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By Neil Anuskiewicz
The fact is that you have much more to gain by sharing information than by hoarding it. The most effective means to disseminate your knowledge is to write articles and publish them on the Web. In return, you can get a higher search engine rank, sales leads, and new business. If you diligently share your knowledge with the world, rewards will flow back to you in due time.
Email Marketing: A crucial but often overlooked component of starting an online business is to have an email marketing solution in place and integrate email marketing into your operations from the beginning. This insures that you collect customer email addresses and ask them from the beginning if they want to receive emails from you. Email can include invoices (often automated), product updates, announcements, special promotions, and email newsletters.
Email is a powerful tool that can help you reduce costs and increase efficiency but perhaps even more powerful is the power of email to increase customer loyalty and retention. As the provider of a product or service that your customers need, you also have information that could benefit your customers as well. If you produce a newsletter and regularly put in the time to create useful content, you will increase your mind share among your customers and they will very likely think of you next time they need to make a purchasing decision.
Provide consistently good content and special deals for the subscribers to your newsletter. Make sure that your customers feel they are getting multiple tangible and intangible benefits from listening to what you have to say.
At a minimum, an email marketing service should make it easy for you to create eye-catching emails, manage multiple email lists, and place newsletter sign-up forms on your website. There should be powerful list management, robust reporting, and reliability.
Your email marketing service should include an easy way to track the results of your email campaigns. Who opened your email, how many times, and when? Did they click on the link you provided? Did they purchase anything or submit a lead? The service should enable you to track message reads in real time, and read detailed reports online or export them to a spreadsheet.
In addition, your email marketing service should give you the ability to manage multiple lists and divide lists into multiple segments. Last, but not least, it is preferable that your email marketing service provider give you a private IP address, rather than one you share with other customers. A private IP address is preferable to a shared IP address, because with a shared IP address you are vulnerable to the shared IP address being blacklisted because of the mistakes of other customers of your email marketing service provider. With a private IP address, you are the only one who sends email through your IP address.
It is also important that your email marketing provider knows the CAN SPAM regulations and makes it easy for clients to comply with them. Knowledge of and compliance with CAN SPAM is crucial for successful email marketing implementation, and with earning and keeping the good graces of ISP’s and other networks. In addition, nothing will ruin the good will of your customers faster than spam. On the other hand, properly implemented permission-based email marketing is one of the most powerful forms of marketing. Done well, email marketing can earn you a reputation as an expert and help you make giant leaps in customer loyalty.
This article is a primer, a survey, of the topics you need to consider from the beginning to have a successful online business. You will want to research each of these topics in much greater depth than I covered them here. It is worth your time to read articles on each of these topics, and even invest the time to read books as well. The effort you put in educating yourself about the various components of starting your online business will pay off, making it well worth the time investment.
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