MAILING LISTS AND EMAIL MARKETING

One big challenge to every business is marketing. What is the best way to reach existing customers regularly when they aren’t looking for you or visiting your website? It’s not only existing customers, but also those who may have visited your site but not yet purchased or contacted you.

Mailing lists are one way and an excellent way to generate repeat customers, keep them informed on new products or sales and discounts. It’s also a great way to bring in new customers by adding a link on your website for people to subscribe to a newsletter.

Unlike paid advertising, it can cost almost nothing and can often be done inhouse. Even if you need outside assistance, the use of email templates means all you need do is populate the new content and it’s ready to go. The enormous cost of printing brochures or catalogues can be prohibitive for many business, but email can not only provide quality advertising, but also more accurately target customers and give valuable information on the success of the campaign by tracking opened emails and clicked links.

Just one thing to keep in mind, don't bombard customers with emails as it quickly goes from interesting to annoying. Also, make sure you have something worthwhile to say that is of interest to your customers.

There are some great third-party mailing list websites and it’s wise to make use of them instead of managing the customer list and manually emailing them. This approach is time consuming and with the anti-spam legislation in Australia, it’s important to have an automated unsubscribe option instead of relying on you or staff to remove people from your emails.

Keep in touch with your customers, or they might not bother to keep in touch with you.

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