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The Importance of Email Marketing
Email Marketing is so important
it should be recognized as a primary component for virtually every factoring and commercial
finance consultant's marketing mix. Few, however, recognize
their email lists as what they are... their most important
business asset. Recent studies report
that over 94% of all internet users have sent or read email
messages and over 62% do this at least once in the course of a typical day.
Current statistical estimates identify 2.9 billion as the number
of email users worldwide which is set to rise to 3.8 billion by 2014.
These are numbers that clearly cannot be ignored. For
consultants, the biggest
challenge to successful email marketing is to build their
critically important "opt-in" or response list.
Email marketing
should always be permission based. Your primary tool for
developing new clients through email marketing will be your online
monthly company newsletter and periodic company bulletins. In addition, new
powerful social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and
LinkedIn are bringing internet and email marketing to an entirely new level
of importance.
Your email marketing efforts should work hand-in-hand
with your company website and your newsletters. Always focus on
driving prospects to your website where they can get the
complete story, additional white papers and case studies on factoring and
small business finance for free. When writing your newsletters,
consider highlighting just the first paragraph of a featured
article. Then, hyperlink the article to your website where
an interested party can read the full article but also navigate
through your site.
It is important to avoid the
issue of spam at all costs. If you think a business might be
interested in your services, you might try one test email, but
make certain your provide an "opt-out" button.
Generally speaking, email marketing experts will all agree that
unlike direct mail, purchasing lists from list brokers
for the purpose of email marketing is at best counter productive
and may actually do more harm than good due to spam laws.
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Building Your Response Lists for Email
Since all email lists are response lists and must be the result of
"opting in", the importance of using your website as a conduit for
the opting in process is obvious. But how do you drive
prospects to your website in the first place?
• Display your website domain on all printed material.
• Exhibit in local trade shows where business owners
are likely to attend.
• Have a fishbowl for a give-away where attendees can
place their business card.
• Use classified advertising liberally with a FREE
white paper or give-away.
• Advertise the fact that you publish a newsletter on
Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Reciprocate with other professionals that publish
newsletters such as accountants and insurance agents.
Advertise their newsletter in yours in return for them advertising
your newsletter in theirs.
• Focus your efforts heavily on content. Make
your newsletter one that is eagerly awaited.
Viral Email Marketing
Viral e-marketing is much like
networking. In the case of email, it is not word-of-mouth but
rather word-of-mouse. It allows a recipient of your email
newsletter to recommend it to friends and acquaintances. You
generate the "viral effect" by placing a "Recommend Button" on
your newsletter. By clicking the recommend button, a reader
can immediately forward it to one or more friends. When your
newsletter contains valuable finance information, one can pass it
to two, two to four, four two eight and so on. Success in
the viral arena depends heavily on the level of content in your
newsletters, however. Such a viral effect can also be the
result of becoming well versed in Facebook and other social media.
Email Marketing Software
Email marketing software is another
important component to your email campaigns. There are
certainly many to choose from with the most popular being Constant
Contact, Get Response, Mail Chimp, Benchmark Email, Vertical
Response, and iContact. You can explore each on a
comparative basis at
www.email-marketing-options.com .
For most, the task of creating their monthly newsletter will be
the most time consuming. This need not be the case, however.
Creating quality newsletters is relatively easy with such
software.
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