The most commonly used Internet marketing tools are email and the World Wide Web. They open up entirely new "virtual locations" for you to market, promote and sell your products and services. Some ideas about how to integrate email and web marketing strategies into your overall marketing strategy follow.
Email Marketing Ideas
Broadcast your email address like a phone number.
- Include your email address on your business cards, brochures and letterhead. Include it anytime you list your phone number.
- Add your email address to all of your press releases and press materials.
- If you have an actively maintained email address for customer service or technical assistance, include it on your product packaging.
- List your business name and email address on the websites of any relevant directories.
- Include your email address in your Yellow Pages ad. In fact, include your email address in all appropriate advertisements.
Collect email addresses.
- If you have a website, ask customers for an email address in your "online guest book."
- Offer to use email to deliver information to customers and prospects such as price lists and product facts when appropriate.
- Collect email addresses at conferences and trade shows. Give yours out, too.
- Build an email database for future mailings. Include valuable demographic information in your database that will allow you to segment and target your email messages.
Correspond with customers and prospects by email.
- Send follow-up emails to purchasers of your products or services. Thank them for their business and let them know how to reach you by email.
- Send holiday greetings to customers and prospects on email.
- Send email to promptly follow up with contacts made at conferences and trade shows.
- Create a "group" of customers' email addresses so you can send an email with news of your business to all of them at once without having all of the individual addresses displayed on the email header for all recipients to see. Most email software applications will provide you with instructions for creating a group in your address book.
Join discussion groups and listservs both to learn and to represent your business.
By joining groups that your customers participate in, you will have the opportunity to soft-sell by representing yourself as knowledgeable and accessible to your customer base.Listservs are groups of individuals with a common interest who have subscribed to a mailing list. Each subscriber has the ability to ask, answer, and voice opinions by sending an e-mail message to the entire subscriber base.
Discussion groups differ from listservs in their format of being public bulletin boards, instead of subscriber-based mailing lists. Discussion groups are formed around a common interest, are usually open to anyone, and can be searched.
Website Marketing Ideas
Broadcast your website like a phone number.
- Include your web address on all printed material (brochures, stationery, business cards, and press materials).
- Include your web address in your email signature file.
- Include your web address in your Yellow Pages listing and in other advertisements.
Entice customers and prospects to visit your website again and again.
- Update your site regularly.
- Add new features to your website regularly.
- Revise your site's Meta tags; to make it easier for search engines to find. (Your website developer can embed codes that the search engines use when indexing your web page.)
- Offer Internet specials, such as discounts for orders placed online.
- Host a discussion group on your website with customer comments and questions.
- Add small photos on opening pages that expand to full-size pictures only when clicked. (This saves loading time.)
- Tailor your choice of web features to your target market - just like you would with any other form of communication.
Regularly view your competitors' websites. Learn from what they do right and from their mistakes.
Use your site for sales and customer service.
- Use shopping cart software that allows customers to shop and order online. The software also provides instant feedback of total costs, including tax amounts, to your online customers.
- Have a secure website for Internet sales.
- Provide a street map to your business location on the Web. (Customers can print it out.) If you have multiple locations, find a way to let customers know which location is most convenient for them.
- Provide forms on your web page that can be completed and submitted online for customers' convenience. (If inquiries are allowed in the forms, respond to them promptly. Most web users expect a response within 24 hours.)
- Create a link to your email on every page in your website. That way, if something on the page sparks a customer's response, you've made it easy for them to "talk" to you.
- Make sure your customers can find you by searching with keywords. Check how easy it is to locate your site using various search engines.
- Check your website using various versions of browsers and types of computers to be sure it loads quickly and correctly. Get business associates and friends to access your site and tell you how it looks.
- Provide a variety of ways for online customers to contact you: by email, phone (800 number), fax and mail.
- Offer an online newsletter. This could be an electronic version of a printed newsletter you already publish, something entirely different, or a combination of the two.
- Feature some interesting history or suggestions about your area of business.
- Offer to include photos sent by your customers showing them using your business.
- Create a sense of family among your web page readers.
Use something like Google Adwords to target customers actively searching for what you sell.
