"66% of those surveyed said they had made a purchase because of a marketing message received through email."
- ExactTarget, "2008 Channel Preference Survey"
Every page on your website should have an opt-in form where people can sign up to receive your emails. While text messages, Facebook and various other methods of contacting customers are important, email is still one of the most widely used technologies on the internet.
Virtually everybody has an email address, and by building a list of your customers' names and email addresses, you can keep in touch with them on a regular basis to keep your company at the top of their mind.
You can send various things via email:
· Upcoming promotions
· Coupons
· Newsletter
· How-to information
· Anything else that would be relevant to your customers
Unlike flyers or other types of advertising, email doesn't have a per-message cost. Whether you send 20 emails a month or 2,000 emails a month, your cost isn't going to change by much, if at all.
What that means for you is that you can send an email as often as you like, and you can do it on short notice. So if you have a special event coming up or some other special promotion that you want to remind your customers about, it's just a matter of writing a quick email and sending it out to them a couple of days ahead of the event.
But it's not just a tool for sending special promotions like this. You can also use what's called an "autoresponder" to automate a certain amount of your email contact.
When a customer signs up to receive your emails, an autoresponder service will automatically send a certain number of messages at whatever interval you want. This lets you queue up a number of emails that will go out to your customers with absolutely no effort on your part.
You can use these emails to educate your customers about the products or services you offer, educate them about how to use those same products or services, or even just send monthly reminders that you are there to help if they need it.
You could even use it to send reminders of appointments or other due dates. For example, a dentist’s office could send a reminder via email a day or two ahead of a scheduled appointment (not to mention a text message with the same information the day of the appointment) or a car dealer could send a reminder that it’s time for the next oil change at the proper time following a customer’s last visit.
And perhaps best of all, email is a two-way communication tool so you can even use it to ask your customers for feedback. There are various ways to take advantage of this:
· Ask them what their biggest questions are about the products you sell, so you can tailor your advertising and other promotions to answer those questions.
· Ask them what products or services they want or need that you don't currently offer.
· Get feedback and testimonials from them that you can use in future promotions
When you do this, you're not going to get responses from every customer who receives your email. In fact, you may only receive a couple of responses. But the responses you do get could help you make a lot more profit simply by providing the products or services that your customers are actually looking for.
How do you get people to sign up to receive your emails? There are various strategies that will work.
If you deal with people in person in your business, such as a retail shop or restaurant for example, you can have a computer or a portable device such as an iPad where people can enter their name and email address right at the point of sale.
This is considerably more effective than the low-tech method still used by a lot of businesses – a notebook and pen. Why have your customer write their name and email address in a notebook when you can have them enter it directly into a lead-capture form on a computer? This puts them directly into your email service’s database so you don’t have to manually enter that information yourself.
Plus, if you use a device like an iPad you’ll often get even more people who will sign up to receive your emails because they want to “play” with the device a bit. Even if it’s just a matter of entering their information on your lead capture form, the novelty is still there.
Another effective way to get people to sign up to receive your emails is on your website itself. Add a lead capture form (known as an “optin box”) to every page on your website so people can enter their name and email address no matter what page they might be looking at.
To increase the number of people who sign up to receive your emails, you can offer them some sort of incentive for doing so. This could be something like a free report or white paper that will help educate them about the products or services you offer, or it could be some sort of special offer or coupon that gets sent to them automatically after they sign up to receive your emails.
Or you could do both to improve your conversions even further. Offering a report or white paper has another advantage as well – you can use it to promote all the reasons why a potential customer would want to deal with your business as opposed to your competition.
That’s not to say you need to badmouth your competitors. Just explain why your company is their best choice, and what unique benefits you can offer. If you provide them with a report that helps them learn more about what you have to offer them, and then include a bit of a sales pitch at the end, it can generate a lot of new customers for your company.
You can also use what is known as an “exit popup” on your website. This is a popup window that gets displayed when someone goes to leave your website. This popup can make essentially the same offer as the optin forms on every other page of your website, but it has been proven that these popup windows are more effective at convincing visitors to sign up for your email list.
The worst case is they will leave without signing up, but they were leaving your website anyway so why not make one last attempt at capturing their contact information?
Another way to get people to sign up to receive your emails is to use other advertising media to help promote it. If you send out flyers, include a brief call to action on each one letting people know they can sign up to receive special offers and other information by email by visiting your website. If you want to continue running Yellow Page ads even after reading this book, include that same call to action in your ad the next time you renew and have the opportunity to change it.
You could even add a message to the end of every customer receipt or invoice, asking them to sign up for your emails at your website.
Treat this email list as a valuable part of your business – because it is – and promote it anywhere and everywhere you can.
Multiple Methods Of Contact
Your website should make it easy for your customers to contact you, no matter what method of communication they prefer. All the places they can get in touch with you should be easily found when they arrive at your website. This includes things such as:
· Your phone number
· Your address
· Links to other websites like Facebook and Twitter
· A "contact us" form where they can send you a message directly from the website
The more ways you give your customers to contact you, the more likely it is that they will. And different people prefer different methods, so make it easy for each of them to do it the way they want.
If you’re really ambitious, and it fits the way you do business, you could even offer a live chat function on your website that lets your visitors chat with someone directly over the internet.
This is similar to a telephone conversation in many ways, except the communication is typed through the chat service instead.
This method of contact won’t work for every business, but if you or a staff member is sitting in front of the computer for much of the day, it may work for you. And while it may seem a bit “anti-social” to some people, there are a lot of people who aren’t comfortable calling and speaking to you “in person” but would be very comfortable chatting over the internet instead.
Promotional Strategies
One of the biggest advantages of using the internet to reach new customers is the low cost of advertising, and the speed at which you can implement, test and change things. There are many different promotional strategies you can use to both improve your rankings in the search engines and get your business listed in various other locations.
Press releases are an effective way to do this, for a couple of reasons. First, when you send out a press release, it is going to get listed on a lot of news websites quite quickly. Because you can include a link back to your site in the press release, it can drive a lot of potential customers directly to your site as well as help improve your site's rankings (which of course will also result in more potential customers).
And second, your press release might actually get noticed by a local newspaper and you could wind up getting some free press out of it. Many local newspapers are desperate for stories about people or businesses in their town. If you have something newsworthy in your press release, this is exactly the type of story they would like to print. And the fact that you're local just makes it that much better, since they can contact you for further information if need be.
There are a number of press release services that will distribute your press release to various newspapers, websites and other media outlets. Some of the most effective include:
- PRWeb.com
- Webwire.com
- Marketwire.com
- PR.com
- WirePRNews.com
You submit your press release to these services, and they in turn broadcast them out to many different news outlets, both online and offline. The cost of these services varies, depending on the number of outlets they broadcast to and what other additional services they provide.
If you distribute press releases on a regular basis, you will not only be more likely to get noticed by one or more media outlets, you will also get SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits that can help your website rank higher in the search engines, and ultimately generate more traffic.
We’ll look at SEO in more detail shortly.
Media distribution is another highly effective way to get more customers to your website. This means submitting articles, video, images and other types of content to various sites. When your content get posted on those sites, it can result in new customers coming as a result of both finding that content and your website's ranking improving.
Video Distribution
Video is one of the most powerful types of media you can use. We already mentioned adding images and video to your Google Places page, but that's not the only place those types of content can be used. There are dozens of video sharing sites, the most widely used being YouTube, where you can also share your videos. Some of the other popular video sites include:
- Vimeo.com
- Dailymotion.com
- Veoh.com
- Justin.tv
- Buzznet.com
- Collegehumor.com
- Ustream.tv
- Revver.com
Some sites are focused on certain types of videos, such as Collegehumor.com which is focused on funny videos. Other sites have a wide range of topics, like YouTube.com, so you can post virtually any type of video.
Those videos could be a commercial format, or they could be something more educational if that style suits your business.
For example, if you operate a computer store you could set up a YouTube channel where you show people how to do various things with their computers. This would give you two opportunities to reach your customers.
First, people searching for a local computer store could find your videos on Google or another search engine, and they would see how knowledgeable you were. If you have a collection of videos showing various things they need to know to use a new computer, you'll have set yourself up as the local expert before they ever set foot in your store.
And second, you could use this as a benefit for your existing customers. They could get tutorials about their computer on YouTube, and you could even take questions from them via email, Facebook or various other sources and create videos explaining how to do whatever they're having trouble with.
Do you think that would help cement your customer relationships a little more effectively?
By submitting your video to multiple sites, you will extend your reach to more potential customers. Not only can they find the video on those sites directly, they can discover them through search engines like Google Video. You just never know where people will find your content, so the more places you can share it, the better.
Article Distribution
Article distribution is another highly effective way to reach your customers online. There are just as many article directories as there are video sharing sites, if not more. Some of the most effective sites to get your articles distributed include:
- Ezinearticles.com
- GoArticles.com
- Articlesbase.com
- WebProNews.com
- ArticleDashboard.com
- Article-buzz.com
Much like video sharing sites, some article distribution sites are more focused on certain topics, such as WebProNews.com which is mainly online marketing related information, while others cover virtually everything.
The way these sites work is you submit your article to get published on their website. You can include a short “bio” at the end of the article, telling the reader what your company offers along with a link back to your website.
The link in your bio has two benefits:
1. People who read the article will click on the link to visit your website, and once they do they can sign up for your email list, read more about your company or anything else that you offer on your site.
2. The link helps your website rank higher in Google and other search engines, so the more articles you distribute, the better you will rank when people are searching for local businesses.
The real power of these article sites is in the syndication features they offer. Most of these sites let other websites use your article on their site, as long as they leave your bio intact at the end of it.
So as other sites syndicate your article, you will get even more opportunities to reach your customers as well as more and more backlinks helping to push your website up in the search engine rankings.
And while all this is happening, you will help to establish your reputation as an expert. If someone goes searching for reviews or more information about your company, they will find all these different websites where your articles are posted. This will help make you the local expert on what you have to offer.
After all, if you saw the same author’s articles in every magazine you read about a particular topic, you would probably think they know a little something about that subject, wouldn’t you? Being mentioned all over the internet has the same effect.
Images
Images are another type of content that can help you extend your reach and get your company in front of potential customers. There are many different photo sharing sites where you can post these pictures:
- Flickr.com
- Photobucket.com
- Imageshack.com
- Imgur.com
- Picasa.com
- Smugmug.com
The value here is twofold. First, if it suits your business, you can share pictures of the products you sell, work you do or almost anything else. For example, an interior designer could share images of past jobs or before and after shots.
For someone searching for a local interior designer, a picture is worth a thousand words so having those pictures available for people to easily find can be invaluable. Google and most other search engines have mixed images into their search results, so you could end up attracting a potential customer’s attention through those images.
But even if your business doesn’t necessarily translate well into pictures, there are reasons you might want to distribute images to these sites.
One reason is for brand recognition. If people are searching online for what you offer and your company name or logo comes up in the search results, that will help to brand you in their mind. When they see your website listed in the search results, or find your Google Places listing on their smartphone the next time they go searching, they’re going to recognize you over other companies that they haven’t heard of.
And if you have pictures of your office or place of business online, it’s going to make it easier for them to recognize when they get there.