There was a time when only 5% of business transactions were done on the web, now fast forward ten years to today and almost all business transactions are done online. For a small business owner this is a big change from ten, fifteen years ago. The new market place is intangible and requires you to engage your customers in the online world. The marketing techniques of the past had to be transformed to apply to the internet. Luckily for you, I’ll show you the top five email marketing techniques that you can easily and quickly put to work on your own small business website. Remember before you could market face to face to customers but now you need to reach those customers via other venues like e-mail marketing and be able to sell your products and services via the web.
Using email marketing is the best way to reach the customers that already know you and/or have shown an interest in your products/services. The best way to reach these potential customers is via email and that’s what is called e-mail marketing – you market your products and services through emails. So your best bet is to put together a list of emails and market to them on a daily basis. Now most people don’t feel comfortable giving away their email addresses because they know that they are probably going to be spammed and no one likes this. So there is a way to do it legally and to make your customers feel at ease. This brings me to the first effective way to E-mail Market:
1. Give them something for free in return for their email – You can write a report, white paper or even a short e-book. Fill it with good useful information that your customers can appreciate and implement. Clearly state that they can download this free product but in return they need to register and give their email address. But when asking for their email address make it very clear in your text that you will only use this for information purposes and that their email addresses will not be shared with any other third parties. Finally, make sure that the people who register receive an initial email welcoming them to your site and services and that they can easily download whatever free product you promised when registering.
2. Follow up with them – Now that they have registered with your site and provided their email address you need to follow up with them. First, send them a thank you email for their registration. A week later send another follow-up email asking them if they have any questions or would like any information. About two weeks later, send them another email with an interesting article and tips that they can start using right away. A month later send another email with news about a new product or service your company is offering. At the month mark, also introduce your email subscribers to the exciting new e-zine or newsletter that you will be sending them for free every month.
3. Offer a free e-zine or newsletter – When offering a free e-zine or online newsletter, you need to make sure you offer useful information so that your subscribers stay excited about your business and in return they can stay interested in the products/services that you offer. When designing your e-zine, ensure it has a good greeting section that is personal. Keep the tone conversational as if you were talking to your customers. Things you can include in your e-zine are articles, customers’ profiles, book reviews, industry tips, interviews, guest columnists, industry statistics and information, and you could also include a Q&A section. Finally you want to include a section about your products and services, when talking about this product or service you need to tell them how it relates to solving a problem or how it might benefit them, and also it should be related to whatever content you included in that issue’s e-zine. You should send your subscribers the free e-zine or online newsletter once a month.
4. Pay attention to the look and feel of your Email communication – Make sure that all the email communication is pleasing to the eye and it is easy to read. You don’t want your potential customer to be turned off by an ugly landing page and by content that does not make sense. Because they will stop reading right away. And you will be throwing away a potential paying customer. So it is super important that you think about the design of the emails, landing pages, free documents, and free newsletter – they have to look nice, uncluttered and inviting. You may have to consider the color scheme that you use, for example, blue and white are calming and relaxing colors and orange is alive and hyper. Finally, the writing tone is important, don’t write industry jargon and avoid being wordy – write in a conversational tone and be brief and to the point.
5. Market, Market, Market – Now that you have a good email database and you know how to use it, don’t forget to actually use it. The whole point of building this database of emails is to market your products and services to these people. Remember that most of your online sales, profits and leads will come from this email marketing database. You can also determine at this point if segmentation is right for you. This means that after building this big list of potential customers, you can go ahead and break the email list into more specific groups of potential customers. People are different and not all of them will be interested in all your products and services, so when you ask them to register try to obtain more specific information about their interests for the products or services. Then, you can use this information to break your email database into specific groups that you can target with specific products or services that they would be interested in.
I hope these five strategies will help you get the most of your email marketing. Remember the important thing is what you do with the emails you collect, so put them to work for you!
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