Boost Your Sales And Kick Start Your Business

Boost Your Sales And Kick Start Your Business

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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.

Inspite of what any e-mail or website will inform you, there is no simple method to grow your company. It certainly will not happen with you sitting in an armchair or indeed when you are asleep overnight. The reality of the situation is that all successful business owners have got there by working hard, but also vitally 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 have done to achieve the success I have had, and I am confident that if you follow my guidelines there will be no reason why you cannot do the same.

To start with, a little bit about the success I have had so far. I am not fantastically wealthy, far from it. I have achieved modest, sustainable sales growth on an ongoing basis that has added about 10% to my bottom line month-on-month. I don't have any special skill sets and nor did I spend huge sums of money to achieve this success. My business sells in the B2B marketplace which is where this whole system works best.

Unfortunately, this is no special secret plan that I have dreamt up. The truth is smart working is rarely something that is a stupendous idea. It is just taking a few moments to step back from coalface, look at your company and work out a sensible strategy. For me this meant focussing on the simple fact that to get necessary growth in my business I needed to either add more customers or get my average order value up. Hardly a eureka moment that one is it!

The way I did it was to concentrate on e-mail marketing. Now to begin with, I have to say, if you are just about to stop reading please bear with me. I too, was sceptical to start with, but I had to face the fact that I could not recruit a sales person to do this job, and I would not be able to find the necessary space in my diary to do what I would call the conventional sales work. To date I had always professed 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 plan that shows you how I made it successful.

1.I quickly learnt that you cannot send e-mails to lots of people using normal e-mail software. The spam filters available nowadays just direct your email to the junk folder. I tried many different programs, but have settled on Interspire which is installed on my server, as my program of choice. True it does cost, and there are some very good free programs out there as well (PHP List springs to mind), but it fulfils all my requirements and muchmore.

2.Make sure you have a good relationship with your ISP as you will undoubtedly have rules you will have to adhere to regarding how many e-mails you can send and how quickly you send them. There is a fine line between legitimate marketing and spamming. Make sure you do not cross it.

3.Having mentioned the spam word, now is an appropriate moment to address that issue as well. There are some critical rules you need to adhere to when sending e-mails. Firstly, if at all possible obtain your e-mails by having people subscribe to your website and have them supply you with their e-mail. This is the opt-in method. It is substantially more successful as you are emailing to prospects who have actually requested your email. This is the only way you can operate if you are sending emails direct to consumers. If your business is B2B, then you can obtain 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 legitimate email address;

b.You must only send business 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. (Interspire does this automatically.)

If you follow these rules your marketing campaign will beperfectly within the law.

4.Make your e-mails interesting to read in addition to having the offer within it. Remember to make the subject line of the e-mail eye-catching and try to avoid sending any e-mail with multiple images. This option just slows down the system and annoys recipients. Take your readers on a journey with you; do not send the same emails each week, vary 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 regular weekly email received at the same time every week will be much more likely to be opened.

6.You will find a number of programs offering to verify the email addresses you have. I can tell you that I have 6 of them installed on my laptop. When I run my list through each program, they all tell me different addresses are either valid or invalid. Even after I sent emails out to the list I had, I could not match up any of the verifier programs as being particularly effective. The most effective I found was to send the emails in manageable bundles and handle the returned emails as they arrive. If the program you use does this automatically even better.

7.You will undoubtedly receive bounce-backs, 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 ISP who will assume you are a spammer and close your account.

8.Start small and build up slowly. Get 1,000 addresses and send those to see how you get on. You will learn far more, and be respected by your ISP if you steadily grow as opposed to trying to send a huge list 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 learnt that the better the program the more likely my email was to go through. I also learnt that certain words and phrases also triggered spam filters, from that point onwards 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 as can always be expected, it did contain a number of invalid emails. However, by working smart and carefully, I removed most of them and now have a list which is significantly reduced, but works very well for my needs. The reality is, it is excellent value for money even after you take into account the invalid addresses.

To start off, the mailing list was the only place I invested, and I can categorically say it was well worth it. I now send 1,000 e-mails a day, each week, and get on average 15 replies a week. Now I can imagine a number of marketing departments being scornful of this, telling me how low my response is. But in reality, 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 mentioned earlier. I am currently winning on average 4 new accounts a week.

Now in the current business environment, who is going to complain about that?

About the Author:
For more information visit Consulmax. Ian is the owner of Consulmax, the BEST site for purchasing mailing databases.



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


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