The mission of this blog, started by the Founders of www.helpamericaspeople.com, is to raise awareness of the most cost-effective marketing tool for Small Business owners like you   >>>  EMAIL MARKETING

Why Email Marketing?

Few will disagree that the internet has taken its place among the greatest communications inventions in the history of the world:  the printing press, the telegraph,the telephone and television. the internet has leveled the business playing field.  Building a communications network in your home or small business office is now very affordable.  User-friendly, low-cost hardware and software are abundant.  With a well-thought out marketing strategy and nearly flawless execution, you can compete with the big guys. 

There are many types of online marketing — search engine marketing, link building, banner advertising, search engine optimization, social media marketing and affiliate marketing.  This blog is dedicated to what we believe is the most cost-effective type of online marketing:  Email Marketing. As a marketing communications tool, email marketing gives you the most bang for your marketing buck.

With email marketing, you can stay in touch with your customers and prospects at a very low cost — providing them with relevant and interesting articles, white papers, how-to advice, tips, informational newsletters, along with special offers/coupons.  Since your customers and prospects have either already done business with you or inquired about your product or service, they’re highly likely to open emails from you. 

Job#1:  Creating Your Email Marketing Plan

As an entrepreneur, you’re spending two of your most valuable assets: your time and money. You don’t want to squander them.  The best chance you have to be successful is to be rigorous about creating a written document that lays out your plan for success and continued growth — your business plan.  If you need help developing your business plan, visit the Small Business Association at www.sba.gov.

One of the single most important sections in a Business Plan is the Marketing Plan.  In the Marketing Plan you will set objectives, strategies and tactics for each media vehicle you will use to build awareness of your business and ultimately sell your product (s) and service (s).  Media vehicles may include newspapers, magazines, trade publications, television, radio, billboards, signage, direct mail, public relations…and more.

This blog will stay narrowly focused on using Email Marketing to achieve your business ojectives.

Components of Your E-Mail Marketing Plan:

1.  Set Your Objectives

2.  Analyze the Situation

     -Industry trends

     -Competition

     -Target Audience

3.  Develop Strategies to Achieve Objectives

       >>>Remember, CONTENT is king on the internet!!!

4.  Create & Maintain an Email Marketing Calendar

5.  Execute the Plan (Tactics)

6.  Track & Measure Everything You Do

7.  Analyze Results, Make Adjustments to the Strategy

Setting Your Business Objectives

Your business objectives should cover a minimum of one year.  Don’t go through the exercise of writing your plan then put it in your desk drawer.  Review it every month and tweak it, if necessary.

Email marketing can help you achieve any or all of the following types of business goals:

• Increase your onsite (storefront) sales
• Generate more qualified leads
• Gain registrants for your online seminars
• Generate subscribers to your enewsletter
• Increase direct sales from your website
• Drive more traffic to your website
• Keep your business on the mind of your customers and prospects
• Sell more to existing customers
• Turn prospects into customers

Some of these objectives may be relevant to your business, others may not.  No one knows your business objectives better than you.  Instead of storing them in your head, write them down in your plan.  Be sure to make your goals both qualitative and quantitative, i.e., generate an additional 10 qualified leads each week; increase newsletter subscribers by 25% this year, add a part-time Marketing Assistant on staff by July 1.

Next Post:  Analyzing the Situation

 

 

The mission of this blog, started by the Founders of www.helpamericaspeople.com, is to raise awareness of the most cost-effective marketing tool for Small Business owners like you   >>>  EMAIL MARKETING

To effectively launch an email marketing campaign, the two most important and immediate activities for you are to:

1)  Build and maintain a database of your clients/customers and prospects

2)  Develop your email marketing plan to include:  Your Marketing Objectives, the Strategies you plan to implement to achieve your marketing objectives and an Email Marketing Calendar to include the details of at least three months worth of email campaigns.

The most critical factor is the LIST and you should start working on it immediately.

Perhaps you’re ahead of the game and already have a list of your clients/customers and prospects in an excel worksheet or a contact database like ACT.   If not, use Excel to create your database.  If you don’t have the Microsoft Office Suite installed on your computer system, which includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint, you can purchase the Microsoft Office Student Edition for about $150.00 (probably less online).  To learn how to create a database in Excel, click here http://spreadsheets.about.com/od/datamanagementinexcel/ss/080608_database.htm

If you haven’t been collecting email addresses from your clients/customers and prospects, start now! If you have long-standing customers/clients, you may want to call them and ask for their email address.  Tell them you’ll be communicating with them via email to update them on useful tips and relevant information along with special offers and promotions.  Assure them they won’t be receiving daily emails from you.  (Best frequency is twice a month, but it’s important to test optimal frequency, as each business differs.) 

After you call your best customers, also send an inexpensive postcard mailing to the rest of the list.  Keep the message short.  Ask them to call you with their email address.  Offer them a gift like an article that will interest them or a special discount on their next purchase of your product or service.  For a full-service, cost-effective vendor to send out your postcard mailing, check out www.vistaprint.com.  (If you or a friend is reasonably computer literate and you own a printer, you can buy postcard stock at Staples, and using Microsoft Office, you can do the mailing yourself.  And, remember, postcard postage stamps cost considerably less than first class stamps.)

A “clean list” (correct email addresses, elimination of duplicates, etc.) is the first step in developing and maintaining an ongoing dialogue with your customers and prospects.  How important is communicating with your clients/customers and prospects?  It’s the single most important and cost-effective marketing activity you’ll ever implement.  Research has shown that it costs about 5 times as much to acquire a new customer as selling to an existing client/customer. 

List segmentation is a vital component of your list.  What is list segmentation? It’s breaking down your list into smaller segments — with each segment sharing similar characteristics.  First and foremost, your list should be segmented into customers and prospects because your messages and offers will invariably be different to each of these audiences.

Businesses differ and the appropriate list segments for each businesses’ customer and prospect database will differ as well.  If you’re dealing with consumers, perhaps it’s important for you to segment your list by gender, zip code and transactional data, i.e., amount spent, recency of purchase, frequency of purchase, etc.  If you’re dealing with businesses, you may want to segment your list by industry, size of company by revenue, size of company by employees, years in business, location of headquarters, etc. 

Time spent on keeping each record in your database updated and information-rich is time well be spent.  Know your target audience — their needs, wants and problems. Maintain an ongoing relationship with them by communicating on a regular basis.  In that way, you are able to provide a solution to their problem — your product or service.

In this highly competitive marketplace, you need to have a high level of visibility and frequent contact with your clients/customers and prospects .  AND the most cost-effective way to stay in touch is via a well-planned, targeted email marketing campaign.

Next Post:  Writing your e-mail marketing plan.

The mission of this blog, started by the Founders of www.helpamericaspeople.com, is to raise awareness of the most cost-effective marketing tool for Small Business owners like you   >>>  EMAIL MARKETING

Email is a proven marketing channel that lets you stay connected to your current customers, past customers and prospects – at a very affordable cost and Return On Investment. It’s vitally important to your business success to build and maintain an ongoing relationship with your customers and prospects.  Why?  Because if you don’t, your competitors will.

 If you’re not using Permission-Based Email Marketing to promote your business, whether you’re selling a product or service, you’re not taking full advantage of the technological tools that have leveled the competitive playing field among businesses – large and small –over the past decade. 

 Getting started with email marketing begins with a database.  That’s a fancy name for a list of your customers and prospects.  If you haven’t already, you should be building a profile of each customer. (Did you know that research shows that it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer vs. selling to an existing customer?) 

A customer profile consists of all the information you’ve been able to obtain from each customer, such as postal mailing address, gender, email address and transaction information.  To become an ethical email marketer, you must ask each and every customer for PERMISSION to send informational and promotional emails to their email address.  (Beginning in 2003 with the CAN-SPAM ACT, as an email marketer you must ask permission from your customers and prospects to send them emails; otherwise you’re considered a SPAMMER.)

If some of your customers or prospects don’t want to give you their email address, that’s fine.  Most of your customers and prospects will be happy to hear from you, just as long as your emails are relevant and interesting to them. And, don’t send them an email every day!! (If you already have email addresses for some of your customers and prospects, it’s not necessary to ask for their permission again.) 

To keep costs low, you can use Microsoft Excel to build, maintain and store customers’ and prospects’ information in your database.

 If you need a little more convincing to get on the email bandwagon, here’s an impressive finding:  82% of marketers surveyed chose email marketing as the most important advertising media they planned to use in 2008. Source: Datran Media, 2008.

 If you have any questions about email marketing, type a comment in the box below We’ll get back to you very soon.

 Next Post: Friday, February 12, 2010

Topic:  The importance of your customer and prospect list