Email marketing has emerged as one of the most effective-cost and time wise-forms of business marketing. Not only is email marketing a low- or no-cost way to convert your prospects into customers, but it also provides instant gratification. Long gone are the days where you have to prepare a direct mail piece with the designer and the printer, address each piece and add the postage, wait for prospects to receive it, and then see what happens. Sometimes in less than ten minutes, you can prepare an email marketing piece, send it out to your entire list, and see an increase in website or telephone traffic right away.
Techniques
- Text-based emails. You always have the option to type up and send out a text-based email to your list. If your list is composed of businesses or individuals that tend to receive messages on a Blackberry or other smartphone, then this may be preferred over HTML emails that may be a difficult format to read on the go. The type of emails you may send could include a special announcement, a sale or discount offer, a link to a recent article or blog post you wrote, or read that may interest them, or a special tradeshow or event you will be attending.
- E-newsletters. Another common form of email marketing is the e-newsletter. Newsletters are great marketing tools because you are combining useful and relevant content or information with information about your business. Newsletters allow you to position yourself as an expert in your field, which is what you are, right? Rather than a hard sale approach, newsletters allow you to sell to your readers more softly. Again, you can easily build an attractive e-newsletter using low-cost online software such as Constant Contact, iContact, or Email Brain.
- Another great email marketing technique is offering email courses on a topic related to your business. An email course is used to provide information to the “student” that is indirectly related to a product or service you offer. Not only are email courses a great way to build your database, but they are also great ways to communicate with your clients. The topics for email courses are pretty much endless, but it should somehow be related to your industry. If you’d like to get see what an email course looks like, you can subscribe to a free email marketing course at. There are also thousands of other email courses online that are free too, so register for several email courses to see how various companies handle their email course programs.
Email marketing can be a very effective way to build your database, communicate with your subscribers, and convert your prospects into paying customers. Use one of these three ideas to start a marketing campaign for your business. There are also plenty of other email pieces you can use to convert leads into customers. Using email marketing regularly can help you to boost your business effectively and efficiently.
