A Detailed Guide to Small Business Email Marketing
Let me ask you a question – what do you think is the best direct marketing solution for your small business?
Is it direct mail?
Is it telemarketing?
Is it door to door marketing?
Is it email marketing?
Which one is it? If your answer was email marketing, pat yourself on the back. It is the right answer. If your answer was something else, you have got it wrong. Let me tell you why.
If you run a small business, your ultimate goal should be simple – to get a lot of new customers and clients, to retain existing customers, and to improve your business considerably. You should find the most effective way to do it and broaden the scope of your business slowly but surely.
The most effective way to get new clients and customers to your small business, like I already mentioned above, is email marketing. Why is small business email marketing considered the best way of direct marketing? Let us take a look.
The Internet has become an incredibly powerful medium and every day more of your potential and existing customers are using it to a greater and greater degree. At any given point of time, hundreds of millions of people access the Internet for various reasons – some of them are only 30 miles from you but who would never ever have known of your existence without the Internet.
If you have a strong online presence, the scope of your business will be increased beyond your wildest imagination – if all you do is connect with the people just outside where you are and just a little farther than they traditionally look for the products and services you offer.
When this wider audience you are now attracting – using bot online and traditional advertising and promotion – your number one objective is to capture then while they are there. They will never be back. You have one shot!
A business owner told me recently that his company’s web site gets 1,000 unique (for the first time) visitors a month. He does nothing other than offer a few articles and free tools – and gets 3% of them to opt in to his list.
If he had an actual strategy in place – because the visitors are 100% organic, there because the search engines sent them based on their inquiry, he could have as much as 15% growth in his database of prospects each month.
With the help of a 21st Century direct marketing solution, you can reach an unbelievably large number of people very easily. Let us now take a look at some of the most important things you should keep in mind about email marketing.
1. The newsletter you send out should be really attractive. It should contain the right mixture of images and content. But make sure you don’t overdo the images. If you do, it will take a lot of time for the pages to get loaded.
2. Small business email marketing should always be done on an opt-in basis. You send emails only to people who have opted to receive emails from you. Never ever send promotional emails to people without their explicit permission. This will create a very bad image for your business.
3. The sales copy is the most important thing about a newsletter. The copy should be interesting, intriguing, and compelling. After reading the copy, the reader should definitely take some action – call you, email you back, or check out your web site.
4. One of the most important reasons why email marketing is considered the best direct marketing solution for small businesses is that it is very simple, yet very effective. When you send out a newsletter to people, you usually include a link to your web site. Now, after reading the newsletter, if someone wants to know more about you and your business, all he needs to do is click on the link. It will take him to your web site and he can get a lot of information. In other words, it requires an extremely small effort from the customer – just a click of the mouse will do. So, response rates are usually high.
5. Sending emails to people is a nice way to remind them about the latest news from your side. You can also send promotional offers, discount coupons, service credits, and other such things to entice customers.
As you can see, running a small business email marketing campaign is really easy once you understand the process completely.
So, get started today and get the best results.
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