Even more so in the current climate, many businesses are moving away from the traditional marketing methods and they are beginning to try the internet and it's technologies. Email is the best way to get to customers and clients and maintain a relationship with them with little work involoved. Almost all of the large global and blue chip companies have started their own Email Marketing Departments to cater for this aspect of their sales and marketing. Call centres are being started just to handle the online marketing aspects of some companies.
With this being said, there is no better time to start your own Email Marketing than right now, if you operate online or offline, this is the best way to create and maintain a relationship with your potential clients for when they make the purchasing decision.
Follow these five steps and you'll be an inch away from getting started.
1. Setup a database program to hold the details of all your prospects, or purchase off the shelf software to help you do this. Although Outlook can create a list of email addresses that you can send out to, we want to make this process as easy as possible, so you might be better of using a service such as Aweber (monthly charge), or even purchasing a copy of Interspire Email Marketing (one off charge - similar benefits). Aweber and Interspire have the ability to create Webforms for your website, so you just copy and paste the code into your webpage to help you build that all important list.
2. Design a seven series autoresponder (advertising campaign) with good content that will capture your prospects attention, and market your product well.
3. Make sure that the recipients of your emails get the right ones. Some people get frustrated when they receive irrelevant marketing maerials. Aweber and Interspire can help you to segregate your lists so that when you press the send button, you are sure that they are relevant to the person who it is sent to.
4. You need to be able to deal with bounced emails, and make sure that you remain SPAM-LAW compliant. Rather than sending a bunch of unsolicited emails from Outlook, this is where the off the shelf packages are worth their weight in gold, to make sure that your ISP doesn't ban you.
5. It's much more important that you follow up well online than with traditional marketing methods, the general rule of thumb online is that it takes seven points of contact before someone is ready to purchase from you.
The steps above seem rather straight forward, the most difficult part is in implementing them. If you don't implement your ideas, or get that special offer out to your customers and prospects somehow, your ideas will remain ideas, and you won't be able to profit from them. If you can't implement the advice above then I strongly suggest that you outsource this to a freelance professional so that they can do the heavy lifting for you.
It's important to make sure you maintain a good channel of communication between you and your potential and current customers. Alot of them will want a variety of new ideas and products; explore this, and don't be araid to try something uncoventional during your email marketing campaign.
