Have you ever wondered why you get so many spam email messages? The simple answer is that email marketing works. While traditional direct mail (ie, junk mail) gets a 1 to 2% response rate, targeted email messages can have returns of 10-20% or even 50%. Studies suggest that as many as 1 in 4 shoppers visit websites because of promotional emails. Regardless of the size of your enterprise, email marketing plays an integral role in your success. And that success is built upon your database.
If you’re like most small business owners, you want to maximize referrals and repeat business so that you don’t have to spend your time chasing down leads and convincing folks that they should do business with you. But building this type of business takes constant contact with your customers. If you own a retail store, you will want to provide an incentive to get email information from your customers when then come in to your store. Web site owners of course do this with each purchase, but what about people who are just visiting and not buying?
You see, as the months go by, your past customers just aren’t thinking about you anymore. That’s the cold, hard truth. And no matter how great your service was, your customers are busy living their lives–odds are, they won’t remember you. As a result, every email you send should incorporate your brand in some way.
If you want a strong customer base that is the backbone of your business, you must actively, systematically and methodically BUILD YOUR CUSTOMER BASE. You need to actively build your customer database—every day, every week, every month! All of your contact, prospect and customer data, order & billing info… everything needs to be entered and stored in the database. You need these people organized into meaningful groups. And you need the flexibility to sort through the database so that on a moment’s notice you can pull up prospects or customers that might bring you more business.
And when you combine a solid customer database with the power of sequential follow-up campaigns, you have the ability to land lots of new business in a short period of time. You can effortlessly create an email campaign that keeps your name in front of customers. Every message you send, no matter its content, must guide users towards a specific action. If you are sending a product announcement email, provide a link to a pre-populated shopping cart. If you are soliciting feedback, provide a link to a form. In each case, make your call to action prominent – tell the reader what you want them to do and tell them often. Once you start sending regular emails to your database it helps generate repeat business and referrals coming your way.
The WebStoresLtd shopping cart has all these features built into the software to make staying in contact with your customers easy. Visit www.WebStoresLtd.com today for more information.
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