Customer email addresses:
- Build repeat business
- Reduce your marketing spend per customer contact
Novel ways to make it easier for your employees to ask for, and get email addresses:
-At Front Desk/customer contact point, have a card that offers a drawing for something free or an immediate discount on something you need to sell. Be sure your employees make the offer verbally as well.
-In elevators, interrupt the music from time to time to ask customers to leave their email addresses to learn about coming specials. (We presume, you are already interrupting your the music to build your normal marketing and sales efforts. It’s extremely easy to do.)
-When interrupting your music, include endorsements from your employees or customers. Most people are thrilled to be asked to help. Employees will listen for their voices and voices of their friends. Then ask your employees for their ideas.
-Ask customers and employees for email addresses of other people who would/could be interested in your products and services. Offer a small incentive. Hotels can knock $5 off on a room upgrade, or offer a free appetizer in the restaurant,
Valid, opt in email lists are perhaps the single most important marketing tool available. They certainly are the least expensive form of advertising. Email give you the opportunity to create small lists, highly customized to meet the needs of specific customers.
Hotels for instance can have several email lists for their group clients. SMERF clients react to different information in the message than do large corporate groups. Large corporate groups will react best to different information than small corporate groups do. Resist “one size fits all” email campaigns. They generate more bad will than good will.
The cost in email marketing is the time spent making sure your email will appeal to the audience you are mailing to. Spammers get away with “throwing something at the wall in hopes it will stick.” The rest of us have to be much more focused in the content and headline of our email solicitations.
I’d be interested in publishing any success stories you are having.
