product page directly from Twitter what do they know about you? How much effort are they going to put in to make sure you deliver a quality product? People are busy. They probably don't have the time to do that right now and as easy as it is for a visitor come into your site it's even easier for them to leave and never come back.

Unless you're selling something cheap and simple people are going to want to make sure they can trust you first. The more expensive or complex the product the more proof they're going to want.

Newsletters allow you build that trust. A person might come to a product page or one of your blog posts and see quality content. If you can offer them more quality content like an e-book or an email course they'll have even more reason to trust you. And after building that trust and knowing that you product will deliver value they're a lot more inclined to spend their money.

The latest data from EQ shows that traffic from email converts much higher than search traffic.

According to the latest Ecommerce Quarterly (EQ) by Monetate, which analyzes 500+ million shopping experiences, email is still the leading medium for conversion rates. It out performs both search & social.

Newsletters Keep You Top of Mind

People are incredibly busy – everyone has a to-do list that's about to explode. They might not be ready to buy your product the moment they click through to your site, or they're ready but they don't have their credit card handy, or maybe they don't have the budget this month. That's when it pays to send out a newsletter once a month to keep you top of mind. That way when the user needs your product you're the first store they think of and you turn a user into a customer.

Warm Product Launches

Newsletters are also a fantastic way to keep people in the loop about what you're working on. If you let them know you're working on a new product one month, and the next month you describe what the product does, and in the last newsletter you officially launch it you'll have people who are already committed to buying it. The more you can educate your customers on the product the more time they have to understand exactly what the product does and if they need it or not.

Newletters Keep People Coming Back

If someone trusts you enough to buy your product you should keep in touch with them. Give the user the ability to signup for your newsletter at checkout so you can alert them about new products. If they're happy with their purchase they'll probably want to know about any other products you offer. Keep in contact with your customers because it's much easier to make a sale from a returning customer than from a new user.

A Newsletter Case Study

As with yesterdays blog post I don't want to just ramble on with my personal opinions. I want to show you that these methods actually work and I want to show you with someone who's made a lot of money with newsletter marketing. Nathan Barry has sold over $350,000 of information products (ex. books) on GumRoad.

If you want to know how more about email courses you should signup for his. He has a fantastic email course about launching products the right way. It's totally free and if you learn something from Nathan (and start to trust him) you may end up buying one of his products. Case in point.

Happy newslettering!