Dominate Your Local Market!

We’re getting down to the last days of this holiday shopping season. I sincerely hope you are experiencing a good year, business-wise.

I also want to be sure you are setting the stage for a better year in 2010.

This post has just one message… get their name and email address!

Get them from everyone who walks in the door – no exceptions.

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“A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.” – Henry Ford

According to some of the latest economic figures, we are in the beginning stages of economic recovery. I’m sure this is a relief to all of us even if unemployment figures are still way too high. Employment always lags behind in a recovery.

It may be a slow road back, but at least we are moving in a positive direction. Sadly some businesses have not been able to survive the downturn, but those that have will have an unprecedented opportunity for growth in the coming years.

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There’s a lot of speculation on what the holiday season will be like this year for local businesses. Nobody is quite sure what to expect although not many are anticipating a banner year.

Despite the gloomy predictions, you can use this holiday season to leverage the customers who will visit you and/or buy from you this year to boost your business next year and beyond as the economy recovers.

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In our last post, we stated that to begin a successful email marketing campaign, you need to do two things:

1. Build a quality list of prospects or customers.
2. Email to that list in a way that achieves maximum deliverability.

In that last post, we covered #1, building a quality list. Today, we’ll cover #2 – emailing to that list in a way that achieves maximum deliverability.

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No one knows for sure what this holiday season is going to hold in store for local businesses. It may be a good year, it may be a another off year. One thing we can be reasonably sure of is that it won’t be a banner year – the economy is still too fragile for that.

How does a local business make the best of the situation? By laying the groundwork to take best advantage of recovery as it comes. Those that gain the most momentum during recovery will maintain their lead in the following years.

One of the most basic ways to gain that momentum is to build and properly use a mailing list. It’s an old axiom in Internet Marketing that the money is in the list. The same can be said for local business marketing. With a list, email or snail mail, you can economically and efficiently stay in contact with your customers or prospects.

In today’s world, EVERY business has to excel at direct marketing and an email list is the most efficient and cost-effective way.

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You all know how powerful a well-conceived email marketing program can be. Forgot? I sometimes forget the details, too. According to the Direct Marketing Association, in 2008, email marketing returned and average $45.65 on each dollar spent. That’s an ROI (Return on Investment) of 4,565%! Can you think of any other marketing strategy for local businesses that offers that kind of return?

That is why you hear Internet Marketers repeat themselves over and over and over again – “The money is in the list.”

But here’s a little secret about that astonishing figure. It takes into account an average of ALL email marketing campaigns (except spamming, which has an historically abysmal rate of return). So it is a average of both good and bad campaigns. That means some folks are doing a lot better than the $45.65 average – and of course, some are doing worse.

How can you make sure that your email campaign is in the “doing better” group?

There are a few factors that come into play that can make your email marketing perform at it’s best. Here are a few:

1. Quality of the list – Do they want it?
2. Deliverability – Do they receive it?
3. Relevance – Do they read it?
4. Actionability – Do they respond to it?

Obviously, none of these questions have a simple “yes” or “no” answer. But the higher the percentage of “yesses” to each one, the higher the return on your investment will be.

PHPList is one application you may use to send emails to your prospects and customers. AutoResponse Plus is another. And aWeber is an online application service provider (ASP) that can host your email campaigns. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, which we will go over in depth in another post.

PHPList posts a PreFlight Checklist on some things you should do before sending emails that can help increase the deliverability rate of your messages (the percentage that actually make it to your customer’s email box).

Whether you are using PHPList or not, these tips apply to your email marketing program. So have a look at them and then check and be sure you are in compliance with them.

It could make the difference between being in the “above average” group or the “below average” one. And that difference can be measured in dollars and cents – YOUR dollars and cents.