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Email marketing basics This article is brought to you by Ted Lewis. A crucial part of any online business is keeping in contact with your customers. The only way you can do that is with email. In these days of massive bulk emails, email certainly has its disadvantages, but it’s still one of your most effective tools in the battle for your customer’s business. While we would all love to have such a killer website and product that every visitor would purchase our stuff on their first visit, the reality is that just ain’t gonna happen. Email marketing has earned a bad reputation in the last few years mostly because of the actions of indiscriminate bulk-emailers. You know the type. They send spam after spam of offers for of questionable pharmaceutical products, watches, software, and um, how shall we say…um, personal enhancement. They are easily recognizable by their misspelled subject lines and undecipherable “from” addresses. For good reason, most people are now extremely wary of handing our their email address. So to get them to sign up on your email list you need to win their trust, and pique their interest. You can win their trust by calling your emails an “e-newsletter”. Make it sound warm and friendly. Pique their interest by offering them some type of exclusive info of the kind that they came to your website for in the first place. Promise your customers that their email will never, EVER be sold or given away. This is an absolute MUST. And stick to your promise. This means that you must always carefully scrutinize every e-newsletter that you send to your list to make sure it is within the bounds of your customer agreement. Your customers are trusting you, expecting your emails to them to be relevant to their interests and useful in some way to them. Otherwise, they’ll certainly stop reading them, and most likely will start unsubscribing from your list. One thing you most certainly don’t want to do is to start sending them emails with commercial offers that are unrelated to your core business. This is suicide and will cost you dearly in the long run. For example, if you run an e-newsletter pertaining to your real-estate development course, don’t start bombarding your customers with emails, or even ads in your e-newsletter, pitching your latest auto-detailing info course to them. You also want to make sure your e-newsletter doesn’t degenerate into nothing more than a glorified sales pitch for your stuff. Your customers are savvy and will know when they’re being hyped-to. Keep your promotions and links to your website subtle, yet still present, and you’ll build trust with your customers. Eventually they’ll realize you’re not just a fly-by-night course-pusher wanting to make a quick buck, and you’ll start to see more sales as a result. Your email list is a potential gold mine for you, but you must treat it with care and caution. Do so, and it will reward many times over. Till next time…Success to you! -Ted
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