Consider email marketing
If you plan to do some online marketing to promote your business endeavors, you should seriously consider email marketing as at least one tier of your Internet marketing campaign. Many business owners shy away from email marketing because they believe all email marketing campaigns are purely spam. However, this is not true and not partaking in this type of marketing can cause your business to lose out on a great deal of business. By not appealing to potential customers via email, your business may lose a great deal of business to competitors who are using email marketing campaigns to reach customers around the world. However, the first step of an email marketing campaign should be creating an email distribution list. This post will discuss some popular options for doing this and should help you to learn more about what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to email marketing.
Creating an email list Once you have made the decision to start using email marketing to promote your business you are likely facing the dilemma of compiling an email distribution list. This is essentially a list of email addresses to which you will email your advertising and promotional materials. One common way to gain a list of email addresses is to purchase a list from distributors. However, this method is not very effective at all and we do not recommend it. The problem generally with purchasing an email list is that you have no way of knowing whether or not the members of the list would have any interest at all in your products or services. This is very important because while you want to reach a large audience with your email marketing you also want this audience to be members of your overall target audience. When you purchase an email list you may be sending your email messages to some users who might be interested but this is largely coincidental and is not likely to be well received because the message was not solicited.
Internet users are very quick to delete materials they believe to be spam without even opening or reading the emails. In fact some Internet service providers include spam filters which may automatically delete your emails if your messages are deemed to be spam. These filters run complex algorithms on the subject heading and content of the message to determine whether or not it is spam and are quite adept at weeding out spam. Therefore you run the risk of having your email marketing effort turn out to be a complete waste if the majority of recipients never even read or receive the message.
Opt-in form
A far better way to create an email distribution list for your email marketing campaign is to ask current customers as well as interested potential customers to register with your website to receive additional information and periodic updates about your products and services as well as other information which might be of interest to them. This can both be done via an online opt-in form on your website or off-line when somebody visits your store and you ask to fill in their credentials or by giving out personalized loyalty cards. This provides you with a database of email addresses from current customers as well as potential customers who have a genuine interest in your products and services and who are interested in learning more about these products and services. Newsletter Once you have a list of interested customers or potential customers you can send emails or create a newsletter for distribution to the members of your email list. (Let me side track for a moment here: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER ask your client if they would like to subscribe to get your newsletter as people are bored to dead with these spammy mails they get everyday in their inbox. Better is to ask them to send additional info on a specific interest of them or a free report. In online marketing terms this is called a lead magnet.) These documents should contain a wealth of valuable information as well as a soft sell pitch for your products and services. This information will be valued by the readers and may help to persuade them to try your products and services. The main purpose here is that you are showing your genuine expertise and adjacent portfolio to cater their needs.
You might also want to include useful links to either your website as well as other websites which may be of interest to your readers. Ideally your content should also contain a portion which urges the reader to take a specific action such as making a purchase or at least investigating a product further. Try to include an incentive for acting now. This is called “a call to action”
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Filip De Pessemier