E-Newsletters are a Great Way to Build Contacts

Marketing in today’s economy is all about gathering contacts and building relationships with those connections. Not to worry, there are more ways to making connections than going to 7 a.m. networking events or happy hour socials. E-newsletter campaigns are a great way to build and maintain your email lists. If done well and consistently, you may acquire new business and establish customer loyalty.

Neil Anuskiewicz and SmartBiz.com have outlined six strategies your small business should utilize in order to build and maintain your email list through e-newsletters.

1. Make your e-newsletter sign-up forms easy to find. If you made the effort to create an e-newsletter and to install sign-up buttons on your Web site, be sure they are not hidden. If a unique visitor comes to your site and bounces off without realizing you had an e-newsletter, then you have missed out on a valuable prospect for your product or service. Be sure to put your sign-up buttons in prominent places and on as many pages as you find appropriate.

2. Build trust, have a privacy policy. In a spam age, people are hesitant to dole out their email addresses. Make sure you have a clearly stated privacy policy positioned in a noticeable area on the e-newsletter. By taking this extra step, you are building trust with your clientele.

3. Provide incentives to subscribers. Hopefully the prospect of receiving valuable information through your e-newsletter will be enough to entice visitors to subscribe. But, if in the off chance it isn’t, try offering special discounts that are exclusive to e-newsletter subscribers.

4. Ask for the right amount of information. Essentially, you have created an e-newsletter to garner contact information from current and prospective clients. That being said, you need more information than a simple email address in order to build a relationship with that contact. However, if you make the form too long, people are likely to bounce off of your page. Stick with the basics – name, company, phone number and email address.

5. Use the Forward to a Friend feature of your ESP. Most Email Service Providers (EPS) have a forward to a friend feature. If your subscribers like your content or know of someone who would benefit from the information, most will forward to a friend yielding you more subscribers and contacts. To make it easier to the receiver of a forwarded email to subscribe to the list, you might want to put a link to the subscription form in the email.

6. Share your Knowledge. Sharing your industry knowledge in articles, blog posts, etc. can drive more traffic to your website and get more email list subscribers. By creating the image that you are an expert in your field, people will be more likely to subscribe to your e-newsletter.

Gathering email addresses for email campaigns like e-newsletters is only the first step. Next, you will need to build a relationship with those contacts. Creative and consistent e-newsletters is one means of establishing that relationship. However, don’t feel shy about personally contacting new subscribers. You may be surprised in the potential behind those contacts!

For more on this article, be sure to check out http://www.smartbiz.com/article/articleview/2510/2/53/.

Want to create an e-newsletter for your business and start building your email lists? ProMoter Inc. can help. Contact us at 502-562-1969 or promoter@promoterinc.com.