Email Marketing Strategies for business

Your Email Marketing strategy needs to be the handled the same as any other plan in your business. You need to sit and think about what you want to achieve before putting in place the steps to achieve that.

You need to work out who you want to target and what is the best way of putting your proposition to that market. Do they enjoy the corny approach, the sexy approach or just the straight out good value approach. Maybe they are professionals who benefit from taking 5 minutes to read your informative email building your authority on certain subjects.

1. Take out a pen and write your main target market (or your most immediate one), what is their average age (it's OK they can't see your notepad), what do you have to offer (information or a product), work out how often you should contact them, work out what time of day they are likely to read your emails.
2. Create a list of topics or products that you are going to tell people about and even write a few dot points under each one for later.
3. Then write down a realistic date for you to start and put it in your diary. Set a reminder for one week before and start a Word Document, again with the dot points... or even better start writing the damn thing!
4. Put the content into your email marketing tool (we have found that edmBlast works best for us) and send several test emails to yourself.
5. At the given date and time of day... send it. Just send it.
6. Then wait a few days and measure the results

Ahh the relief, you have actually started email marketing and it is now something that you can tick off your list. WRONG! You have simply setup and started a schedule that when maintained can be a great sales tool.

Remember:

• Persistence is the key... keep sending and measuring. You are looking for 1 response from everyone ONCE in 12 months, not a 100% response every time.
• The best time of day to communicate with most office professionals is Wednesday or Thursday just before lunch.
• If you have an offer it is always good to lead people to a landing page that contains all the information they need in one spot
• If you have lots of information, then create a News section on your website and give people snippets that lead them to the full article.
• Have fun with it... don't compromise your reputation but get creative with your marketing. It is not costing you $500 to print and mail.