Boost your Sales and Kick Start your Business

Follow the steps outlined below and you will increase your sales and your client base, which will lead to additional profit and growth in your business. Despite what any e-mail or website will tell you, there is no simple method to grow your company. It certainly will not happen with you sitting in an armchair or even when you are asleep. The hard facts of the matter are that all successful business owners have achieved what they have by working hard, but also crucially working smart. Hard work is not a guarantee of success on its own, but couple that with smart work and you will be on the fast track to success. I will spell-out what I undertook to achieve the success I have had, and I am certain that if you follow my guidelines that you can see the same level of success as I did. To start with, a little bit about the success I have had so far. I am not a millionaire, far from it. I have achieved modest, maintainable sales growth on an ongoing basis that has added approximately 10% to my profits month-on-month. I have no special skill sets and nor did I spend vast sums of money to achieve this success. My business sells in the Business-2-Business marketplace which is where this process works best. Sadly, this is no special secret plan that I have dreamt up. The truth is smart working is often just the basics reworked. It is just taking some time to step back from coalface, look at your company and work out a sensible strategy. For me this meant focussing on the reality that to get growth in my business I needed to either add more customers or get my current customers spending money. Hardly rocket science that one is it! The way I did it was to focus on e-mail marketing. Now to begin with, I have to say, if you are ready to stop reading please bear with me. I too, was verysceptical to start with, but I had to face the fact that I could not recruit a sales person to do fulfil this role, and I would not be able to find the necessary space in my diary to do what I would call the normal sales work. To date I had always proudly stated that I had never done business with a customer I had not met in person, and I was not going to compromise that standard. I have to say that I have learnt the hard way and had a few setbacks en route, but here is my 8 point strategicplan that sums up how I made it successful. 1. I rapidly understood that you cannot send e-mails to lots of people using standard e-mail software. The spam filters currently available just direct your email to the junk folder. I tried many different programs, but have chosen Interspire which is a web based software, as my program of choice. True it does cost, and there are some very good free programs out there as well (PHP List comes to mind), but it does everything I want and more. 2. Make sure you have a good relationship with your ISP as you will undoubtedly have guidelines as to how many e-mails you can send and the speed you can send them. There is a incredibly fine line between legitimate marketing and spamming. Make sure you do not cross it. 3. Having mentioned the spam word, it is appropriate to address that issue as well. There are some crucial rules you need to follow when sending e-mails. Firstly, if at all possible get your e-mails by having people subscribe to your website and have them supply you with their e-mail. This is called the opt-in method. It is hugely more successful as you are emailing to prospects who have actually asked for your email. This is the only way you can function if you are sending emails direct to consumers. If your company operates in the B”B marketplace, then you can purchase a mailing list of some description and use that. If you go down this route, then there are three vital things you must do: a. The emails address you send your emails from must be a used and registered email address; b. You must only send business related e-mails to the emails you have; c. You must always have an unsubscribe link on each e-mail you send. It follows that you must always also unsubscribe anybody that uses it. (The program I use does this automatically.) If you adhere to these rules your marketing campaign will beperfectly within the law. 4. Make your e-mails pleasant to read in addition to having the promotion within it. Remember to make the subject line of the e-mail eye-catching and try to avoid sending any e-mail with loads of images. This option just slows down the system and irritates recipients. Take your readers on a journey with you; do not send the same emails each week, alternate them so the readers get to see the full resources of your company. 5. Endeavour wherever possible to send to your emails at the same time each week. Do not bombard them every day, nor mail infrequently like monthly. A weekly email received at the same time every week will be more likely to be read. 6. You will find several programs offering to verify the email addresses in your list. I can advise you that I have 6 of them installed on my laptop. When I run my list through each program, they all indicate which addresses are either valid or not valid. Even after I sent emails out to the list I had, I could not tally up any of the verifier programs as being particularly effective. The best way I found was to send the emails in manageable bundles and handle the returned emails as they arrive. If the software you use does this automatically all the better. 7. You will no doubt get many returned e-mails, that cannot be sent or the e-mail address you have no longer exists. Make sure you delete them from your list immediately as this will just annoy your web hoster who will make the assumption that you are a spammer and block your account. 8. Begin with a small manageable list. Get 1,000 addresses and send those to see how you fare. You will learn more quickly, and be respected by your web hoster if you steadily grow rather than trying to send a vast number of emails out over night. These are my 8 points to success in email marketing. I can truthfully say that I never broke any of them. I began using a free bulk email program and I purchased a mailing list. I quickly understood that the better the software the more likely my email was to go through. I also learnt that certain words and phrases also triggered spam filters, so none of my emails offer FREE or NO OBLIGATION items. I have my own subscribe page on my website, but to kick start the whole process I purchased a mailing list. It was excellent value, but predictably, it did contain a number of invalid emails. However, by working smart and carefully, I eradicated most of them and now have a list which is significantly reduced, but works very well for my needs. The truth is, it is excellent value for money even after you take into account the inaccurate addresses. To begin with, the mailing list was the only place I invested, and I have to say it was excellent value for money. I now send 1,000 e-mails a day, each week, and get on average 15 replies a week. Now I can imagine several marketing departments being scornful of this, telling me how poor my response is. But in truth, it takes me 90 minutes a day to send out the emails, and 15 responses a week is an amount I can control and has lead to me expanding my business by the percentages I stated earlier. I win on average 4 new customers a week. Now in the current market, who is going to laugh at that?