This is a guest post by Shaun at Ultimate Mailing List, a blog looking aiming to help you with your list building and email marketing efforts.
If you run a small business or have a talent, you need to promote, there are a number of things you need to do to be successful. You need to build up your customer or fan base, you need to effectively relay your message to these people, and you need to make it easy for them to contact you with any feedback or queries. While this may sound like a lot of work to anyone new to this business, it really isn't. Through the power of email marketing, you can do all of this with minimum effort and technical know how.
Why You Need To Build Up Your Mailing List
As I'm sure you know, the people that 'follow' you are one of the most important factors in making your business or career a success. If you run a business for example, where would you be if no one bought your product or service? And if you're a musician with no fans, how profitable do you think your music career would be? Communicating with your tops customers and fans is of the up-most importance, and something you should definitely be doing if your business is customer driven.
While there are a number of ways to keep in contact with your followers, the easiest way is to get these people onto your mailing list. Once they're signed up to your list, you have access to them any time you want. Have a new service you think may be of interest to them? Or got a up coming show you'd like them to attend? Then let them know.
Making It A Two Way Relationship
While having a newsletter is great for letting people know the latest goings on with your company, you need to remember that you can't simply blast your subscribers with adverts. While you can let them know your latest products and services every now and then, the majority of the time you should be giving something of interest back to your subscribers.
Let's say for example you're an aspiring singer. You have a few songs available to buy on your website, and want to make as many sales as possible. Simply messaging people “If you haven't download my song yet, make sure you buy it today” five days a week is a sure fire way to make people unsubscribe and forget about your music, so is not advisable. If they wanted to buy your music, they would have done it the first time you emailed. Emailing them the same message another four times that week isn't going to do anything but annoy that person and break up your relationship.
What you could do instead, is focus on building up a relationship with that person. You could send them emails with inspiring stories (Maybe some of your subscribers want to become singers too, so let them know your story), competitions, and interesting facts. You could inform them of any up coming projects you have going on, and ask them what they'd like to see you do in those projects. Get people involved in the process, and make them feel like they're part of something bigger. If you get them to feel like this, they'll be a lot more likely to invest in you in future.
Conclusion
Many people start building up a list, but fail to communicate with this list effectively when they have access to them. While there are exceptions (If you're a big retail company like Amazon for example), you can't really get away with only sending sales emails to your newsletter subscribers. If you want to make the most of your list, you need to build relationships with these subscribers. The better relationships you have, the more these subscribers will reward you in the long run.
If you know of any other way to build up a better relationship with your customers through email marketing, please let us know in the comments below.
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In addition to the traditional email marketing (mass email) one should look at another marketing opportunity and that is the emails we all send from our corporate email addresses every day. I represent a company that has developed a solution for just those emails and thus this post.
The basic idea behind wrapmail is to utilize the facts that all businesses have websites and employees that send emails every day. These emails can become complete marketing tools and help promote, brand, sell and cross-sell in addition to drive traffic to the website and conduct research.
WrapMail can also be used to create personal email stationary based on their social networks (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace) hobbies, interests etc for anyone’s personal email.
Wrapmail is available for free at www.wrapmail.com and wrapped emails arrive with no red x!
In addition to the traditional email marketing (mass email) one should look at another marketing opportunity and that is the emails we all send from our corporate email addresses every day. I represent a company that has developed a solution for just those emails and thus this post.
The basic idea behind wrapmail is to utilize the facts that all businesses have websites and employees that send emails every day. These emails can become complete marketing tools and help promote, brand, sell and cross-sell in addition to drive traffic to the website and conduct research.
WrapMail can also be used to create personal email stationary based on their social networks (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace) hobbies, interests etc for anyone’s personal email.
Wrapmail is available for free at www.wrapmail.com and wrapped emails arrive with no red x!