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Using Email to Drive Customers to Your Business and Website

One of your most effective marketing tools will be e-mail. For now, it is free and it allows you to communicate an effective message with as many people as you can imagine. One of the best things that you can do for your business is to have excellent communication with the people you are doing business with. With our business at the Horse Course we return a personalized e-mail to every single question a customer can ask. This is not done because we just love to send e-mail to people all over the world, nor do we do it is because we like answering questions all the time. To be honest with you, answering e-mail is a tedious process, however, there is a very real value is in establishing good rapport with your customers.

The Value Behind Email

We are living in an age where you dial a phone number and you usually get a recorded message asking you to press another button, followed by another message asking you to press another button ad nausea. Customers and people feel like they aren't important. At all times your customers should be of the utmost importance and in no way viewed as though they are a waste of time. Building a relationship with them will let them know that you honestly appreciate their business and will do everything you can to make them happy.

Despite the way big businesses treat people these days, people are important and they want to feel that way. When you get an e-mail from a customer, answer it as quickly as you can and use the person's name several times in the e-mail to let them know that you are looking at them as an individual and not just a way to make quick money. You should even go so far as to on occasion, letting them know that I am actually doing this and that you actually care for and respect them. This has got to come from the bottom of your heart because you are dealing with a human being that is just like you, who wants to feel like they are special.

There are benefits to doing business this way. For one thing, people are more flexible, more receptive to your your product or abilities and will work with you on a business level. In the equine services realm, you have got to be a public relations person. If you are going to go out and effectively market your services or products, whether it is giving riding lessons, boarding horses, putting together events, or whatever, you need to know how to relate to people.

When you hand out your business card, you'll have your e-mail address on it. Make sure that you tell the people you are dealing with to e-mail you. Tell them that you have some valuable information that you will be sending them and you would like to e-mail it to them immediately. Also, have a small pad of paper with you at all times or something to write on and ask them for their e-mail address. 99% of the time, they will be happy to give it to you. You could even tell them that you write a newsletter (which I will talk about more in a minute) that explains your business and gives them valuable details that they can use.

Now, this is the only way I recommend for you to get e-mail addresses. You only want to get them by permission only. Whatever you do, do not go onto the Internet and purchase an e-mail stripping program that will randomly go through the Internet and harvest e-mail addresses of people and then spam them to death.

What is Spam and What is Spamming?

If you don't know what spamming is, let me give you a very short definition. Spamming is when you send somebody e-mail, that does not know you, has never done business with you, or has any relationship with you whatsoever. Spamming will do nothing more than get you a bad reputation. Not only can you get a bad reputation, but you can get reported to the search engines like Google and your local Internet service provider (ISP) which can put a lock on your email accounts. The best policy to have when using email as a marketing tool, is to use a well known method of collecting the addresses from people that want your messages. How can you do that? You will find that in Lesson Module 1.2

Take the assesment test for Module 1.0