Email Marketing

Email Marketing Image

Intro

Once you have started to collate a database of clients and potential clients it is time to start thinking about making regular contact with them.

Email is considered an acceptable form of communication and most people don't mind being emailed (some do, so ensure you do not SPAM people).

It is 15 times easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to sell to a new prospect, so with that in mind making the most of who you currently sell to makes sense. Regular contact with your clients is essential to building a relationship with your client and email marketing is a cheap way to do it.

Definition

Email Marketing is the term used for setting up a well laid out email template with interesting and informative information in it, thi sis to entice your clients and potential clients to take notice of your company and ultimately trust you enough to buy from you.

SPAM - is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages. - Wikipedia

You must have the persons permission to email them - the easiest way to do this is to phone them to explain what you are doing and get a verbal acceptance. You MUST place an unsubscribe link on every email campaign you send so people do not have to receive more than one email from you if they do not want to.

Benefits

Your clients and prospects get to see who you are, what you do and what you can offer them on a regular basis - its good brand exposure.

Pros

  • It's cheap
  • It's simple
  • It's effective
  • You can sell yourself as an expert in your field
  • You get your brand and business in the forefront of the recipients regularly.
  • You get to see useful statistical information about who open what and when
  • You can target your campaigns by industry, customer type - whatever as long as you separate your databases - its all possible.

Cons

  • It does cost to set up the system initially
  • It can cost per email you send
  • It might cost to host the database on the email server
  • It takes a few hours to set up an effective mailer
  • You do have to look at the stats to make it work for you

How to Implement this into your Business

There are a variety of email marketing tools available on the market. Some that we know about are:

Choose which company you want to use and sign up to their service. Then get them to set up a good looking template and you upload your database to the system and away you go.

The benefits of this is that you get to track who opens your emails, see what links they clicked on and generally see what worked in your last campaign so you can create targeted email campaigns from there on in. Its clever its easy and its cheap.

Tips

  • Do your homework - some services are more expensive than others, you pay for what you get.