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Email Marketing is Still Hot for Small BusinessTip! Send Coupons Everyone loves coupons. Make them part of your direct email marketing campaign. 1faa
How do you communicate with your customers? We all know that there's getting to be more and more online activity. How much? According to the Pew Research Center: The proportion of Americans online on a typical day grew from 36% of the entire
adult population in January 2002 to 44% in December 2005. The number of adults
who said they logged on at least once a day from home rose from 27% of American
adults in January 2002 to 35% in late 2005. On top of that, Americans don't feel overloaded by the information they're getting
on the web. Pew Research stated: Just 15% said they sometimes felt overwhelmed by the amount of information they
had, while 71% said they had all the information they needed and thought it was
manageable, and 11% said they were missing information that they wish they had.
It makes me further think about how we communicate with our customers. Some
businesses have jumped into the blog world in hopes that their customers will come
and engage with them online. That works for some but this strategy doesn't work
well for many small businesses because their business just isn't the type to draw
attention to itself such that a customer would want to come and read about them in
the normal course of the day. Do you want to know what's going on in the world of
sandwich making, hair cutting, or pool/spa maintenance? Me either, not so much
that I would return again and again to hear it. Tip! Start using a permission-based email marketing software that allows you to easily create newsletters, automatically manage subscribes, unsubscribes, bounces, and view reporting statistics like opens and clickthroughs. The good news is that I would like to hear about special offers my hair cutting place
has or new sandwiches my favorite sub place has coming out. And I, like most
people, would like to hear about it through email. There continues to be more techie
ways to send information out there (like RSS), but email is THE killer application...
the most used, it allows you to push your message to your customers when you
wish and they pick it up when they wish. It is effective and personal because it
comes from you, allowing you to share offers and news. What's more, it allows you
to develop a relationship with your customers. This is all good and true, but knowing this and doing nothing about it will not help
you grow your business. Technology can help you here. Look for a software
solution that automates the sending of special offers through email, encourages
your customers to send referrals about you to their friends (making it a word of
mouth marketing tool), and gives you feedback from your customers about the
most important thing they can tell you about your business. A system like this is
kind of like having an employee that talks to your customers 24 hours a day, 7 days
a week. Tip! Send Thank You Notes Using an email autoresponder to send thank you notes to your customers after the sale is a polite gesture—it's also Internet marketing at it's finest. Thank show your appreciation and should be incorporated into your direct email marketing if at all possible. Dave Free is president of Zeryn, makers of PromoterZ(tm) (http://www.promoterz.com), a customer care
system for small business growth. Mr. Free received an MBA from BYU and has
worked as an Intel executive domestically and internationally, at a Washington think
tank, and entrepreneur. You can read more of Mr. Free's commentary in his Seeds
of Growth blog at:
http://www.seedsofgrowth.com
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