Follow the steps outlined below and you will increase your sales and your client base, which will lead to additional profit and growth in your business.Inspite of what any e-mail or website will tell you, there is no simple method to grow your business. It certainly will not happen with you sitting in an armchair or indeed when you are asleep. The reality of the situation is that all successful business owners have achieved what they have by working hard, but also vitally working smart. Hard work is not a guarantee of success on its own, but couple that with smart work and you will be on the fast track to success.I will outline what I have done to achieve the success I have had, and I am certain that if you follow my guidelines there will be no reason why you cannot do the same.To start with, a little bit about the success I have had so far. I am not a millionaire, far from it. I have achieved modest, maintainable sales growth on a monthly basis that has added approximately 10% to my bottom line month-on-month. I don´t have any special skill sets and nor did I spend huge sums of money to achieve this success. My business sells in the Business-2-Business marketplace which is where this whole system works best.Sadly, this is no special secret plan that I have devised. The truth is smart working is often just the basics reworked. It is just taking some time to step back from the grindstone, look at your business and work out a sensible strategy. For me this meant focussing on the reality that to get necessary growth in my business I needed to either add more customers or get my average order value up. Hardly a eureka moment that one is it!The way I did it was to focus on e-mail marketing. Now to begin with, I have to say, if you are ready to stop reading please hold on for one moment. I too, was verysceptical to start with, but I had to face the fact that I could not employ a sales person to do fulfil this role, and I would not be able to find the necessary space in my diary to do what I would call the normal sales work. To date I had always proudly stated that I had never done business with a customer I had not met in person, and I was not going to compromise that ethos. I have to say that I have learnt the hard way and had a few knocks en route, but here is my 8 point plan that shows you how I made it successful.1. I quickly learnt that you cannot send e-mails to lots of people using normal e-mail software. The spam filters currently available just direct your email to the junk folder. I tried many different programs, but have chosen Interspire which is installed on my server, as my program of choice. True it does cost, and there are some very good free programs out there as well (PHP List springs to mind), but it does everything I want and more.2. Make sure you have a solid relationship with your ISP as you will certainly have rules you will have to adhere to regarding how many e-mails you can send and the speed you can send them. There is a fine line between marketing and spamming. Make sure you are not on the wrong side of this line.3. Having commented on the spam word, it is appropriate to address that issue as well. There are some critical rules you need to follow when sending e-mails. Firstly, if at all possible get your e-mails by having people subscribe to your website and have them supply you with their e-mail. This is called the opt-in method. It is substantially more successful as you are emailing somebody who has actually requested your email. This is the only way you can function if you are sending emails direct to consumers. If your business is B2B, then you can obtain a mailing list of some description and use that. If this option is relevant to you, then there are three critical things you must do:a. The emails address you send your emails from must be a monitored and registered email address;b. You must only send business e-mails to the emails you have;c. You must always have an unsubscribe link on every e-mail you send. It should be needless to say that this function works effectively. (Interspire does this automatically.)If you adhere to these rules your marketing campaign will beperfectly within the law.4. Make your e-mails pleasant to read in addition to having the promotion within it. Remember to make the subject line of the e-mail eye-catching and try to avoid filling the e-mail with multiple images. This just slows down the system and annoys recipients. Take your recipients on a journey with you; do not send identical emails every week, vary them so the readers get to see the full capabilities of your company.5. Try wherever possible to send to your emails at the same time each week. Do not invade your prospects inbox every day, nor mail infrequently like once a month. A regular weekly email received at the same time every week will be more likely to be read.6. You will find a number of programs that offer the ability to verify the email addresses in your list. I can tell you that I have 6 of them installed on my laptop. When I run my list through each program, they all indicate which addresses are either valid or not valid. Even after I sent emails out to the list I had, I could not match up any of the verifier programs as being effective. The most effective I found was to send the emails in small bundles and handle the returned emails as they arrive. If the program you use does this automatically even better.7. You will undoubtedly receive bounce-backs, that cannot be sent or the e-mail address you have does not exist any more. Make sure you delete them from your list immediately as this will just irritate your ISP who will make the assumption that you are a spammer and block your account.8. Begin with a small manageable list. Get 1,000 addresses and process those to see how you fare. You will learn more quickly, and be respected by your ISP if you steadily grow as opposed to trying to send a huge list out over night.This is my 8 point plan to success in email marketing. I can truthfully say that I never broke any of them. I began using a free bulk email program and I purchased a mailing list. I quickly understood that the better the program the better the chance my email was to go through. I also learnt that certain words and phrases also activated spam filters, so none of my emails offer FREE or NO OBLIGATION items.I have set up my own subscribe page on my website, but to kick start the whole process I purchased a mailing list. It was very good value, but as can always be expected, it did contain several invalid emails. However, by working smart and carefully, I eradicated most of them and now have a list which is significantly smaller, but works perfectly for my needs. The truth is, it is excellent value for money even for the final number I ended up with.To begin with, the mailing list was the only place I invested, and I can categorically say it was well worth it. I now send 1,000 e-mails a day, every week, and get on average 15 replies a week. Now I can imagine a number of marketing departments being scornful of this, telling me how low my response is. But in truth, it takes me 90 minutes a day to send out the emails, and 15 responses a week is an amount I can manage and has lead to me growing my business by the percentages I mentioned earlier. I am currently winning on average 4 new customers a week.Now in the current business environment, who is going to laugh at that?
For more information visit Consulmax. Ian is the owner of Consulmax, the BEST site for purchasing mailing databases.
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