The most effective and economic way to market your business this year is email marketing. Sounds easy enough, right? You email everyone you know. You email your clients. You email your boss. You email your coworkers. You email your friends. You probably even email your mother.
But do you email people you don’t know– yet? Do you email prospects?
Email marketing is a non-threatening way for prospects to get to know you. Prospects can learn about you, your business, your successes, your distinctions and your values before they even meet you. And when they do meet you, they’re ready to do business.
Here are five easy steps to developing an effective email marketing program for 2012:
1. List: It all starts with a verified, vetted and segmented list. Consult with a list developer to ensure your list is comprised of accurate, tested and valid emails of prospects within your demographic. Remember, you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince, so make sure your list is large enough to produce multiple sales and/or new clients for you. Rally Drive Train is the perfect solution, we think.
2. Tool: To deliver all those emails, you’ll need something other than Outlook. Investigate online solutions that will help you organize your database, design a marketing campaign, deliver the emails and provide statistics (who opened, who clicked and who unsubscribed). Rally connects its clients with True Mailer, an excellent email marketing tool.
3. Content: Email drip marketing programs aren’t sale circulars; rather, they are helpful bits of information that share your expertise and experience without giving away the store while building credibility and rapport with your prospect. Content is also short. Businesses are inundated with information these days: make sure yours is short, sweet, and memorable.
4. Frequency: There’s a magic number out there, too bad we don’t know what it is. It’s frequent, but not too frequent. You don’t want to annoy your prospects, but you don’t want them to forget you, either, and you don’t want them to think you’ve forgotten them. Send out your valuable information in a timely and respectful pattern, and your prospects will begin to appreciate you.
5. Analysis: The cool thing about email tools is they tell you who opened, who clicked, who spent time on your website, how many pages they looked at, and who unsubscribed. You can watch your prospects’ behavior, know who’s interested, and make an educated guess that they’re ready for an old-fashioned phone call.
And there are some pesky laws governing emails, but we’ve already written about those. You can read about there here.
Make email work for you in 2012.
