Email Advertising Essentials
Email advertising is one of the most effective forms of advertising small businesses can engage in. A quick word of caution: although some big-name Internet Marketers have made fortunes using email advertising alone, in general it’s not good practice to put all your eggs in one basket.
Apart from anything else, it’s important to watch what these people do and not just listen to what they say they’re doing. They’re often doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes you’re not privy to.
Nevertheless, most small businesses don’t use email advertising anywhere near enough. Walk down almost any High Street in any town in Britain and ask people at random, “when was the last time you got an email from your hairdresser?”, and 9 times out of 10 you’ll get the answer, “never”.
In general you can quite comfortably email your customers, clients, and prospects, a couple of times a week without getting any problems or objections from them, if you go about it the right way. If you’re not sending out emails, or you’re sending them only sporadically, perhaps once a month or so, you are almost certainly leaving a lot of profits unclaimed.
So, here’s how to start:
First, start building your list. Marketing your business should always be your No. 1 priority anyway, so you should be building a list already! But if you’re not, put into place a procedure for collecting the name and email address of everyone who comes into contact with your business. Be sure to get their permission for you to send them email! The Holy Grail is to get their postal address and phone number, too, but for email advertising, just the email address and first name is fine. You can start this simply by getting some cards printed very cheaply and then just asking people for their details, with a promise of sending them special offers, etc. If you own a retail premises, you can perhaps have a “fishbowl” on the counter and offer a monthly prizes-draw. Just use your imagination.
Secondly, start your email advertising campaign to them! Put them into a pre-set sequence of emails that subtly promote your business. The trick to getting your emails accepted and responded to (in the form of increased sales!) is to make your emails personal, personable, interesting and informative. Be positive, warm, and friendly and don’t write something like you’d expect from a lawyer! Email advertising is hard to make too frequent, but it’s easy to make too boring!
Thirdly and finally, don’t give up! The process you’re getting into with your email advertising is one of building a relationship. That’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s not going to happen at all if you send nothing but “sales emails” asking people to buy stuff from you. Think of it more as a newsletter, but NOT one of these boring ones you may have seen. Write your email advertising as if you were writing to a friend or favourite aunt. If you’re a local business, it’s going to be really easy for you to write about local events and happenings and get that all-important relationship developing.
Have a look around the rest of this site and see some of the specific email advertising secrets and strategies you can use to increase your profits starting TODAY!
Happy Advertising!
Chris Cardell
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