Email marketing is one of the cheapest ways in which to reach out to potential, current and past customers of your business. The most important rule of email marketing is consistency. It is imperative to achieve a balance between a lack of adequate contact and spamming, and once you have achieved just the right consistency in contact, you are on your way to successful marketing.
When you first start considering a plan for email marketing, you must begin to collect the email addresses of people who might want to use your products or services. In the past, a good way to get a long list of email addresses was to buy one. Really, this is not worth it. When you want to keep to a small marketing budget and make your email marketing cheap, buying a list of addresses is a horrible idea.
How Do I Build a List of Contacts for Email Marketing?
- You can create a newsletter and discount email list and ask site visitors to sign up for it. In most cases, they will happily submit their email address in exchange for something free in return. For example, if you are running a sewing store online, consider offering a free pattern or access to a sewing e-book in exchange for a visitors email address.
- Offer to trade email lists with other websites who work with the same niche group that you are targeting. The drawback to this method of adding contacts to your mailing list, is that they did not voluntarily add themselves and may unsubscribe immediately.
- If you attend a trade show, operate a brick and mortar store or make other face to face appearances with potential clients, ask them to give you their email address so that you can send them news and information.
How Do I Reach Out to My Contacts?
Once you have developed your list of contacts, cheap email marketing is a fun activity. The most important thing, as stated earlier, is consistency. Make a plan of how often you will contact your mailing list. Will you send a weekly update with a new discount deal on Fridays? Will you send out a monthly newsletter about your subject matter on the third Wednesday? First, decide what you want to send and how often. Then, start thinking about implementation.
Take some time to go online and find out what professional email marketing companies are doing for their clients. You might be able to find some sample emails that are sent, or websites with free newsletter content that you can use if necessary. Email marketing will be cheap if you do it yourself. The information is out there, just be cautious if you use information from free content sites as it is generally stale content and may be full of errors.
Let’s look at the example of running a sewing shop again for a moment. If you are trying to convert your mailing list subscribers to customers, you need to give them something of value. Sending a monthly newsletter with a few free patterns and some great hints and tips, along with advertisements for featured products and paid patterns, is a great way to generate interest. Perhaps you can advertise for some sewing magazines that will contribute to your marketing budget.
Where do I Get Content? I’m Not a Writer.
If you need to get your email marketing campaign moving, then you need to get content immediately. And, you will need to get more content when it’s time to send out the next email blast. You could potentially write the information yourself, but if you are not a writer this process will probably become frustrating quickly.
You can very easily hire someone to produce content for you on a scheduled basis, and this is not as expensive as you might expect. You can ask for a number of articles, that can be added in with other content as filler when needed. Or, you could hire a small marketing company to manage your email marketing campaign.
What About Email Marketing Software?
Email marketing software is not free, but when you consider the time savings, it will often be relatively cheap. There are many different software options out there to manage your email marketing campaign and they range in features and price.
Some email marketing software will enable to you to import your contact list and set up a schedule on which automatic emails are sent to the users you specify. For example, each Wednesday an email newsletter can be sent. You would enter the text of the email, and it would be automatically emailed on the specified date. If you have information such as the contact’s birthday, you could even send out a special birthday greeting.
Email Marketing Does Not Have to be Expensive
As you can see, there are plenty of cheap email marketing options out there. If you are willing to take the time to research the options and decide which is the best fit for you, it should only be a matter of time before your marketing efforts are bringing you dozens of new customers every day.
