But still serves a purpose…
When is the last time you picked up a paper and looked through the ads? When did you last reach for a phone book to look up a business for a service you needed, or for that matter, anything at all? If you’re looking for a service, who is more likely to come to mind—the business that has an ad on the back of the phone book or the business that regularly sends you an email advertising their services? The one with the billboard on the side of the highway or the one that comes up first in an online search? Truth be told, when I receive ads by mail, I don’t read them.
Email is the new priority mail.
If you’re like most people, you probably haven’t picked up a phone book in years…if you have kids, they might not even know what a phone book is. That form of advertising is becoming more and more obsolete. Should you be listed in a phone book? Sure. Should that be your main outreach to potential clients?
No. It’s not how they connect with you.
Think about it. In a given day, we all get work-related emails, personal emails, and some emails that come to us from other companies—emails we may not have specifically asked for, but when we get them—we delete them, and sometimes we file them. Why? Just in case. Just in case you need that service or you liked something you saw… you want to be able to reference it later.
After a website, it is potentially one of the best ways to market your company: sending regular emails to a massive list—an email campaign.
It is not as easy as opening a new email, pasting all your contacts into the “To” line, tapping out an email and hitting send. Here are a couple of tips to a successful email campaign:
- Only email those who have subscribed or requested your emails. We all saw the mess when a political email went out to people who didn’t subscribe to receive it. It’s not pretty.
- NEVER do a mass business email and just dump the email list into the “To” line—you can get yourself black-listed by the search engines. If I can see who else your email went to, there is a problem.
- Always give them the option to unsubscribe. If they don’t want your emails and think they don’t need your service—but can’t get away from you, you’re not going to be on the top of their “go-to” list anyway. They can also report you as a spammer if you don’t allow them to unsubscribe.
- Avoid the text-heavy emails. If anyone sent me a 3 page text-only email about something I wasn’t even interested in right then, I’d hit delete. If there were images throughout and it was broken apart by topic—there’s more of a chance that I’ll skim it for something of interest.
- Make sure there is some sort of call to action in every email you send. If you’re sending out a lot of information and someone happens to come across the email and IS interested in what you do—then what? Be sure to always give them a path that leads them to the next step—your website, the phone, your location.
There are a lot of tools out there that you can use; they are all worth looking into, depending on how much you want it to do. If you use a CRM, sometimes the email management systems can integrate with them. Most of them allow you to import your mailing list as well. Non-profits can often send so many free emails per month depending on the service, but otherwise, it does cost a few pennies per email. Services include Constant Contact, Vertical Response, and Mail Chimp. These tools force you to send out emails properly in order to avoid breaking any of those standard email campaign “rules.”
Happy emailing!
Cirrus Site Tip: If you have a Cirrus site and we’re collecting data for you, we can dump any email addresses you collect right into your email service—without you lifting a finger…contact us to learn how!
