At a recent business brainstorming event focused on the benefits of various online marketing technologies, I was surprised to learn that a substantial percentage of the small businesses in attendance had not implemented any form of online promotional effort to generate/cultivate leads, even e-mail marketing which is very cost effective.

Upon further questioning I learned that most of these businesses wanted to leverage this technology, but either did understand the mechanics of implementing it or did not have the time to devote to maintaining it. This article addresses those issues.

The basic concept is to keep your promotional and/or educational information in front of interested members of your target audience on a regular basis.  The most effective system I have found is to send a short, graphically eye-catching announcement via e-mail and incorporate a link back to a web page that contains the specific information. That accomplishes two things - capturing statistics on actual responses and increasing the probability that the material will actually be read!

There are 5 components required to build ongoing promotional campaigns. The key is to build an operational process around these components that becomes part of the overall marketing effort.

1. A database of email addresses to whom promotions are sent. Creating this list can be as easy as exporting from a contact manager or building a spreadsheet.

2. An input form on a website page that allows visitors to add themselves to the database.  This is called "opting in" and eliminates the element of spam in your promotions. It also eliminates the effort of keying entries to your database.

3. An HTML capable e-mail system. This allows inclusion of graphic images and colored text to get the attention of the recipient.

4. A landing page on your website that contains the specific information that you want the recipient to have.  It can be the Home Page but is most effective as a unique page.  Administrative capability for the website is required to build this page or a webmaster would have to do it.

5. A web program that can merge the announcement page with the selected database and send a unique e-mail to each recipient in the database. 

For those people who want to manage this process themselves , there are two options.

First, some websites include an application called e-Marketer that actually utilizes the customer/contacts database maintained by day-to-day operation of the site. Ask your webmaster if this capability is an available option on your site.  Our company does offer this capability on sites we develop.

Second, there are a number of excellent online products available in the marketplace that provide all of these capabilities. These links provide access to some of them. It is not difficult to learn to use their products.

www.ConstantContact.com
www.IContact.com
www.aweber.com

For those people who DO NOT want to manage this process, there are service providers who will handle all of the details and provide feedback on response rates for all promotions Proactive Promotions is one such provider. To learn more about their process, Click Here . 

If you found this helpful and would like to know more about our approach to achieving success with the Internet, please click on our logo at the top of the page.