Bark! if you love small businesses. Check out the latest from SmallBizBee.com and their Email Marketing Summer School as they look at email marketing, and how you can begin using email to more effectively market and grow your small business. excerpt from
1. To Build Trust
Since you’ll be sending informational, focused, email communication, you will begin building trust with those on your list.
They will come to know you as a valuable source of information, and with that trust, they will actually start listening to what you have to say. This is the most crucial step in the email marketing process. If you have an email list that trust you, you’ve won the battle, and we’ll talk more about how you build trust in an upcoming blog post.
2. To Become Familiar
Email by nature is a *friendly* form of communication. We feel the best about emails from friends and trusted sources. We look forward to these emails, and by using an email list to market your business you will be one of those people we look forward to getting email from. If you do it right, you will become familiar to those on your list, and your emails will be opened, read, and acted upon.
Better yet, you will become the “top of the mind” supplier of what you sell for those on your list. The more familiar you are to your list, the more likely they will be to think of you when they need to product or service you offer. Why buy from a stranger when they can buy from a friend?
3. To Get Repeat Business
When used correctly email marketing is a great way to get repeat business. You’ll be communicating with your list consistently, and providing opportunity for those on your list to buy from you time and again. You’ll also be building an email list of current customers, allowing them to not only buy from you the first time in person, but possibly again via an email offer.
4. To Make More Sales
Isn’t that the goal of all marketing – more sales? If you do it right, your email list generate more sales for your business. By doing a combination of everything on this Top 10 list, your email marketing will be a lean, mean, sales getting machine!
5. To Build Your Authority
Many of the emails you send will be informational by nature, and through sharing of information you’ll be building your own credibility and authority as an expert on your subject. Guess who people buy from? That’s right, the experts.
6. To Save Money
It cost next to nothing to set up and maintain a powerful email campaign. You’ll pay $50-100/month for email list management software. After that, the cost of your time to get it set up and write/send emails are your only sunk cost. Compare it against any other form of marketing I think you’ll find it’s very hard to get more for less.
7. To Create an Opt-In Market
The people on your list have asked you to send them information – It doesn’t get better than this! Most marketing goes out to the crowd and you hope your message resonates with enough of them you make sales. If you have an email list you’re marketing efforts are automatically targeted to a population of people who WANT what you are offering.
8. To Save Time
It doesn’t take much time to send a few friendly emails a month to your list. When it comes to calculating a return on your time investment, email marketing is going to be tough to beat with other forms of more traditional ad generation.
9. To Expand Your Reach
If I see a great commercial on TV the only way I can share it is by retelling the concept to my friends, or hoping they’ve seen it. With email, that’s not the case. Your message can be passed on and shared with the click of a button. This essentially expands your reach beyond those on your list, to potentially everyone on the receivers “list” as well.
10. To Create Multiple Buying Opportunities
When a customer walks into a store, the place of business only has that one chance to sell them something. Once they walk out, you just have to hope they come back giving you another chance to sell. Email marketing gives your customers multiple opportunities to buy from you. You’ll be reminding them how great your products and services are on a regular basis, pulling them back.
In Summary
I think it’s easy to see the benefit in building and using an email list as part of your marketing activities. If you’re not currently using email to market your products and services, I think you’re leaving a lot on the table.
Hopefully you’ll hang with us through Summer School, and some of the tips and techniques we talk about over the next few days help you grow and expand your business.
Class dismissed…
Blog content comes from SmallBizBee “Making a Big Deal out of Small Business”
To read more and join the Email Marketing Summer School,
please visit SmallBizBee online.
