News & Articles -
Small Business Promotion For Pennies!
By: Ron Beilin and Paul DelFino
Technology & E-mail Can Work For You - IF - You Capture & Manage E-Mail Addresses!
The average marketing budget for an Opportunity Inc client is between 03 - 3% of revenue. We challenge you to compute your cost per prospect or customer contact Our cost to send this 'Perspectives* newsletter to our friends is $0.015 per mailer The cost of business communication is falling!
Every entrepreneur believes he/she needs more dollars and investment in marketing and sales personnel. Small Business Owners are constantly battling a desire to invest in marketing vs the forever looming demands of cash flow and payroll.
We consultants continually remind business owners that you must reinforce brand and communicate with prospects, customers, and referral sources with regularity. Brand Marketing 101 mandates a consistent took with frequency in order to maximize brand awareness/recognition
But traditionally small businesses
- Have reduced access and limited budgets for mass media promotion
- Have splintered and bogged down direct mail mechanisms, to include problems with list availability and multiple production/fulfillment intermediaries
- Have mixed results with outbound calling programs
- Have struggled to devote resources to Web site maintenance
- Have lived with fear of the anticipated expense and low productivity associated with cold calling and sales force expansion programs.
Is the solution SPAM? NO - but direct e-mail can truly have a cost effective impact
We would encourage you all to visit www verticalresoonse com Take a tour of the site and envision the distribution of your customized and branded marketing messages for pennies It is true and it works
WHAT IS THE CATCH? - Who will you send your messages to? Have you been disciplined to capture e-mail addresses of every prospect, contact, referral source, or customer? If you have, you may be in a position to launch a targeted and graphically appealing marketing campaign of product/service announcement within hours. If you have not captured e-mail lists, we suggest you begin today.
We are not IT consultants, so we will allow your tour of the Vertical Response Web site to answer the tech and Implementation questions However we will offer a couple of important considerations that may increase your effectiveness
- Develop a personalized and identifiable banner/look dominated by your brand
- Generate campaigns with reasonable frequency so as to inform, educate, and raise interest without becoming perceived as spam or a nuisance
- Personalize mailing lists and compartmentalize campaigns by sender. That is, denote sender's names specific to those who have contacts with the receivers
- Time your mailing campaigns to arrive mid day and not in the early AM when most people erase overnight spam in mass
- Take care to avoid words m your 'Subject* line which are likely to activate spam control software of your receivers
- Keep communication crisp and to the point We all have a tot to read
- Make sure there is a central control and proofing function monitoring all activity It is your brand, so be sure to control the quality of what is distributed under It.
- WARNING - Stay up to date and familiarize yourself with ever-changing spam regulatory guidelines Utilize the report functions of Vertical Response to keep your e-mailing lists clean and to edit out unsubsribers with discipline.
- Apply central control to e-mailing list management with a compatible CRM system Capture every e-mail address possible from every contact possible and defend/protect your list with a passion
- Integrate e-mail campaigns into your overall marketing program as a lead, reinforcer and supplement at various times
Direct E-mail is now a truly viable and dependable marketing tool We counsel you to be on the forefront of this technology and resource It is:
- Efficient
- Targeted
- Dependable