Since email marketing has become an integral part of any small business marketing strategy, you do want to follow some simple advice to ensure your email marketing is received well, provides values and increases your revenues!

Plan Early & Send Early

When it comes to email campaigns, you may not realize this, but the sooner you get on your clients’ and/or customers’ minds, the better off you are. You better believe your competition is planning and sending out early campaigns. If you plan your campaigns in advance, you will be better prepared to change course if need be.

Be Consistent in Your Frequency

As you know the rule of thumb is 7 times exposed before a prospect becomes a customer. That guideline is certainly still viable and valid. If you only take the time to send 2 or 3 messages in your email marketing campaign, then you are leaving money on the table, no doubt about it. Keep your frequency going, use similar, if not the same template with different content.

Use Calls to Action and Incentives

People like getting stuff, and in their core, they like taking action, when they perceive true value. If you don’t provide an incentive or call to action, you will NEVER be able to tap that intrinsic desire to get something or take action. There are limitless possibilities for incentives and calls to action – they can simply be value add services and offerings, or limited time offers, contests and giveaways.

For Goodness Sakes, Use HTML

The only time this would not apply, is if the majority of your email list has opted out of HTML emails, or rather chosen plain text for their delivery method. But why, you ask? HTML is far prettier than plain text or even rich text and people like pretty! You also have more control over how your email marketing content is delivered. NOTE: always provide a link to the “hosted” HTML version of your email marketing piece, so users that want to see your HTML without compromising their email client can experience the full HTML email effect.

Send Holiday & Special Occasion Emails

People all have egos, if you stroke them at least 7 times a year, you stand a far greater chance of them receiving your messages, reading them in their entirety and also interacting with your organization. People like to know that others care about them, so make sure these emails are geared toward the client and NOT your offers. Of course, include a call to action, just like with every email, but keep your promotional copy to the bare minimum on these emails.

If you keep these email marketing tips in mind, you stand to blow your competition out of the water moving forward.

Building a business online can be a rough task. With so many business “experts” pulling you in a hundred directions with their advice, it’s nice to come back to “core” concepts and refocus your online marketing efforts.

I’m going to share with you the 5 fundamental thoughts I have when it comes to building business online. This is not hype or pie in the sky, but rather a clear mindset for planning your business marketing strategy, especially when it comes to the marketing online.

Build Your Email Marketing List

The more emails you have on your list the more profit potential you have in your business. This is a huge void for most small businesses. If you don’t have a tool in place to manage your list, get one ASAP. Make sure your site has a form to get new subscribers.

Automate Your Marketing Processes Online

You can use great tools like this business marketing automation tool, or even have your own custom application built. Processes include, client account setup, account management, subscription management, email marketing, customer incentives, affiliate management, credit/points management, shopping cart, online payments, recurring payments, etc… the list of processed that can be automated online is just ridiculous, I’ll leave it there for the sake of brevity.

Leverage Social Media & Web 2.0

You can use videos, audios, pdfs, social groups and profiles, contests, giveaways or even a referral process with rewards. Social Media and Web 2.0 are not synonymous with Social Networking Sites, but rather embody the concept of virtual, word of mouth marketing. This is one of the most powerful, yet least understood marketing strategies of them all! No one is going to have all of the answers, be very WARY of those claiming to have the “final answer”, as it were.

Think subscriptions

Subscriptions, and more specifically, automated subscriptions is the best move a business can make. If you only sell products in your business, you may have internal sources for recurring revenue. Just spend some time thinking about what is valuable to your clients and how to turn that into a monthly subscription.

Selling a product one off is great and all, but it’s much nicer to have the base of passive residual income flowing! Not only will you profit more, but if your exit strategy is to sell your business, then you’ll want some residual income flowing, to demand top dollar!

Get in the news

I sometimes feel sorry for retail establishments that have no news about, but most of the time it gets me excited! Why? Because I know I can help them generate returns with a well executed press distribution strategy. Anyone can submit a press release, but not everyone has the reporters calling them!

And of course, the most fruitful of all strategies…

Use Common Sense

I knew you’d get a kick out of that one.. what I mean by that is, know what you’re getting into and plan ahead so you can have a well rounded marketing strategy that encompasses these 5 core concepts.

If you are looking for some expert video training for getting your business online, take a look at Maverick Money Maker Series – I know you’ll be impressed!