Email Marketing: Low Tech Strategies for Small Businesses – Planning

If you’re a the small business owner, then the following scenario will not be difficult to imagine. You know that you could be connecting better with customers. You know that you could start to interest new customers. You know you could build more customer loyalty. What’s the problem? No budget for sophisticated email marketing software and little time.

How do you begin? Well, most successful efforts begin with some sort of plan. What questions do you need to answer to build your plan? Let’s take a look.

Five Questions to Help you Build Your Email Marketing Plan

First question – what is the goal of your email campaign? Do you want to increase customer loyalty? Do you want to bring more people into your shop or restaurant?
Next, what do you have to offer them? Do you have some interesting cooking tips, recipes, special discounts?
How will you legally collect addresses and how will you comply with all the laws regarding email marketing. See yesterday’s post about CAN-SPAM. Here you may need to get some help.
How frequently will you email your list? We will address this in a future post but excessive emails will turn people off.
How will you track the success of your efforts? Will you have them print off a coupon, go to a specific web page that you’re watching for visits? This will depend on your access to your website and the ease with which you can add and follow specific pages.

Think about these steps and tomorrow we’ll look more closely at the first question, “What is the goal of your campaign?”

Thanks for reading. Please add your questions or comments below.