Using Email to Reach Existing Customers and Ignite Sales

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Email represents one of the most powerful and useful tools for both business marketing and customer sales promotions available today. Despite the fuss made over social media, this ancient (by Internet standards) marketing tool is still probably your best, cheapest and most reliable friend when it comes to selling to your existing customers or finding new ones.

Best of all, using email offers you a fairly diverse array of options that aren’t as easily available with other marketing and promotion methods. When you’re using email, you’re benefiting from the ability to be much more expansive and personalized in how you approach your customers and explain to them all about whatever product or service you happen to be offering.

Finally, with email promotion campaigns, you can keep your brand and business on your customers’ minds all the time and in doing so dramatically reduce the risk of losing their potential for future purchases.

That said; let’s go over some of the most important customer outreach and management tips you need to focus on to keep your sales and client loyalty going strong.

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Make Sales and Promotion Easier with Email Marketing Software

If you want to run an effective email promotion program for your business, whether it’s small or large, there are all sorts of software options available online to help you do this as effectively and efficiently as possible.  Aweber Email marketing, for example, offers a full scale software package that integrates right into your website to give you a whole series of tools such as email subscriber management options, newsletter emailing features, Autoresponder systems, signup forms and a useful menu of email analytics amongst many other features.  You can learn more about Aweber from the company site.

Aweber isn’t the only bundle available for these things and other competitors offer the same or even better services at excellent prices. One example is Email Marketing Express, which has been given 4.5 stars out of 5 by the reviewers at CNET.com.

The following are 4 key tips to help you use your email for your customer service and sales promotions.

Keep Offering Great Content.

The emails you send to your subscriber list can’t simply be sales promotions and affiliate marketing leads. You probably already knew this at the start of your campaign and made sure to offer some great free content as an initial trust builder. However, what many businesses easily forget down the road is to keep doing the same thing that got you the mail addresses of your list members -providing plenty of free value in the form of highly useful bonus information.

Most of your list subscribers won’t be constant buyers; instead, they’ll either buy an initial product or just one or two offers down the road. In the meantime, you need to keep them interested enough to pay attention to your emails by periodically sending them useful freebies that focus more on informing than selling. This not only creates more trust in your expertise, it also shows respect to subscribers. So while you periodically sell, never stop sending out the great free niche information that relates to your business.

Keep things as Personalized as Possible.

Make your customers feel well remembered by keeping your emails as target specific and personal as possible. One obvious step that most email marketing software easily handles is to include each subscribers name right in the email as if you were talking to just them. However, there are also other possibilities that will have even more impact.

For one thing, any email marketing software that’s worth its salt will let you subcategorize your subscribers into different subgroups. These can be based on all sorts of classifications that you pick. Use this feature to separate customers into different groups based on the products or services they buy, the email subjects they show more interest in and any other distinctions you can find. Then, through these subcategories, send out differently worded emails to each group that even more closely meet their personal interests. This is nearly guaranteed to create higher click throughs and higher sales figures.

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Promotions and Coupon Offers.

Don’t forget to hand out promotional offers from time to time. These can either be for existing products that you’ve already had on sale or offers that apply to new products and services you’re offering.

You can either offer 2 for 1 deals,  percentage discounts and “act now” sales that also happen to include new bonuses like face time with you or a special additional product or service. However, when you’re offering special offers, try not to insult the customer by making the limited time offers arbitrarily limited; instead, give plausible reasons for why you’re now making these special promotions. This may seem like an odd piece of advice but a lot of email subscribers find the idea of arbitrary limitations on sales without a decent reason annoying -though it depends on the nature of your target market.

Conduct Some Surveys.

Don’t be afraid to ask your clients their opinions of what they would like to see you offer them. Some of the best product strategies and ideas can be born from finding out what customers think is missing or would be a  great extra. You can try this if you want to modify existing products, use it to float the idea of new products or services or simply ask customers what kind of new service or product they’d like to see you offer as a convenient new feature.

Not only are you getting your sales ideas right from the horse’s mouth, you’ll also make your customer base feel like you really care about what they want instead of just pushing junk at them. This can dramatically increase sales, especially from subscribers who actually requested your next offer.

About the Author:

Robert Woodford has been writing about affordable email marketing and high level strategy for more than 15 years. When he’s not writing, you can find Robert at home with his family or playing golf.