Any local business can harness the power of the internet and put it to good use. Although email marketing has been associated more with online businesses, this strategy can also be extremely helpful to local businesses. The entire idea of email marketing is to create demand for goods and services with the help of e-newsletters. But it’s more sophisticated that just that. Business owners should be able to provide their recipients with an e-newsletter with helpful and newsworthy content. Only when businesses have established a relationship with their prospects by sharing useful information will they be able to advertise products without repelling prospects away.

Any email marketing campaign will have to start at the very beginning and that is to come up with a list of email addresses. You can always choose to purchase these lists but then you’ll never be assured of the quality of this list. If you’re sending e-newsletters to people who are not even part of your target market, your efforts would all go down the drain.

Step 1

Come up with an offer that prospects won’t refuse. You can always give out a CD, white paper or an eBook. Regardless of whatever you have in mind, those people who are part of your target market should find this item valuable.
You can also offer discounts if you also want to drive foot traffic to your store on top of jumpstarting your email marketing campaign. Or you can possibly have a draw with participants required to give out their email addresses.

Step 2

Keep things simple. You will need prospects to give out their contact information most especially their email addresses, or phone numbers and addresses. But if you ask your prospects to fill out a very long form, then that in itself might deter them from opting in. So keep things simple and ask only for information that is vital for your campaign, in this case email addresses.

Step 3

Send your e-newsletters right away. Don’t wait for an entire month before you start sending these people e-newsletters. Don’t badger them with so many either. Make sure that your emails are loaded with helpful information. Remember that recipients will always have the power to delete your emails or unsubscribe if they feel that your emails are just eating up space. Encourage your recipients to forward your emails or include a “subscribe” section to your emails to get more people into your list.

Chris Marentis is an experienced marketer who likes to write aboute Surefire Social and local marketing experts