We Shine at Email Marketing
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| Terminex, a very good company, didn't get their money's worth with this email |
Email marketing is the most powerful marketing tool small businesses have. It is all about building relationships. People are more apt to do business with the people, companies, organizations they know. Build and nurture your database and you are bound for success.
Opt in Lists
An Opt in lists is where someone has given you permission to send them emails. Your opt in list is your best tool. Build it with sign up sheets at your counter, by asking people who call your business, by a "Sign Up For Email Alerts" on your website - basically any way you can.
There are many companies who have great web-based systems for sending out these emails. I like Constant Contact (what a great name!), IContact and EmailBrain. The cost is marginal and you can see who opens your emails and what links they visited.
Design Your Email
You want to send out rich, beautiful HTML emails. Your recipeint's computer wants to accept text email. The HTML used in an email is a lot more limited that what you can put up on a website. The Terminex email mentioned in this article didn't arrive like that. It came in like this:
Most people aren't thrilled to get your email. Don't make them work by having to download images. Terminex's email could have been improved if they used actual text instead of three solid images. Spam filters also look at text to image ratio.
Purchased Email Lists
Crossing over to the dark side, there are also purchased lists out there. (The Terminex email was probably sent to a purchased list) They are technically compliant with the Can Spam Act since people did opt in at some point (maybe not knowingly) We have had some success using these lists and I'm happy to use these services. You can't use any of the opt in email services to send out a purchased list. The companies who sell purchased email lists usually have a service to send them out. They claim a higher open rate, but we've experienced a 3 to 4% open rate.
You may want to use Microsoft Word, which has a great email merge feature to start your campaign on a purchased list. Doing that, we usually get an 8 to 15% open rate.
Whether you have your own email list or you would like us to find you a list, we love to do email marketing and email communications. We can get your message out better and less expensive.