Email Marketing as a Primary Business Marketing Tool

There are individuals and whole businesses using just email to fund their businesses believe it or not. Email is not dead – it never was. It’s effectiveness has dropped a bit over the years as business email with valid messages were diluted with junk – spam mail by companies sending out billions per month.
Here’s how some companies are using email marketing to fund their entire business…

First they build landing pages where they will funnel visitors to. The landing page is focused on a singular goal – persuading the visitor to sign up (opt-in) to their email newsletter. You may have thousands of people come to your website each day but if you’re not converting a portion of them to either sales or leads that you can email later – then you’re just like a free magazine on the street.

Converting visitors to leads that are allowed to be emailed (permission based email marketing) can be quite profitable. One man, Adam Short, has devoted all his time to creating 90 different email campaigns to target niches he found that were in need of someone to create a business around. He’s created these 90 micro-businesses that each make a couple hundred to a couple of thousand dollars per month – on their own. He doesn’t do much once the small websites are up and running.

What we’re going to do is search for books that are selling well and that we could create an e-book about ourselves so we can market it and sell it online through our email newsletter campaign.

Here’s the process:

Go to Amazon.com. Look at the “books” department main headings for products you can search for. Choose another category once in the book section. I chose “Self-Help”. There might be a small and profitable niche market here. When the next page pops up there are sub-categories I can choose from. I chose Eating Disorders. I have a master’s in psychology so eating disorders is something I know about to some degree. I’ve worked with many people that had them. I could probably create an ebook to sell on my email campaign.

I look through the books available and there are many topics.

I decide my ebook will be about eating disorders – and specifically how to conquer binge-eating. I create the ebook on Google Docs (free) and fill it with information – good, solid information that will help someone conquer binge-eating. I’d do a meta topic ebook where I tell something about all aspects of binge eating. The ebook would be about 50 pages long. You can write it yourself if you’re a writer – or, outsource it to a writer in the Philippines – which are excellent. I’d of course review the book and edit it where necessary and presto – an ebook to sell for maybe $200 dollars. Quite affordable.

Then, you go about crafting your email campaign. You’ll need 12-20 short emails that are filled with tidbits about your chosen topic. You’d tease the readers with information they can find in your ebook – and provide a link for them to buy if they choose.

You’re building trust for the first few times you email. On the 3rd email you send them – do a hard sell on your product. For 4th – give information and tease. For 5th – sell. Sixth and seventh – info… 8th – sell. And so on. There have been studies that most sales occur after the 6th email to a customer. That’s important to note because how many of us email more than 6 times? Twice? How many of us craft all our emails to just SELL? Most of us. The key is to give info for free a lot of times during the course of your campaign and ask for a sale only sometimes. Not everytime.

For business email campaigns we use Aweber – which is the standard in the industry.

There are many resources for how to build effective landing pages to help convert visitors to buyers of your ebook(s). Google even offers a page tester where you can compare two or more pages that people arrive on to see which one is the most effective at converting visitors into new leads for your email campaign.

For bringing customers to your pages to buy your ebook try:

• Writing articles about the topic at free magazine article databases. They will funnel some free traffic to your landing page via links on your articles.
• If you’re good at SEO you might try that route.
• Another route a little bit difficult to master is using Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns to send people from ads you place using a PPC service like Google Adwords, to your landing pages.

Using Twitter to Manage Customer Service Complaints

As Twitter.com becomes more pervasive, it will become imperative for companies to watch what is being said about their products, services, and service to customers. Already there are enough people on Twitter (30 million +) to warrant having a look to see if anyone is talking about your business in a negative or positive way – but, definitely you’d want to know if someone was saying smoethng negative so you could do some damage control.

Twitter is a little like the world’s largest chat system. And it isn’t. Only those that follow you can see what you write, or “Tweet”. So, if you have 1,000 followers – only they can see what you’re writing about on Twitter. However, say something great (or stupid) and some that are following you can retweet what you said to their group of followers which means your message could go quite a bit further than just within your own follower group.

One of the neat features about Twitter is that you can search on the whole Twitter world and see what anyone is saying about any topic you choose.

If you go to Twitter.com you’ll see a search box on the right column. Try it. When I search on “AimforAwesome” – a friend’s business I can see all the chats that went on with that username – and with anyone mentioning that exact phrase – with no spaces – anywhere on Twitter – no matter if I follow them or not.

It’s powerful stuff. Here’s why.

You can send a message to people that are talking about your business and ask them if you can help clear up their problem. You can manage the negatives people are saying about your business daily. You have an opportunity to do damage control and turn negatives into positives. That’s very powerful because before Twitter you had no way to montor what anyone is saying about your business unless they’re writing a website post about it or talking about it in a forum.

Twitter has become a sort of forum for people with customer service issues. They tweet about their problems and eventually someone hears them and gets it resolved.

Sign up for Twitter and start monitoring your business, email address, websites, name, products you’re selling – or considering buying. Twitter also is a great way to research what people are saying about products you are thinking about buying – and gives you the opportunity to ask owners of those products whether they would recommend them to you.

Social media – it’s the next wave… it’s here – but, it’s the next wave and it’s a big one.

Online Business Marketing: 7 Reasons to Tweet on Twitter.com

Here are some reasons you should be using Twitter to market your business online:

1. Join the Crowd – if you’ve missed it, Twitter.com is a very hot marketing promotion tool for businesses – online or off. Major companies are all over Twitter. Smaller businesses are getting involved too as they figure out what can be done. There are millions of users on Twitter. There are customers on there for every business – yours too!

2. Twitterers are good company – early adopters, that is – people that get started on the newest trends online are a group of people that realize the value of each other. Start tweeting on Twitter now and meet some amazing people online – the other early adopters.

3. Twitter is fast – many businesses are using Twitter as a fast way to get a message out about a sale or a meeting that would be difficult in other ways. If everyone in your company follows your tweets you could instantly let everyone know with a short message that you’ll be having an extra day off for 4th of July holiday. Influential people with many followers are using Twitter to announce impromptu meetings in countries where they wouldn’t know how to rally a group otherwise. Tip: Use Tweetdeck.com software to help you keep track of Tweets specifically for you.

4. Twitter keeps you informed – you can keep up with what some of the top people in your industry are saying. That alone is worth the effort to get involved in Twitter. Often times someone will link to new information that just came out – and you’ll be one of the first to know. Twitter breaks news all the time. Plane crashes. Iran uprisings. Internet marketing and other business news – is often heard first on Twitter – not CNN, Fox, New York Times or anyone else!

5. Twitter can help you personalize your brand – you can put a name and a face to your brand… even a personality by using Twitter. Major companies – even Microsoft, is finally using Twitter. Twitter can help you do damage control in cases where negative information is floating around the cloud about your brand. Clear harmful issues up quickly. Twitter is excellent for this.

6. Networking increases exponentially – you’ll meet people in your industry daily if you want to. You’ll also meet customers more often than you would just surfing the web haphazardly. Twitter facilitates networking – which you know is essential to growing and improving your business.

7. Instant feedback - throw a question out to your followers and get instant – real time feedback. We use this often to gauge what our customers are thinking and doing. Many of the top internet marketing professionals are using Twitter just for this reason!

Twitter is a tool worth getting to know. Shortly we’ll have some ebusiness training courses to help you learn all you can about using Twitter to help your business. Stay tuned!