Email Marketing. The key to success on the web is not just to gain traffic, but also to control that traffic. What does that mean? It means that you need to know how to decide which of your visitors you want to talk to at any time. It means that you need to understand your visitors and to know what they're thinking, what their moods are, and what they're interested in at any given time. And it means you need to know how and when to strike when it comes to selling products or encouraging people to sign up to your mailing list.

This is a theme we've seen come up time and again with machine learning and AI, and email marketing is no different. You can do all this by building a mailing list and then segmenting that list. First, let's go over the basics of email marketing. Again, for those that aren't familiar. Email Marketing is of course the process of marketing via email. In other words, this means you're going to be building a big list a collection of emails, and you'll do this by asking visitors to your site to share their contact details when they land on your homepage.

This in turn requires an autoresponder an autoresponder Wonder is a tool that you use to create email forms and then to manage all of the contacts on your list. You can use the form somewhere on your page to let people input their details and you'll use the autoresponder to actually send all your emails, it should be immediately apparent with the value of this is sending all your emails manually using Gmail or another web client is not easy and would likely result in many not getting delivered. You'd have to send lots of different emails for longer lists and you need to manually manage any requests to subscribe or unsubscribe, and autoresponder manages all of that for you. So you just need to write one email and then click Send. The other benefit of an autoresponder is that it can collect data for you and use that information to do a range of different things.

For example, an autoresponder can show you the percentage of subscribers who actually open your emails. If your email subject headings aren't successfully encouraging people to read, then you can identify this problem and work on a solution. Suddenly, we're using a data driven approach in machine learning again, you can then see all the visitors who did read it, give message in one place, or choose to see all the ones that didn't. You can see the open rate for different individual visitors and you organize your list by different factors. That's another handy thing about using an autoresponder it will allow you to grab more information using the form embedded on your page. And that information can then be used to group your visitors want to just message the men go for it, want to just message the people over 30 you can do that too.

Or how about having multiple different mailing lists for different brands or even for different products. All of this can be accomplished using just a single autoresponder. And of course, this kind of control and automation opens up all sorts of possibilities when it comes to AI and machine learning for marketers lead, warmth and email segmentation. The true power of all this information comes from being able to use that data in order to pick and choose who your message is go to. For instance, you can decide that you want to send an email only to people who fall into particular categories. What we're interested in to begin with is sending emails based on engagement.

Retention and lead warmth. A lead Has anyone who has shown some kind of interest in buying from you. That means that anyone who has signed up to your mailing list can be considered a lead, because they have demonstrated interest simply by doing this. But at the same time, a lead is also anyone who visits your site, or who takes your card. This is a cold lead, whereas someone who actually gives you their contact details is a warm lead. Leads get warmer, the more interest they show in what you do in what you're selling.

And the warmer lead is, the more likely they are to buy from you. In fact, this is the true and most useful purpose of having a mailing list to begin with, and allows you to take your ice cold leads and turn them into warm leads and then paying customers. I always liken this to asking for someone's phone number. If you were just to walk up to someone in the club and ask for their number, they'd likely just tell you to go away. Why would they give you their number when they know nothing about you and haven't showed no interest in you? First you need to chat to them and let them get to know you.

If they look at you and smile. They're a cold lead. If they respond to your witty banter Until you their name, they're a warm lead. If they've kissed you or let you buy them a drink, they're a hot lead. And once they're hot, you can ask for their number. This is all about timing, time this wrong, and they're not going to give you their number because you haven't laid the groundwork.

The exact same thing is true with internet marketing. If someone visits your site and you tell them right away to buy your product, they won't. Why would they? You haven't given them any reason to trust you. You haven't told them anything about you. They don't know much about the product.

Ask them to hand over their email after a few blog posts, though, and you can gently start to increase engagement. This is then when you Wow them with all your information and all your knowledge. you entertain them a little and you let them get to know you. If they don't open your emails, that's the equivalent of giving you the cold shoulder. That's like the girl or guy in the club that isn't laughing at your jokes and keeps looking away. If you try and sell to them now you become spam and you get deleted and they never returned to your website.

But if they open your emails, you know you're in with a shot. That means you can then send them some more information about your products and get them excited for your product launch. If during that they still keep opening your emails, then you know you've got an even better chance of success. If you now try and sell to them, there's a much better chance they'll buy from you. using email segmentation, you can do exactly that. You can see which of your visitors are actually opening your emails are actually clicking your links and are scrolling down to the bottom.

In fact, using cookies, it is even possible to see which of those visitors has been to your website and look at your products. You can see who has hovered on your products and been tempted to click by email segmentation combined with machine learning. If you've been paying close attention, then you might already have figured out where this is going. Remember when we discussed the big data, we said that you could use predictive analytics in order to better rate leads. This is where things could get really interesting for the autoresponders of the future. Imagine if your autoresponder not only segmented your audience and looked at the open rates and engagement but if it could look look for trends across huge data sets.

In other words, what if your autoresponder recorded every single person who bought from you and assess what actions they usually took first, this would allow that machine learning algorithm to better spot when a user is behaving like someone ready to buy, and to send them a message tailor to encourage that purchase. This could be combined with smart recommendations in order to improve their likelihood of buying even more. This is already being used by some big brands. So it's only a matter of time until more of us get access to the same amount of precision tips marketers can follow. Now, for any of that to work, you also need to make sure that people are signing up to your mailing list in the first place. Again, this will help us to prepare for the AI powered feature.

There are a few ways you can encourage this. Firstly, make sure that you show your mailing list wherever you can. At the very least, that should mean that your mailing list shown at the bottom of your post. At the same time though, you can also place this in the sidebar so that your list is visible on every page of your site. Another tip is to make sure that you draw attention to it. A mistake a lot of people make is to create their mailing list and then just hope that people see it.

Far more effective is to occasionally tell people about it and to explain in your posts why it's a good opportunity, and why people should be excited to sign up. Here's the thing though, you should always be honest, the aim of a mailing list is not to grow it as much as you possibly can. Instead, the aim is to grow it as much as you can with only highly targeted visitors. If your visitors have no interest in what you're offering through your list, then you will just frustrate them and effectively be spamming.