Knitting fetishes, bone collecting and tornado chasing are just a few examples of the many weird niche topics out there. Despite their obscurity, these topics have a market comprised of people who dedicate themselves to the niche. There are people out there who share your passion for the odd hobby you have taken a liking to, but how do you connect and bring them together? Email marketing is the right tool for the job, and here is a simple three step plan that will enable you to use it effectively:

1. Define Your Goals

What objective are you trying to meet with email marketing? Regardless of what you have planned, defining the goals you want to accomplish is something that must be done before proceeding. This step is so important because it helps determine how you should move forward with your email marketing initiatives. For instance, if you are trying to boost your sales, you know you need to be attracting new prospects and enticing them with offers that compel them to buy. If you are merely looking to share important information your target market must know, it probably makes sense to reach out to the leaders and influencers in your niche to help get the word out. It sounds obvious, but you can’t accomplish anything without knowing what you want to accomplish.

2. Identify Your Audience

Who is the audience you are trying to reach with email marketing? Is it consumers, industry experts or other hobbyists? The audience isn’t important for now. What is important is knowing what that audience is looking for. In order to engage them, you must have the answers to questions such as:

  • What do they like?
  • What do they expect?
  • How much do they know about the topic at hand?
  • How often would they like to hear from me?

When you know your audience, you have the knowledge necessary to make it easy to focus on their needs, wants and preferences, as opposed to basing your strategy on what you think they want. It is all about targeting your efforts and getting the best possible response.

3. Grow Your Audience

After you have defined your goals and identified your audience, there is really only one thing left to do – grow your audience. In order to do this, you need to build up a list of email addresses and names from people who have given you the permission to contact them. The Benchmark Email signup box, which is available in our Free Edition, provides a convenient way to grow your audience by capturing new subscriptions and automatically adding them to your master list. If you can drive people to your website and give them a reason to subscribe, a good signup box will do the rest.

No matter how obscure your topic, email marketing can be extremely effective at connecting the people who care about it the most. By reading this post, you have learned that there is plenty that must be done before the actual marketing begins. Overlook these crucial steps and you may find it very difficult to have any success with your efforts.

For more tips on growing your email marketing audience, download our free PDF on Creating an Email Marketing Plan.