Small business marketing via e-mail
Written by PLRMan on May 24, 2009 – 12:06 am -E-mail newsletter and drip marketing needs play a major role in a company’s marketing strategies. If you’re not using e-mail for marketing your business, you’re simply not taking adequate advantage of the online medium to position your company as an expert.
Most business marketing strategies deal primarily with customer acquisition. Customer acquisition is not cheap, though, which means a smart marketer will work hard to develop repeat business from an existing client base. While SEO and PPC advertising is a great tool to find new leads, permission-based bulk email software, when used responsibly and ethically, excels at:
- Converting them to sales
- Solidifying a relationship that will produce repeat sales
Some modern email marketing techniques are:
- Autoresponders (Drip Email Marketing)
- Newsletters (Broadcast Email Marketing)
- RSS Feed Updates (blog update subscriptions, etc.)
Auto-responders
E-mail drip campaigns are a great tool to keep in your email marketing toolkit. If you have never set up an autoresponder campaign (drip series), you should do so ASAP. It is one marketing tool that you can truly “set it and forget it.”
The downfall of any marketing technique is if it requires too much human involvement in order to work. Ideally, you want to design a marketing system that almost completely runs itself. With a drip campaign autoresponse system, you can do exactly that. Here’s how it can work:
- A user signs up on your website (or you add them after a phone conversation)
- They instantly get an email with a free report or instant download of some sort. For real estate agents, it could be something like “How to short sell your home and avoid foreclosure.” You want to create a helpful resources that readers will want to enough that they will be willing to sign up to receive it by email.
- They will get a followup e-mail – automatically – an hour later, a day later, or a week later. You can even refer to “the email I sent last week” because your drip system automatically schedules the delivery of each message in the sequence.
- You can send more followup e-mails automatically at key time periods that you choose. You can say “A month ago, I emailed you a free guide entitled….”
Broadcast Email Marketing
Broadcast emails are distinguished from drip campaigns because they are sent as a broadcast message to the entire list at the same time. Email newsletter marketing is a great way to establish your credentials as a knowledgeable expert in your field, or simply send out product announcements and press releases. You decide what goes in the broadcast newsletter. The trick is to make it fit the needs of your readers as much as possible.
An email newsletter marketing system should allow for email scheduling as well. With this feature, you can write announcements in advance and have them repeat annually, such as “It’s December 1st, have you done your Christmas shopping yet?”
RSS Email Updates
Subscriptions to RSS Feeds are a great way to market a blog. While popular browsers like Firefox make subscribing to a blog feed simple, a smart e-mail marketer knows that most people don’t read their bookmarked feeds - but people do read their emails. So if a subscriber is interested enough in your blog content to subscribe to your RSS feed by email, you are much more likely to keep her reading your blog than if she just bookmarked it in her web browser.
Tags: bulk, bulk email marketing, email Marketing, email newsletter marketing, optin email marketing, permission-based email marketing
Posted in email Marketing |
