We are living in an era where letters have been replaced by emails, birthday cards by digital cards and where we stay up to date with our friends and families by checking out their social network pages!

As a professional in any industry, it is therefore to keep up with the ever changing trends. This even includes the way you market your business! A couple of years ago the only to market your business was by means of very expensive newspaper and magazine advertisements. There was not really a way to measure the success rate of your advert. You can’t be guaranteed that a magazine with a readership of 100 000 meant that 100 000 people actually paid attention to your advert!

Email marketing, if used correctly, can be a very effective tool for marketing your business.

A travel agent or tour operator can inform clients about their special offers, a chain of grocery stores can let you know about their extended trading hours and the fact that they now also have a fresh fruit and vegetable section… and a music store can send a quick email to let their clients know about the latest CD or DVD that has just hit the shelves!

When using email marketing, it is important to supply information that would benefit your readers.

Keep in mind that there is a difference between email marketing and flooding peoples’ email servers with irrelevant (and very irritating!) junk emails. It is therefore vitally important that your emails are sent to the correct target market. If you are a supplier in the building industry, you would agree that a teenager only interested in nail polish and loud music, will delete your message without looking at it. However, this same teenager would grab a wallet and call a taxi if the email was about a sale at the hippest clothing store in the city!

How to you build up your email marketing database?

A properly populated email list takes some time to create. Do not waste your money on buying a random email list from a company. These email lists are firstly not targeted to a specific audience, and secondly you will most probably end up with a list where more than half of the email addresses don’t even exist anymore. And I’m pretty such this approach can’t be totally legal…Secondly, don’t send emails to every single address you can find in your address book – you might upset a couple of people in the process! Take time to build up your database by contacting existing customers and asking their permission to be put onto your list or run a competition where a lucky customer can win a prize by signing up for your newsletter. Be creative! As long as you add value to the person receiving the email’s life, you will have a happy customer who will keep on reading your emails, which will eventually results in more sales and return business.

Email marketing is not only easy to use, it is also very affordable.
The last thing to remember is: If you don’t have anything to say… don’t say it! Don’t send out meaningless emails which really does not say anything – your emails must be striking and to the point… otherwise your next messages might just be forwarded to the junk email folder…