Tampa website design and hosting

Shawn - August 16th, 2010

Effecively Emailing Your Clients & Prospects

To promote your business, we believe in the power of blogs and the benefits of social media to brand yourself and make contacts, but email marketing really completes that balance and gives you another avenue to target your market.

While some companies subscribe to print ads and postcards (which can be very effective if your budget allows for it and you’ve got a really polished campaign that extends over a period of time) many companies leverage Email Marketing, Bulk Email, and Newsletters to keep their business on the consumer radar. Personally, we partner with iContact.com for their flexibility, their reasonable prices, and their feature-rich selection.

While email is a more affordable solution than traditional print media, we’d like to recommend some guidelines that you’ll find useful or this whole electronic crusade could really backfire on you!

The Number one rule for effectively keeping in touch with your database is to be consistent; twice a month is probably a good interval.

Rule number two: Know the distinction between spamming your potential clients to death and consistently imparting interesting information about your industry while subliminally reminding them that you are an excellent resource for that need.

Rule number three: Don’t make your emails or newsletters all about how great you are, but provide useful tips; you’ll spotlight yourself as a resource, not as a loudmouth capitalizing on a captive audience. (How do you know if you’re doing it wrong? You’ll find that your “unsubscribe” notifications will start to mount.)

Basically, we don’t recommend emailing your entire client and prospect base from Outlook or other normal email software because it is not effective. Reasons for using a service like iContact.com:

Reason number one: They focus on insuring your messages get delivered to your recipient's Inboxes and not their Spam folders.

Reason number two: They are also looking out that you follow all spam regulations so you don’t get reported for not following the permission-based marketing etiquette.

Reason number three: They provide really useful statistics so you know who is opening, reading, and forwarding your emails. You can even get reports on the unique click-throughs on the hyperlinks, so you get a handle on what people are responding to in your emails.

Between blogs and social media and the good use of email marketing strategies, you can reach a ton of people efficiently and affordably…and spend the savings on a vacation.