With the economy in a constant state of flux, it is more important than ever to reach out to your existing clients and generate more revenue from them then simply finding new business. Constantly finding new business is expensive and time consuming. If you can cultivate a better relationship with your existing clients, you will see revenues grow from upselling new services to people who are already familiar with you. How can you increase your relationship with current clients? Through Email Marketing.
STEP ONE - CLIENT DATABASE
If you don’t have one now, you absolutely need to create a client database or a list of your clients and all of their contact information. This includes name, address, phone, email address. Once you have the list, you can import into a contact management software like ACT! or Sugar CRM.
STEP TWO - CREATE A NUMBER OF EMAILS
Now that you have a contact list (say a list of 100 emails of clients), you need to create a list of new services you have to offer and possible updates. Don’t send them all out at once. Create up to 6 new things to annouce and send one per month for the next 6 months. By constant communication, you may get business from existing clients or, more importantly, referrals to other businesses.
STEP THREE - SENDING THE EMAILS
Now you have a list to send to and up to 6 messages to send out. You need to use a software to send out emails. We recommend using Email Brain (www.emailbrain.com) or Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com). These are cheap, easy to use software products that will allow you to create HTML template newsletters and to send to a mailing list you can upload.
STEP FOUR - ANALYZE
I have said it before, you will not know the effectiveness of anything you do unless you analyze the results. The software mentioned above will tell you how many people received the email, opened the email, what they clicked on, and overall response rates. You need to to track the phone calls coming in and determine if they came from the email or from the web site so you can determine if it was effective or not.
Email marketing can be effective if done correctly. Make the message personal (not too corporate) and people will respond.
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