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Internet
Marketing Tip of the Month
E-Mail Marketing: No Postage
Required!
December, 1999
Don't
worry, we're not talking about the untargeted e-mail (spam) that ends up in the
recycle bin, those come-ons for work-at-home, low-mortgage opportunities to meet
babes. We're talking about personalized messages you send regularly to a
targeted list of qualified prospects and clients that you maintain. Targeted
e-mail marketing is a great, low-cost method for turning prospects into
customers and customers into repeat customers. Instead of waiting for prospects
to visit your website, you are actively inviting them to participate in a
specific offer. Here are the steps you need to take:
Collect
E-Mail Addresses. Sure, there are plenty of services willing to sell you
thousands of e-mail addresses for a few hundred dollars. Do you think the poor
souls on those lists will read your mail? The best list is the one you
build yourself from business cards you've collected, tradeshow contests,
membership databases (important for associations), or the address book feature
of your e-mail software. Collect these addresses in your contact management
system, or simply type them into a word processing file.
You
can also put your website to work in collecting e-mail addresses. Site visitors
are more than willing to provide their e-mail address to access
information, to get the answers to a trivia
contest, to win a contest,
to tell their friends or colleagues about
your site, or to simply get mail
from you! Click for examples of website features we designed to obtain
e-mail addresses and save them for future e-mail marketing campaigns.
You
may also be able to acquire legitimate e-mail lists from industry sources, such
as websites of companies you target, trade associations, or services that sell
targeted, opt-in lists, such as PostMasterDirect.
There is no one central directory of e-mail addresses like the white pages for
phone numbers.
Keep
in mind that people change e-mail addresses more often than they do street
addresses, so any list will have 20 percent go bad every year. Continue to
maintain and replenish your list on an ongoing basis.
Plan
Your Campaign. Like any form of direct marketing, no single mailing to your
targeted e-mail list will produce overnight results. You'll need to experiment
with the right message and frequency of your mailings. We recommend sending
messages no more frequently than monthly to any one recipient. The best approach
is to plan messages every month, quarter or other time period, and stick to it
more for your own discipline than for the expectations of your recipients.
When
writing your messages, keep them short enough to fit on a single screen, if
possible. Refer interested readers to more detail on your website. As a result,
recipients will be more likely to read your entire message, and future messages.
Also be sure to include a method for the recipient to be removed from the
mailing list. Very few will exercise this option, in our experience.
The
most successful messages have a specific action item, such as to visit a
particular web page, call for a quote, or use a time-limited password.
Measure
your success over a long period of time. Most recipients will be glad to read
your messages and file them for future reference. But in every batch of messages
you send, you are sure to hit a few people at exactly the right time.
How
to Proceed. You can use the above information to add features to your
website and conduct your own campaign. You can also contact Dynamics Online
about adding interactive e-mail capturing features to your website, managing an
e-mail database, and sending regularly scheduled messages on your behalf. E-mail
marketing is remarkably cost effective...and no postage is required!
Contact
Dynamics Online about managing your e-mail marketing
campaign.
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