As a brick-and-mortar business on Main Street America, it is sometimes very difficult and expensive to break through the local advertising clutter. Television is often very expensive. Radio tends to offer mixed results. Even the local newspaper can be quite expensive, depending on where you live.
According to a consumer survey from ExactTarget, the top 3 methods of advertising that drove consumer purchases during 2008 were:
1. Direct Mail – 76%
2. Television – 75%
3. Email – 58%
One bit of interesting information that came out of this data was the fact that most consumers felt that Direct Mail was the only acceptable method for a business to contact a consumer directly, without have a prior relationship.
Another point of interest is the fact that 53% of Americans had purchased something offline, as a result of an email that they had received.
Now the important thing to understand about email marketing is that email is Permission-Based Marketing. Your contacts must give you permission to contact them, and they must validate their interest in receiving mailings from you, through an online interface.
As a small business person, you usually will not have the time to figure out the technical details of how to make this work for your business.
But the good news is that you don’t have to figure out how to set up a mailing list and populate it with people who have already shown an interest in what you sell.
A good Permission-Based Email Marketing Management company will be able to give you printed postcards that encourage the people already coming to your store, to sign up to receive mailings from your company.
Of course, you must be careful with any such mailing list, as you do not want to irritate the people who are already buying from you.
So instead of pounding them with endless emails asking them into your store to what you are selling, it is advisable to take one of two, or both, of these email marketing techniques into practice, to stay on the good side of your customers:
1. Offer special promotions, available only to mailing list subscribers;
2. Offer useful information to your customers, to help them solve problems in their daily lives.
When consumers look forward to opening your emails, they will open your emails more often. This affects your email Open Rate, which is an important metric to measure the value of your Permission-Based Mailing List.
The second metric to measuring the value of your email list is comparing the Open Rates of your email to the number of people who responded to your email Call-to-Action.
Both numbers are important to understanding the value of your Permission-Based Marketing efforts. According to another study of consumer behavior, Epsilon suggested that a full 67% of consumers on a business’ email mailing list will purchase from the store, based on having received an email from that store.
Where else can the offline business owner put his or her advertising dollars, and generate a response rate of 2-out-of-3 consumers buying from the store as the result of the advertising?
The answer is simple — no where…
If you have not yet started using email marketing to promote your offline business, the time to start doing that is now!!
After all, it is easier and cheaper to generate repeat business from existing customers, than it is to find new customers.
Once you begin to experience the power of Permission-Based Email Marketing, you will no longer need to wonder if you are throwing away your limited advertising dollars on local advertising that does not provide increases for your store…
Visit our website shown below, to learn how we can help you get your customers back into your store, with cash in hand — ready to what you are selling.
Hunter Waterhouse has been helping business owners, promote their businesses, for nearly a decade. If you would like to , learn about our Services at: Article Source:
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