Follow the steps outlined below and you will increase your sales and your client base, which will lead to additional profit and growth in your business.
Despite what any e-mail or website will tell you, there is no easy way to grow your business. I guarantee you it will not happen with you sitting in an armchair or even when you are asleep overnight. The hard facts of the matter are that all successful business owners have got there by working hard, but also crucially working smart. Hard work is not a guarantee of success on its own, but couple that with smart work and you will be on the fast road to success.
I will outline what I have done to achieve the success I have had, and I am certain that if you follow my process that you can see the same level of success as I did.
To start with, a little bit about the success I have had so far. I am not a millionaire, far from it. I have achieved modest, sustainable sales growth on an ongoing basis that has added approximately 10% to my profits month-on-month. I don’t have any special skill sets and nor did I spend huge sums of money to achieve this success. My business sells in the B2B marketplace which is where this whole system works best.
Sadly, this is no special secret plan that I have devised. The harsh reality is smart working is often just the basics reworked. It is just about taking a few moments to step back from coalface, look at your business and work out a viable plan. For me this meant focussing on the simple fact that to get growth in my business I needed to either grow my customer base or get my average order value up. Hardly rocket science that one is it!
The way I did it was to focus on e-mail marketing. Now first off, I have to say, if you are ready to stop reading please bear with me. I too, was verysceptical to start with, but I had to face the fact that I could not employ a sales person to do fulfil this role, and I would not be able to find the time I needed to do what I would call the normal sales work. To date I had always professed that I had never done business with a customer I had not met face to face, and I was not going to compromise that ethos. I have to say that I have learnt the hard way and had a few setbacks en route, but here is my 8 point strategicplan that sums up how I made a success of it.
1. I rapidly understood that you cannot send e-mails to lots of people using standard e-mail software. The spam filters available nowadays just direct your email to the junk folder. I tried several different programs, but have settled on Interspire which is a web based software, as my program of choice. True it does cost, and there are some very good free programs out there as well (PHP List springs to mind), but it fulfils all my requirements and muchmore.
2. Make sure you have a good relationship with your web host as you will undoubtedly have guidelines as to how many e-mails you can send and how quickly you send them. There is a incredibly fine line between marketing and spamming. Make sure you are not on the wrong side of this line.
3. Having commented on the spam word, now is an appropriate moment to address that issue as well. There are some crucial rules you need to adhere to when sending e-mails. Firstly, if at all possible get your e-mails by having interested parties subscribe to your website and have them supply you with their e-mail. This is called the opt-in method. It is substantially more successful as you are emailing to prospects who have actually asked for your email. This is the only way you can function if you are sending emails direct to end users. If your company operates in the B”B marketplace, then you can purchase a mailing list of some description and utilise that. If this option is relevant to you, then there are three vital things you must do:
a. The emails address you send your emails from must be a monitored and legitimate email address;
b. You must only send business related e-mails to the emails you have;
c. You must always have an unsubscribe link on every e-mail you send. It follows that you must always also unsubscribe anybody that uses it. (Interspire does this automatically.)
If you adhere to these rules you will be perfectly within the law to start up an e-mail marketing campaign.
4. Make your e-mails interesting to read in addition to having the offer within it. Do not forget to make the subject line of the e-mail eye-catching and try to avoid sending any e-mail with multiple images. This option just slows down the system and irritates recipients. Take your readers on a journey with you; do not send the same emails every week, vary them so the readers get to see the full capabilities of your company.
5. Try wherever possible to send to your emails at the same time each week. Do not bombard them every day, nor mail infrequently like once a month. A weekly email received at the same time every week will be much more likely to be read.
6. You will find a number of programs offering to verify the email addresses in your list. I can advise you that I have 6 of them running on my laptop. When I run my list through each program, they all indicate which addresses are either valid or invalid. Even after I sent emails out to the list I had, I could not tally up any of the verifier programs as being particularly effective. The best way I found was to send the emails in small bundles and handle the returned emails as they arrive. If the program you use does this automatically even better.
7. You will no doubt receive bounce-backs, that cannot be sent or the e-mail address you have no longer exists. Make sure you remove them from your list straight away as this will just irritate your ISP who will make the assumption that you are a spammer and close your account.
8. Begin with a small manageable list. Get 1,000 addresses and send those to see how you get on. You will learn more quickly, and be respected by your ISP if you build up as opposed to trying to send a huge list out over night.
This is my 8 point plan to success in email marketing. I can honestly say that I never broke any of them. I started using a free bulk email program and I bought a mailing list. I quickly learnt that the better the program the more likely my email was to go through. I also learnt that some words and phrases also activated spam filters, from that point onwards none of my emails offer FREE or NO OBLIGATION items.
I have set up my own subscribe page on my website, but to speed up the whole process I bought a mailing list. It was very good value, but predictably, it did contain several incorrect emails. However, by working smart and carefully, I eradicated most of them and now have created a list which is significantly reduced, but works perfectly for my needs. The truth is, it is excellent value for money even after you take into account the inaccurate addresses.
To start off, the mailing list was the only place I invested, and I can categorically say it was excellent value for money. I now send 1,000 e-mails a day, every week, and get on average 15 replies a week. Now I can imagine a number of marketing departments laughing at this, telling me how low my response is. But in truth, it takes me 90 minutes a day to send out the emails, and 15 responses a week is a number I can control and has lead to me expanding my business by the percentages I stated earlier. I am currently winning on average 4 new customers a week.
Now in the current market, who is going to complain about that?
For more information visit
Consulmax. Ian is the owner of Consulmax, the BEST site for purchasing mailing databases.
