Many decades ago, marketing was far more low-key and low-tech, taking the form of posters, newspaper advertisements, and the occasional hawker on the street corner. Yesterday’s print ad has been largely replaced by the less expensive and more effective email. Email has become the tool of choice for a huge array of businesses, offering them the ability to target customers and potential customers who are most likely to respond, at a fraction of the cost required by print media.
A company-specific newsletter offers you the ability to reach a huge audience of customers instantly. Best of all, it’s an audience that is genuinely interested in what you have to say! That’s why email marketing is one of the smartest approaches to getting your goods or services on the radar of those who really want and use them.
Rather than investing a huge amount of time and expense in a direct mail advertisement (which will take a few days to arrive and probably get lost in a pile of mail anyway), why not develop an email newsletter? An email newsletter is a great forum to provide information about your business in a simple and eye-catching way. It can also drive traffic to your company’s website, as it will contain links and direct your readers to investigate the latest happenings in your business on the site. Another benefit of an email newsletter is that it offers the opportunity to reward your best customers (or tempt potential customers) with special deals and coupons not available to the general public.
So how do you get your email newsletter into the inboxes of the most promising prospects? You’ve got to have email addresses, and lots of them. There’s no magic to this gathering process, but it of course it must be conducted legitimately. Using someone’s email address without permission will do nothing to help your business, and may even hurt it.
Creating a newsletter subscription list takes time and a lot of effort, but it will be repaid handsomely in the form of repeat business. Your own website is ground zero for this effort. Place a newsletter subscription form in a prominent area of your website, near the top or in the navigation bar. Tempt your customers to subscribe by offering exclusive information about your product or services in the newsletter, as well as the all-important special deal and/or coupon. Change the offers as often as needed, noting which offers result in the most subscriptions.
Another location to collect addresses for your newsletter is also found on your website. Upon checkout in your store, offer the customer the option to receive updates and special offers from your business in the form of a newsletter subscription. You’ve already gotten the customer to your site and made the sale…why not keep that relationship going? Get permission to keep them up-to-date on what already interests them, and you’ve got future customers waiting in the wings.
Finally, trade shows and other industry-specific events offer another hot spot for gathering emails for a newsletter subscription list.
Using all of these techniques will maximize your email marketing campaign, ultimately landing dollars in your pocket in the form of saved expenses and increased business.
Written by Mark Bove’
