ATTN: SMALL BIZ OWNERS. Email Marketing

Is Low Cost, Targeted, Measurable, Effective.

E-Marketing blog: http://helpamericaspeople.com/EWP/

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