Business is slow and you are looking at getting new customers into your business or organization, you start advertising here and there only to see no measurable results or at the very least seeing some results but not having any kind of tools to know id the results are from your advertising campaign.
In this multi-part series I will explore ways that Email Marketing can help your business not only grow but also give you some fantastic Measurable Results so that you can tweak and improve your Email Marketing Program.
Connect With Your Customer
So your looking for new customers, well so is everyone else, it is the constant mission of any organization, but what about the hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of customers that have already done business with you?
Ask yourself these questions:
- Do you stay in touch with them?
- Do you reward them for being good customers?
- Have you thought about them generating a group of new customers for you by their Word of Mouth? or Clicks of a Keyboard?
- Do you make it easy for them to do so?
- Do your customers like you enough to spread the word about your business?
If you answered no to any of the above it is time to look at creating an Email Campaign for your existing customers. With today's busy lifesyles, sometimes they need a reminder of the great experience they had or the fantastic information that they received from you or any number of events that may have left an impression. How are you going to remind them if you do not have a way of contacting them?
First and Most Important
"IF YOU ARE NOT COLLECTING CUSTOMER NAMES AND EMAIL ADDRESSES THEN START TODAY!"
This may be a signup sheet, or if you use software where you enter a customers name then make sure you get their email address. It doesn't matter how you do it, JUST DO IT! If you don't start now you are losing a fantastic future direct marketing opportunity.
The first question I am asked is: "Can I send emails to customers without their explicit permission, if I do is it spamming?" In short the answer is YES to Adding & NO It is Not Spamming! As long as you had direct contact with the person about your business they can be added to your email list as long as they do not explicitly say they do not want to be added as a contact.
Let's say you own an Inn and you have a guest or a potential guest, if they provide you an email address without explicitly requesting not to be put onto an email list then they can be added to your email list without you being considered spammer. On the other hand let's say you own a shop as well as an Inn, if a customer customer stopped in your shop and gave you an email address and name for your shops email list you could not add that customer's information to your Inn's email list that would be considered spamming.
Once you have your Email List together a product like Constant Contact provides you a way to upload your contacts.
With your contacts loaded the next step is put together your Email Campaign.
In Part 2 I will get into the details of an Email Campaign with the key being "FOCUS"!