Chapter 1

Give Them What They Want

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The value proposition for high ROI e-mail newsletters is dead-simple: figure out what topics interest your customers and prospects. Write about these topics. Send them these articles in an e-mail newsletter. Do this and they’ll give you something you can’t get at any price in traditional marketing: their appreciation and their interest in what you have to say. Not just once, but over and over again. Earn their trust through these methods, sprinkle in a bit of salesmanship when appropriate and you’ll get way higher repeat revenues per customer.

“That won’t work for me, I sell to businesses.”

“That won’t work, I sell plumbing products – who wants to read about plumbing products?”

OK, first the BtoB argument. Did you every see a business sit down at the computer to open its e-mail? Of course not – businesses don’t open e-mails or buy things – people do. At one time I opened a print shop. As a startup in a small market, we didn’t feel we had the luxury of picking a certain market segment. We worked our butts off to sell to anyone who would give us their money. We worked with big companies, small companies, plumbers, restaurants, you name it. In that example, trying to create a newsletter that talked about our customers’ type of businesses would have been unachievable because there was no commonality.

Guess what though? All our best customers did have one thing in common – they all had an entrepreneurial spirit and we recognized that. It makes enough sense – as a young startup company ourselves, it seems we attracted customers that shared our entrepreneurial spirit. Once we had that realization we tried to position ourselves as a company that could help our customers to grow their business. Unfortunately, back in the mid-90’s we weren’t smart enough to figure out how to leverage e-mail marketing to boost retention and sales. Are you smart enough in 2008?

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