Why You Should Build an E-Mail List for Your Business and What to Do with It

When you own your own business the name of the game is promotion and one way you may not have thought about promoting yourself before is with e-mail marketing. Building an e-mail list for your business will allow you to effectively promote your business and your products and is a great way to keep in touch with customers and prospective customers.

Wherever you go you should keep a journal with you and if you happen to start talking with someone, ask them for their e-mail address. Before you know it your journal will be full of e-mail addresses.

You should also have a place on your website that asks for people to give you their names and their e-mail address. In order to get their information you will have to offer them something for free such as a newsletter or articles, but that is okay as you can use those tools as promotional tools.

Once you have all these e-mail addresses what do you do with them? The idea is to build up a huge list of e-mail addresses. You will then need to use a service like Constant Contact and pay a monthly fee, but the fee is worth it as this type of service will allow you to be able to conduct mass e-mails without being pegged as SPAM. They also have tools that help you set up something eye catching to send out.

What you e-mail out is entirely up to you but the point is that you want to stay in touch with your customers and those who you want to add as customers. I would suggest that you group all of your e-mails into two categories. The first will be those who are current customers and the second will be those who are prospective customers.

Then you can send each group a specific e-mail. For your customers you may send a special offer for them only. For your prospects you may want to send a coupon good for their first purchase with you. You are only limited by your imagination. Services like Constant Contact can help you decide what to send and they even have templates that can be used where you simply provide your business info and before you know it a professional flyer is ready to be e-mailed away.

Letting an opportunity go by where you fail to seize the moment and ask for an e-mail address is a wasted business opportunity. With the ease of collecting e-mails and the ease of getting the word out about your company thanks to places like Constant Contact, staying in touch with your customers and potential customers has never been easier. E-mail marketing works and when done properly you will see some of those potential customers become actual customers and added sales as a result.

Source: Constant Contact, E-Mail Solutions from Constant Contact, Constantcontact.com