An Introduction to Email Marketing for Small Businesses
Even though many small business owners use email, very few use it to market their business.
In fact very few large businesses make effective use of email for marketing their business.
There are many reasons for sending customers email but the main reasons are :
- Increasing customer loyalty
- Promoting products
- Promoting events
- Promoting the business
Email Marketing has many advantages for small businesses they are:
- Cost- Much less expensive that printed media
- Can be automated .
- Can lead to direct sales
- Easy Tracked - No other form of promotion can be so easily tracked
- Can be used to open two way dialogue
- Instantaneous
- No geographic constraints/costs- i.e. It doesn’t matter if the recipient is in England,India or America.
Email Marketing Requirements
To get started with email marketing you need two things.
- Customer email addresses
- Email Sending program
Email Marketing Costs
You can actually start marketing with email by using your existing customer email list that you already have and sending emails using outlook, outlook express or similar.
This method works but it is really only suitable for vey small lists (less than 50) and it is not what I would recommend, but you can find more details in managing email lists with Outlook Express.
Email Autoresponders for Professional Email Marketing
An entire industry has grown up around email promotion and the main tool used is an email autoresponder.
The job of an email autoresponder is to:
- Collect and manage email addresses
- To send and track email.
If you have a mailing list with more than 20 email addresses and you want to email on a regular basis ( at least once per month) then you should consider using an autoresponder.
If you intend to capture email addresses via your company website then an autoresponder is a must.
I’m currently not offering Email Marketing services but I cover this topic in the search engine consultant newsletter. I will also be putting together an introductory course that will be made available to newsletter subscribers.
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