Custom Search
|
|
Kickstart Marketing Tip: Start An E-newsletter Or Ezine
Starting a newsletter or ezine is very effective when launching your business. Here are some of the points in favor of this method: 1. Builds relationships with your target market 2. Helps to establish you as an expert 3. Helps to position your business as an authority 4. Easy way to communicate with your market to promote special offers or new services or products 5. Highly valued by your market when filled with helpful content, which also increases open rate Schedule You need to know your market in order to develop a good delivery schedule. Weekly delivery of ezines or e-newsletters is widely the acceptable norm. However, some markets may just need a Monthly or bi-weekly mailing. When promoting special offers, you may also need to increase your mailings to about 2 to 3 per week. However, if you have a special offer every week, just confine it to the regular weekly mailing. You do not want to bombard your list with too many emails and risk losing subscribers. Format You can send your ezine or e-newsletter as a text-only mailing or you can send it as an HTML mailing. The difference is appearance. HTML newsletters are great for branding since you can place your company logo, picture of yourself, pictures of feature product offerings and other graphics. This helps to make it easy on the eyes of the reader and also gives the illusion of reading a print magazine. However, some email programs reject or mark html emails as spam or just does not display graphics. You can get creative with text emails using characters such as the asterisk, equal sign, dashes. You can also bold certain parts of your text email for emphasis. You can also send your newsletter as an html email and send special offer mailings as text. Again, it comes down to knowing your market and what would appeal to them more and then executing on that premise. Email Newsletter Programs The good news here is that the cost for most newsletter programs is very affordable. In fact there are free ones too. One 'free' newsletter program that I have used is Mailchimp.com. I found it user-friendly and quite a few options at the free level. If you are just starting out, this may be all that you need. Some paid programs that are affordable and popular are iContact.com, Aweber.com, ConstantContact.com. They all offer a free trial so you can test drive each one and see which is right for your business. One Caution though is that you need to research and choose a program that you can stick with for the long term. If you want to start off with Mailchimp and have a long-term plan to grow your email list, you should choose a paid newsletter program. Due to Can-Spam laws adn other issues, when you are ready to upgrade to a paid program, you may not be able to transfer your existing list. Your email list will need to opt in again once you switch to the new service and then you will risk losing subscribers. You can launch your business using this method right away and you should do it right away. At the simplest level, sign up with an email newsletter program and send an email to your existing prospect database asking them to opt in. Then go ahead and draft your first newsletter. Sign up for my video series below for more no and low cost methods to launch your business using the Internet. Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com And now I would like to invite you to claim your Free Instant Access to my 10 video series, "10 Surefire No & Low Cost Ways to Market Your Business On the Internet" when you visit kickstartmarketingtips.com You will get practical & actionable marketing tips that you can use right away! From Stephanie Treasure, Information Marketing Strategist |
|