ATTN: SMALL BIZ OWNERS. Email Marketing

Is Low Cost, Targeted, Measurable, Effective.

EMarketing 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

Since February 2, 2010 this blog has been extolling the virtues of email marketing for small  businesses, especially those with five or fewer employees.  There is simply no more high impact, low cost, online  marketing tool available.  If you’re still not convinced, check out the next few  blogs that will discuss how a monthly  email newsletter from your company can –

• turn your prospects (leads) into customers
• turn current customers into repeat buyers
• reactivate past customers
• drive traffic to your website
• build and maintain loyalty with your customers
• stay “top of mind” with your target audience

Thanks to the internet, as a small business owner you can now “play with the big guys.”  In fact, you hold the advantage because no large company, no matter how high their customer service standards are, can ever compete with the “up close and personal” relationships a small business can establish with its customers.  And, Permission-Based E-mail Marketing has now made it possible for small business owners like you to communicate daily, weekly or monthly with customers and prospects at ridicuously affordable prices.

If you’ve researched  or tested other online marketing methods, you know the costs can add up pretty quickly.  These methods include search engine marketing (Pay-per-Click), e-newsletter sponsorship, renting an opt-in list for an email campaign and purchasing banner ads.

As discussed in previous blogs, the most critical step in launching email marketing campaigns is the first step:  Your House List (your customers and prospects).  Without an updated list of customers and prospects ,who have given you permission to send them information and offers via email, you’re like an automobile without an engine.  You are going nowhere. (Note:  I’m strongly recommending that you start out by emailing  exclusively to your house list; later you may want to conduct a test by renting an opt-in list.)

Small businesses generally have small house lists.  Depending on how long you’ve been in business, you could have anywhere from 25 to 500 records on your house list.  If you haven’t already, enter these customers and prospects into an Excel spreadsheet with as many fields  of information you have, i.e., first name, last name, phone number, business name, products or services purchased and date of purchase, amount of purchase, etc.

Most importantly, do you have the email addresses of your customers and prospects?  If you have their business card and it includes an email address that is considered implicit permission to send them emails.  Just be sure to obey the law and include an Unsubscribe option in ALL  you email communications to your house list.   If you don’t have your customers’ email address, it’s also appropriate to call your customers and let them know you’re launching an email newsletter with valuable information and promotional offers and would they like to subscribe to the free enewsletter.

VERY IMPORTANT: Be prepared to maintain and manage your house list on a regular basis — no less than once a week.  That means you must honor unsubscribes and remove them from your house list as soon as possible.  Also, update customer and prospect profile information on a timely basis, such as physical address, phone number, email address, etc.

Once you have a plan for building and maintaining a clean house list, you’ll need to focus on steps two, three and four of launching your monthly e-newsletter:  Content, Format & Layout and Deployment of your e-newsletter to your house list.

Next post:  E-newsletter Content

Suggested reading: