Proximity Marketing Blog

No time like the present, right?

Take this scenario: You started a business and it’s booming. Until now, your marketing needs were manageable. Sure, you needed some help preparing fliers and designing a logo. And, the website? Hah, your brother has a friend who could design it on nights and weekends. Communicating with customers and new business acquisition? That is all you--sending out direct mail and making follow up calls like a champ is your job.

But, guess what? The other things that come with running a small business start to add up such as vendor and customer relations, employee issues, insurance and benefits, and financial partnership arrangements and relationships. My goodness, you even have to take out the trash at the end of the day! And the list goes on and on...

Exhausted, yet?

Now you need to fill the corners and edges of your yearly profit with new revenue from both existing and new customers. Sure, you can make all the phone calls, post to the website, and send mail and email.

But it all takes TIME away from all the other to-do’s. It also takes time to design an email campaign, select a list, deploy it and follow up. And, there’s no guarantee you’ll get the results you want from your campaign. Let’s face it, your least expensive, most direct, and most effective way of communication MUST bring results.

So, consider a trusted third party email marketing partner.

Why?

This partner will listen to your goals, relate your overall marketing strategy to each individual campaign, provide you measurable results, and help you review and understand them. This partner can design a follow-up campaign to help capture those recipients who were “on the fence” and may not have paid attention to your first launch. It’ll provide you an email design engineered to work because it’ll know your business model. That partner will help you understand the best day and time to deploy based on the email results metrics. BLUF: A partner will help you succeed.

But, you’ll need to track results, which will involve your sales team. Your partner can help you track the results in the following areas:

* Delivery rates - so you know your list is providing you the benefit you hoped.

* HTML open rates - so you know your customers see your emails.

* Click rates - these are where your leads come from. If somebody is clicking on an item in your email, he wants to know more about you.

* Opt-out rates - this is when someone doesn’t want to know more about you. (You’ll want to tabulate your opt-outs since it’s against the law to email someone who has specifically asked you not to email him.)

Remember, click rates are THE gauge of email, and that is where your business results come from. Your email vendor should help you maximize your click rates for the best results. Your click rates are where your revenue benefit is captured. Your email vendor will be able to help you define who it was that clicked on your email and what was clicked. Then, you can call that lead.

Also, keep in mind: You must try to keep your delivery rates as high as possible. If you use a rented list, make sure your email marketing partner uses a source who intimately knows the lists they rent to help keep the delivery rates high. (And, keep up with your own internal lists, so you are not deploying to duplicate or invalid email addresses.)

Companies that provide an email marketing service will help you succeed in email. They hire people that make it happen to include account managers, designers, DBAs and list managers. They also have the TIME, can design a working successful promotion, and report on the results.

They do all this, so you don’t have to.

So, save time, alleviate stress, and consider a a trusted third party email partner to help you grow your business.