Don’t Overlook Email as a Primary Sales Tool In Your Home Business Arsenal - Part 1

Posted by Cindy Floyd

May 14, 2008

With all the noise on the internet and in the news about email spam, many home business owners may think that email marketing is either dead or not a good tool for advertising. Well I believe that email is as important as your website and is still one of your best options for building a relationship with your list.

But there is still a right and a wrong way to email marketing. Some marketers use email as an afterthought. So their emails have no substance and are not sent on a regular basis.

I am not the first one to say that “the money’s in the list”. Every home business owner can build a list but if they don’t manage the list then the list does not have any real value to the business. In other words you need to build a relationship with the people on your list.

This is even more important as internet marketers, since we do not have a brick and mortar spot to visit our customers face to face we need to keep in touch with them so they don’t forget us and we can continually extend our value to them.

So how do we do that?

In this 3 part serious I will discuss methods on the do’s and don’ts of email marketing.

As a home based business owner it’s your responsibility to keep in front of your list. By that I mean you should have constant contact with them. You should be contacting your list a minimum of once per week. If you have a very respective list then I would be getting in front of them more often.

Most internet marketers have more than one business their selling or at least more than one product in a given industry. If you are in the same industry that’s better; you can mix and match the emails to buyers of other products.

Most email readers fall within one of three categories, so it’s key to understand their actions when preparing your email.

Okay, who sent me an email today – these people are always available to their email and curious to open any email. Maybe however not so response to purchase?

I’m busy and I just have enough time to read the good stuff. These people scan their inbox for personal email, important business stuff and everything else is put off until later. You need to be right there in the middle.

Let me delete all the junk mail so it doesn’t clutter up my in-box. The average person will receive over 200 pieces of email a day. This includes newsletters, commercial email, e-zines and personal email. So they only want to spend their time reading what’s important. Build a relationship with them so they want to open and save your emails when they appear.

Your email is no different than any sales or web copy you post elsewhere on the internet. The heading or subject line is the most important. This will get someone to open your email or not.

It should be enticing enough to make them click on the link to open it. Good headline writing takes some practice but not impossible even for a beginner to grasp. Simple think about what you would open.

Put simply- it should address the two basic human needs:

Gain pleasure

Avoid pain

You need to appeal to the human need to gain pleasure or to avoid pain, and your responsibility is to convey that to your readers in a way that spot lights your product or services.

Get this right and you’ll get people to make opening your emails a priority.

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