Grow Your Small Business with Email Marketing

Email marketing can be a great way to grow your small business, attract attention to a cause, conduct surveys, and more. You may already be doing this in one form or another, but as your contact list grows, you will need the help of permission-based email software like iContact.

Why use email marketing?

If you haven’t already incorporated email marketing into your business plan, it is a low cost, effective way to build relationships with your customers and audiences. Companies with goods to sell spend an average of $7 per order with email marketing strategies, which is 60 to 92 percent less¹ than the cost of other online marketing strategies. And, another study shows that people prefer getting promotional messages via email over direct mail (a.k.a. junk mail) and other methods.²

Why do I need iContact?

Using a service like iContact will make your marketing life easier. iContact works around many of the do-it-yourself limitations, it increases the legitimacy of your emails, and it gives you a real-time picture of how well your email marketing is working for you.

• Send high volumes of email safely. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) limit the number of emails you can send in one day. On the low end, you may be allowed as few as 100 emails, and each recipient you send to counts toward the total. The do-it-yourself approach also could get you black-listed as a spammer. However, iContact has agreements with large email providers like AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and others that allow spam-free delivery of their emails.
  
  
• Send emails faster. Emails sent by iContact will get there faster. The speed of your ISP may vary or even get sluggish on occasion, but iContact uses their own high-speed servers so that your email is sent out within minutes or even seconds.
  
  
• Comply with regulations. In 2004, the Federal Trade Commission started enforcing a new law to help protect consumers from spam. Violating the CAN-SPAM Act (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) can result in steep fines. Using iContact ensures that you are in compliance with most of these rules.
  
  
  iContact adds legally compliant opt-out language and functionality to each email you send. Recipients also get the reassurance that if they opt out of a list, the sender can’t bypass the request and add them back.
  
  
• Measure email effectiveness. Perhaps the best reason to use iContact is so you’ll know how well your email campaign is working. Their service tracks how many people open your email, click on links, unsubscribe and more. It automatically generates a variety of reports for each email you send or over the life of your email campaign.
  
  
• Conduct surveys. iContact lets you easily create and send email surveys then compiles the results for you. This is a great way to open up two-way communication with your audiences. For starters, you may want to ask people what they like about your emails and how you could improve them.
  
  
• Segment lists. With email marketing, one size doesn’t always fit all. iContact allows you to easily segment your master list into smaller lists. This is especially helpful if you let people choose the types of messages they want to receive. For example, some people may only want to receive information about contests and others may only want to know about classes. Respecting your customer’s wishes will build your credibility and help prevent them from unsubscribing.
  
  
  You may also want to try out different messages or graphics with different audiences to see what gets the best response. This is called split testing. It’s a great way to determine if, for example, coupons are best received by people over 55 and contests are preferred by younger audience members.

How do I get started?

Whether you’ve already tried email marketing or this is a new approach for your business, iContact makes it simple and cost effective. Your first step is to sign up for a free trial or subscribe to iContact’s affordable monthly plan for only $9.95 per month. You can get help with starting your email marketing by accessing member-only articles, a whitepaper and webinars. Plus, friendly support is available every step of the way via phone, email or online chat.

If you don’t already have a list of contacts, iContact will help you with that too. The service walks you though the creation of a sign-up form then gives you the code you need to plug it into your web site. You also can manually add contacts one at a time; import several at once from Excel, Vcard or CSV files; or use iContact’s unique copy and paste tool that lets you paste a chunk of text containing addresses so iContact can save the information you’ll need for your list and ignore the rest.

Now, you are ready to send announcements, newsletters, surveys and more via email and you’ll look good doing it, too. iContact provides more than 300 professionally designed email newsletter templates, or you can upload one of your own.

¹ Shop.org, State of Retailing Online 2008: Marketing Report

² ExactTarget, 2008 Channel Preference Survey