Many of you are now on board with email marketing, building relationships with your customers via email. This is a must for anyone that is serious about growing their business. Well written, purpose driven emails are the easiest, most affordable way for you to gain trust and loyalty from your customers. If you are not regularly communicating with your customers, you are missing out big-time.

Here are just a few of the many benefits to email marketing.

It’s Easy - Though writing may be hard for some people, and there is definitely great skill involved, it sure beats traditional ways of keeping in contact with your people. A simple contact management software will sort your customers on lists, all you have to do is create a plan and take a few minutes to write an email once a week or so.

It’s Cheap - In the past, most businesses owners neglected to stay in contact with their customers because it was too expensive. Sending direct mail pieces can be expensive and who has the time to call of our customers (although, now a days a quick thank you call would work like gangbusters)Email management softwares like constancontact, or icontact are very affordable from ($0 - $20) per month. The cost varies on the size of your list.

It works - Turn on your tv on any given night and you will find at least one sleezy reality show. (Stay tuned for “Who Wants to Marry an Internet Geek?”) People love to watch other people live their lives, in fact… they spend more time watching then actually living their own lives. Your customers will like to hear from you (if you have something of value to say), they will listen to your stories about your children or what happened to you on the way to the office. As time goes on, they will “get to know you” and they just might like you (aka. buy from you)

Again, you can’t just send an email an expect people to fall in love with you. There are things you need to know:

People are bombarded with email, you need to make them look forward to your emails. Here a re a few tips.

• Provide Value - If they feel like they are learning from you, they will read your emails. If even one of them “seems like a waste of time” you will lose them.

• Use Great Subject Lines - Make them interesting but not misleading (I will create an entire post about subject lines later)
• Be frequent, but not too frequent - There are many schools of thought on this but I feel that more than 2-3 times per week is overkill. There’s only one person or company that emails me everyday and I still read it, and that is because there content is very good.

So if you aren’t using these email marketing techniques, you better start soon.

If you already are, you need to learn how to improve your techniques and strategies. It is an ever-evolving practice and you must stay ahead of the game.

Best of luck, please comment with any questions or points of interest.

Keith