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04 | 02 | 08 Promoting your business is never easy but here are a few tips.

Email marketing

Promoting your products or services by email can be a powerful and flexible form of direct marketing. You can communicate your messages quickly and cheaply. You can also tailor your message to specific types of customer more cost-effectively than with paper-based marketing.

However, you should plan your email marketing with care to make it relevant and interesting to recipients. You also need to be aware that you must always obtain their consent before sending them marketing emails.

The full article shows how to get customers' permission to receive email from your business and how to ensure you reach the right people. It also covers how to monitor the effectiveness of email marketing and newsletters and the legal issues you need to be aware of.

Target the right people

Focus on your best prospects. Even though it costs very little financially to send an email, it can still take up a lot of your time if your campaign is not targeted.

Email marketing is more successful if it focuses on people you know are interested in what you're offering. For example, if you're running a special offer on society days then it helps if it goes to businesses or events co-ordinators.

Unsolicited marketing emails, or spam, are illegal, but because they continue to be a major problem, computer security software can be used to block them. People are easily annoyed when they receive an email that's irrelevant to them, and they're likely to delete unsolicited messages from your club without reading them.

But an email to an existing customer or contact, who has agreed to receive marketing from you about products or services, may well be valuable to them. Even if they don't buy from you immediately, they're more likely to do so in the future.

Keeping it relevant

If you've got a large database of customers and potential customers for your email marketing campaign, it's worth analysing what you know about them, so you can send a more relevant message. See our guide on how to manage your customer database.

For example, you could send high-spending customers an email about your new loyalty discount. Customers who you haven't seen for six months will be more likely to respond to an update on your products and services.

For a copy of the complete guide to email marketing including:

Get people to opt in to your email marketing
Create an email newsletter
Make your email newsletter engaging
Monitor and follow up your campaign
Legal issues
Here's how I used email marketing effectively

Send an email to ian@4imagination.co.uk and we will be happy to forward it to you.

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