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Email Marketing Tips For Business Owners

May 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Email Marketing For Small Business Owners

Who hasn’t been the victim of targeted email marketing, where someone has sold your email address and all of a sudden you’re the lucky recipient of things like “Try this little blue pill!” or “Use this credit card – you can’t live without it!”  As a small business owner, you certainly don’t want to fall into the same category as these unwanted messages do: that category is Spam!

On the other hand, you can run an effective email marketing campaign that your customers will enjoy.
Let’s take a look at what a good email marketing campaign is, and why it works so well for businesses of every size.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a method for telling customers or potential clients about a product, service, or combination of the two, that you have. It’s a way to give them insight about what is going on with your business, and it’s a great way to build a good working relationship with them.

This is particularly true if you have a consumable product or service.

The fact is, people have a lot on their minds, and they are constantly barraged with a whole host of messages from every direction.

Failing to communicate with your customers puts you at risk of being forgotten.

How Does Email Marketing Work?

While it is possible for a business owner to send out little reminders to a group of customers on a regular basis, doing it the old fashioned way is not the best use of your valuable time.

Here’s the best way to implement an email marketing campaign for your business:

1) Come up with a message, or set of messages.

You might run regular sales or service specials, or want to promote a lunch or dinner special for your restaurant on a regular basis.

2) Remember, talk to people like they’re your friends, because in the end, they are.

Customers can make or break your business, and you want them to love you. Make your message friendly.

3) Take advantage of an email autoresponder.

Load your email contacts into the autoresponder, and get your message to your customers.

Just like every other aspect of online marketing for small businesses, using email marketing and autoresponders  is something that requires a certain amount of finesse.  Get together with your online marketing specialist, and create a specialized email marketing plan that will work wonders for your business!

Email Marketing Services Solutions For Your Business.

 

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Email Marketing- The Importance Of List Building

March 8, 2011 By

Email Marketing – The Importance of Building an Email List

All successful internet entrepreneurs agree that your email list is king. Your email list is a database of important contact information that enables your business:

  • To keep in touch with your customers on a regular basis and allows you to generate direct sales without going through any third party or indirect methods.
  • To have more control over your customers and a level of independence from Google, Facebook or other internet companies that can change their rules at any time. Should your accounts or websites get slapped with a ban, you still have your list.
  • To serve a much larger number of customers than could possibly fit in your brick and mortar store.

You will have two sets of clients: online customers whom you ship products to or service online and offline customers who walk in through your front door. If you had an email list of 5000, there is no way 5000 people would fit in your tutoring class or hardware store, but you can tutor the same crowd online through video casts and e-books or ship hardware supplies across the nation to them.

So how exactly do you build an email list?

The first step is to direct all your traffic from the different sources to a squeeze page also known as an opt-in form. A squeeze page is simply a one page website whose sole aim is to collect email addresses.

An opt-in form has the same function as an opt-in page but may appear embedded within your website page in a prominent area or may appear as a pop-up box which is simply a box that pops up in front of a web page although the web page can still be seen in the background.

Whichever design you decide to use, just understand that nothing else should be found on your squeeze page-no sales offers and additional article content.

Your traffic simply enters a first name and perhaps a last name and their email address. They shouldn’t be able to perform any other activity that would distract them from this exercise.

The question then becomes, how do you get people to give you their name and email address?

Normally people are naturally reluctant to just give you their email information, which is why your business needs to offer a free gift of value to entice people. This free gift should be so valuable such that your prospects will see it as a no-brainer to sign up.

Of course you need to mention this free gift giveaway in all your traffic generation sources to drive them to your squeeze page. A free gift initiates the relationship between your business and your customers. It can be in the form of a report, an e-book, a video or an audio file but it must be valuable or something that your customer would appreciate.

Information that solves people’s problems is a proven strategy that works in any niche.

By researching news articles, forums, blogs and popular website in your business niche, you will be able to gather a ton of information from the questions people ask and the comments they make. Use this research to create your free info-product gift.

You can also offer free physical product samples too and require prospects to not only give you their email address, but also their mailing address. This gives you a list of people who are more responsive to your business and you may want to target them more in your sales pitches and promotions compared to those who only provide an email address.

This free product gift should also be valuable to your customers and not just a way to get rid of expired or outdated stock.

Put your best foot forward and see what your business can truly afford.

Most prospects are willing to pay for shipping fees provided it’s worth it. Once you have collected emails and sent free gifts as you promised, you can now focus on monetizing the list by sending sales offers to your email list and also work to maintain your relationship with them through regular communication.

 

Additional Email Marketing Resources:

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Best Email Marketing Practices

February 15, 2011 By

Best Email Marketing Practices

If you consider the fact that the value of each email address in your customer list is worth $1 per month, you will quickly realize that your business must treat its list very carefully to realize its full potential. The common mistake is to focus on building a list and forget about maintaining it. It’s always easier and less expensive to keep a customer than to acquire a new one. Here are a few of the best email marketing practices to keep in mind as you market to your email list.

Treat Your Email Marketing Subscribers With Respect

Remember that your list is human. It consists of moms, dads, policemen, lawyers, plumbers, office workers, typists, students and business people to name just a few. As you keep that in mind, always address them as if you were standing at their front door or seated in their office. Proper social manners and plain decency will reap your business loyalty and mutual respect from them.

Communicate With Your Email Marketing List Subscribers Regularly

Just because you gave your list a free gift and made killer sales after that doesn’t mean you should just dump them and only resurface when you have another product to sell. People don’t like to feel used and cheated. If your list only feels that they are a money-making machine for your business, they will drop you like a hot potato and unsubscribe faster than you can sign more up. Communicate regularly like once or twice a month but definitely not daily and when you do, just talk to them. Don’t use each and every email to try and sell something. Instead focus on becoming friends with them.

Encourage Your Email Marketing List Members To Communicate With You Too

It’s really irritating and boring to be in a conversation with someone who does all the talking and doesn’t let you get in a word edgewise! Let your list also get a chance to talk back to you. Ask them questions, open discussion on a topic, have a contest- anything that will give them a sense of ownership and importance in the relationship.
Giving your list a voice provides feedback information that benefits your business because they will tell you exactly what they are thinking and what they want- that’s free market research information right there.

Take Advantage Of Email Marketing To Position Yourself As The Expert

The advantage you have as a local business owner is that more often than not, you are also a specialist in your business field and being in the online world, people respect and listen more to experts because of the large amount of junk information available in cyberspace. Leverage your specialist knowledge by becoming the person people go to for advice and help because you know what you’re talking about. Selling will become much easier for you because people will trust whatever you honestly recommend to them.

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More Information About Email Marketing

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When it comes to email marketing, most brands know about the best practices: cull the list, email only according to the Welcome Letter, engage through rich, sharable content. But some emailers are still missing the ‘rich’ part of the equation. In email [Read more...]

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