Could you imagine having a potential customer/client walk into your business and never trying to build rapport with them? Now imagine how powerful it would be to be able to reach out and stay-in-touch with them even after they’ve walked out the door. Imagine the power of educating and informing your current customers and prospects on a consistent basis. To never lose touch, to always be top-of-mind. That’s the power of email marketing when it is done right.
Email marketing is simply the lifeblood for connecting 1:1 with your website visitors and customers. If done wrong, it’s an ineffective tool that can turn off clients and prospects. If done, right, it is a tool that will be as important (and definitely the most cost-effective) than any in your marketing toolkit.
You may be on email lists that send you occasional email newsletters. But, you probably don’t get many from small businesses. But, you can be one of those small businesses that utilize email marketing remarkably well.
Right now I probably get three or four emails from local businesses/organizations for one reason or another. Of those, a few look really tacky and the others are simply using their desktop email program and sending email out to their clients 100 at a time (or whatever their local Internet service provider will allow). If you or another business owner you know are doing this, I need to tell you how important it is that you stop sending out emails to all your clients through your desktop email program.
Here’s why:
- Your ISP could shut down your Internet. You’re a spammer. There are gray areas regarding emailing your customers, but emailing hundreds of customers/prospects with no link they can click to receive emails from you is spam in every book. There isn’t a gray area in this scenario. Also, according to CAN-SPAM laws, your address must be at the bottom of your emails. Now, I’m guessing if you’re not using a service that your emails don’t contain these two elements. If they don’t, stop those emails immediately. Here are some of the CAN-SPAM laws we follow for ourselves and our clients:
- Unsubscribe Compliance
- A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.
- Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 days.
- Opt-out lists also known as suppression lists are only used for compliance purposes.
- Content Compliance
- Accurate from lines (including “friendly from’s”).
- Relevant subject lines (relative to offer in body content and not deceptive).
- A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present.
- A label is present if the content is adult.
- Sending Behavior Compliance.
- A message cannot be sent through an open relay.
- A message cannot be sent to a harvested email address.
- A message cannot contain a false header.
The email marketing program we use and recommend most is called, Aweber.
I’ve used several email marketing services out there over the years. With all I’ve used, I always come back to Aweber for its perfect mix of features and price. And I am not alone. It would be hard to find many website marketing specialists that would recommend anything but Aweber these days.
There are a few reasons why Aweber is the choice for a small business person.
- You can have your blog posts emailed automatically to your email list.
- Their support and educational videos are second to none.
- The control panel that you’ll use is not overwhelming. You can learn it all in just a few hours.
Of course, they have all the features that most of the other providers have, including the ability to do the following.
- Quickly create and run your campaigns with powerful, easy-to-use email marketing tools.
- Send engaging email newsletters (eBlasts) to your email list.
- Create auto-responders that send out a reply email to potential customers after they’ve signed up on your website.
If you’re a small business owner, then you know you need to have a “real” email marketing system to interact with customers and prospects. The bottom line is I can’t recommend anything better than Aweber. They even have a 30-day trial. Check out Aweber here (opens in new window).
