.

Contacting your prospects and clients using email marketing is arguably the most cost-effective way for any business…and it works!

It doesn’t matter if you’re on a shoestring budget – or you have a million dollar marketing budget – using email marketing blasts is just plain smart.

And what makes it better is you don’t even have to have a website (even though I didn’t know why you wouldn’t have one) to market with email. Of course, if you do have a website, it’s a no-brainer to integrate email marketing and list building into it.

Here’s an actual example of a recent client (ABC Inc):

ABC Inc is a local shoe retailer that primarily advertised in print, and they get a ton of traffic in their stores because of it.

But the printing and mailing were costing them a small fortune.

After meeting with them, I found they’d also been manually collecting names and email addresses at the checkout registers – over 2,000 in all entered in a spreadsheet – but didn’t know if they could do anything useful with them.

In addition to that, because of website problems, they didn’t want to get involved with integrating any type of email program – yet.

So I set up a simple program for them that any business can follow.

In a nutshell, we set up an autoresponder email management account at constant Contact and uploaded their email addresses to the Constant Contact site.

From there, we wrote a series of follow-up emails to be sent automatically at pre-defined intervals, including thank you emails, special promo emails, up-sells, new product info, and holiday specials.

As more people provided their emails, they simply added them to the list once a week, and the rest is taken care of. They were even able to segment the list into groups (dress shoes, boots, sports, etc) so they could send laser-focused impromptu messages to specific buyers.

How cool is that?

The fees incurred with this program including strategy, implementation, and copywriting fees for the emails, and the low monthly fees ($30/mth) for Constant Contact. After one quarter, they saved over $8,000 in print and postage.

What’s next for them? Well…The best part is when their website is ready, it’s going to be a piece of cake to integrate the email marketing into it using a sign-up form, and it will be completely automatic.

I’d like to hear your thoughts…

And if you need offline direct response marketing copy and advice, go to www.crestviewmarketing.com

To your website’s success!

Merrill Clark
Website and Direct Response Copywriter