Boosting Your Online Mailing List
One of the most powerful ways to build a successful online business is by creating relationships with your visitors so they can begin to trust you and feel comfortable ordering from you. One way of building these relationships is by having a mailing list so you can keep in contact with your subscribers. This helps form a bond and will start to build that foundation of trust and credibility.
Sending out weekly online newsletters or mailings is a great way to solidify the trust relationship. But who do you send it to? Taking the time and effort to build a responsive email list is not easy but it certainly can be done.
The ten tips below will help you get started building that all important list of names and email addresses.
Marketing to Current Customers Over Email
Email marketing has been a tremendous leap forward for business owners, providing a means by which existing customers and potential customers can be contacted on a wholesale level. Allowing tracking and measuring of responses, email marketing has made it possible to market to the same prospects time and time again for no marginal cost. It also helps to increase the chances of converting brand new prospects and maximizing the efficiency of your lead generation spend. No matter what your line of business is, email marketing can be a great tool in helping to boost your marketing efficiency and helping to retain existing customers within your sales funnel.
One of the biggest expenses any business has is driving leads. Leads are the lifeblood of any business – without them, there are no sales, and without sales, there is no money. Finding a new customer is an expensive thing to do, and there’s never any guarantee that you’re going to find new business. Existing customers are cheap leads because you’ve already paid to acquire them. The second time you sell to an existing customer, you’re halving your acquisition cost and improving your profit margins on every subsequent sale. And there’s no easier or more cost-effective way to do that than by email marketing.
Challenges of Email Marketing for Small Businesses
According to a survey, conducted by Hurwitz & Associates for Ontario-based email marketing service provider Campaigner (a solution of Software-as-a-Service communication services and solutions company Protus), almost half of North American small businesses use email marketing today.
Campaigner’s “State of Small Business Online Marketing Survey” found that 46% of small businesses surveyed rely on email marketing to help them find new customers, keep existing ones and grow their businesses. Hurwitz & Associates gathered responses from 259 North American businesses with 1 to 20 employees.
Furthermore the report reveals that 36% of the surveyed small businesses plan to start using email marketing in the coming year.
Improving Your Email Newsletter
The Internet has transformed the way we do business, opening new channels of communication and introducing far more direct ways of marketing to customers. One aspect of online marketing that is frequently underused is email marketing and one critical element that is often overlooked is the actual content of the email. So how can you get more from your newsletter copywriting?
Here are some tips:
1. Avoid the delete button. 90% of the millions of emails sent every day are spam. Your email newsletters can only be judged as successful if your customers actually read them. An effective subject line is the first point of contact – if that doesn’t have the power to engage and interest, your carefully crafted newsletter will end up in the recycling folder.You are already talking to an audience you know are interested in your products. So the door is already open. If your customer has signed up to your newsletter, then they’ve already expressed an interest. It’s now your job (or that of your copywriter) to keep that interest by constructing a newsletter that interests, entertains and, most importantly, informs.
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Email Marketing Tips
An email inbox is a very noisy environment, with calendars, notes and folders all competing with the actual emails for space. Given that a reader may only ever see your subject line before deciding whether to read your email, you can’t afford to waste time. Make sure that your emails show right away why they are worth reading. Consider starting with a succinct table of contents to help decide whether they should read on.
