By Jennifer Shaheen, The Technology Therapist®
As featured in Women & Biz Magazine and WomensRadio.com

Big businesses spend millions of dollars on branding their names, focusing on being everywhere and playing the odds that consumers will eventually notice their product or service when the time is right. As a small, but growing business, I do not have that luxury nor do I have the budget to accomplish that task. So I decided over 2 years ago to use the Internet to communicate and stay connected with my audience. I made a commitment to create an email newsletter in January of 2003 and oh… how it has grown. But now in 2005 with spam guards and blacklists more and more small businesses wonder if email marketing is worth it.

The answer is simply YES!*

Fact: In December 2003, 44 people signed up for one of our free web classes. Out of those registered, 86% responded to an email invitation.

I added the * because there is more to it than just creating an email and sending it out once a month. You have to plan and target who your audience is and what they are really looking for.

Here are a few tips to help you get started:

- Understand the difference between a mass email and email marketing

A mass email is something you would send to a group of recipients through Outlook, Eudora or Entourage with members in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field with no way to track if they even opened your message. Email marketing is much more detailed. You need to use an outside company to send the email for you. A company that provides you with the ability to track how many people open your message. Without tracking how do you know your email marketing is working? You don’t.

- Subject hook. The subject line is the hook for people to open or trash your email. You have less than 10 words to convince someone you have something they want and need. Use keywords that will excite or even enrage your target audience. If you know your audience you will know just what they desire or even fear.

- Consistency wins every time. Create a plan and stick to it. If you say you are going to do something weekly then set a certain day of the week. If you want to send a monthly newsletter choose a day and a week for example, 2nd Wednesday of every month. You want your audience to look forward to getting your information.

- Target your mailings. Most email systems allow you to create groups or even classify audience members by specific characteristics. This will allow you to send different emails with articles or topics that relate more to your target groups. For example if you run a spa, you would want to segment men & women. Send both groups a list of services specific to them. Women have many of the same services as men but remove the items not applicable to them and maybe add pictures of women’s products only and then do the same for the men. Running separate campaigns like this may take you an extra 30 minutes but the return will be well worth the effort.

- Link to your web site. When you create an email marketing campaign with a weekly article or tip you should not put the entire article in the body because then you won’t know if people were truly interested and read the whole article. When you link back to your site you get a clear picture of what people are really interested in.

- Review the data. Make time to go back and review what’s hot & what’s not. Email marketing is one of the few areas you get immediate feedback. I recommend a quarterly review. Look at what topics people were most interested in. Now you can make target follow up calls or even send letters.

Email marketing can be a powerful tool to reach your market with targeted campaigns and email marketing is the only marketing where you can get instant feedback on what people like. If you take these steps and add on promotions and other incentives you will see a big difference in your business.

©The Technology Therapy Group, LLC

Jennifer Shaheen – The eMarketing and Technology Therapist