Email Marketing

You may have seen some recent blogs about the "old fashioned" direct mail marketing and telemarketing.  Have you tried email marketing, or even marketing by text messages on your smartphone?

There is a blog entitled, "A 5-Pronged Approach for Using Strategic Email Marketing for Quality Lead Generation" if you have an interest in a different approach to marketing that had not been discussed as often as social media marketing or traditional methods of marketing.  I have used email marketing.  You can reach a large number of people for a very minimal cost.  You can solicit referral partners or go after potential clients directly.  You do need a different message based on the audience that you are targeting, and it does need to "tease" the recipients enough to respond.  You don't want to lay out your entire pitch in the email, just give the recipient enough information to arouse his/her curiosity.  It cannot be a quickly drafted message, there must be a hook that will elicit a response.

The blog that I referred to suggests that you narrowly define your goal that you want to accomplish with your email campaign.  You need to develop a high-quality list of email addresses.  Your message must be clear and concise.  You need to go after the decision makers in a company as well as people who work for the company in positions other than the CEO.  Seek some form of personal contact with your email message, either a phone call or a short face-to-face meeting so that you can start building personal relationships.

The email is just the ice-breaker and takes away the stigma of making a cold call since you will have had some contact with the email recipient before meeting with them personally or speaking with them on the phone.  The more people that you can contact within the same organization will give you a chance at finding someone that can open the door for you to others in the company and that may eventually lead to a much larger base for referrals or contact with potential clients on a more direct basis.

Email lists can be developed from your own database of contacts. You can also build your email list from websites of various companies with which you wish to do business.

It is an interesting concept.  It is not an exclusive methods by any means and can compliment your website, Facebook page, your LinkedIn profile and other websites on which you are active as you can include links in your email to your various platforms.  One word of caution, however, is that some junk mail filters do automatically route emails with embedded images and links into the recipient's junk mail folder.  Give it a try.  It does take some time, but otherwise, the cost cannot be beat.