Your Questions About Email Marketing Services

Jere answers:

Dear John,

I sell promotional giveaway items to Servpro, and they go directly to the insurance people, builders, and other prospects and visit everyone in their territory at least once a month with a little desktop promotional item with their information on them. They have our area saturated and have nearly all the business, see those little green and orange vans all over the place, so it must be working.

Some of the items they have given away are rulers, calculators, candy jars, mugs, staplers, magnets, magnetic memo boards, tote bags, door hangers (These are used with a $10 off whole house carpet cleaning coupon, and placed on every house door within a block of where they are working.), cellphone holders, magnetic house shaped clips, clipboards, pens, laminated rolodex cards, highlighters, calendars, CD cleaners, keychains, staple removers, bandaid cases for purses, mirrors, mousepads, house shaped sticky notes, and magnetic picture frames, plus more I cannot even think of right now.

In general, cold calling will get you more results than anything else, because you become a person instead of just an email. You can also do a postcard campaign to your total prospect list giving an overview of what you do, your benefits to the adjusters & property managers, and why they should choose you. Have your photo, your contact information, your experience, etc all on the mailing. Use a full color, large size postcard, and take advantage of free use of a bulk mail permit or mailing service offered. Or just stamp it yourself, using a really cool first class stamp. I often use superhero or moviestar stamps to get attention.

Sometimes they just go in with refills for the candy jar or baked goods. You could even have a bakery customise some sugar cookies with your colors and logo.

Their budget is only a few hundred dollars a month for giveaways, but there are so many things that can be done up for that, and it makes each of your callsEmail marketing can work AFTER you have an established rapport with the customers. You could use it in conjunction, with a little industry newsletter that has relevant information to them, as well as any of your customer testimonials, and a coupon or something.

Hope this helps! I have included a couple of websites that have additional information you might be helped by. Congratulations on your new company, and all the best to you!

Jere answers:

There is a ton of software out there. No software will do everything! You need to decide what you want out of a software program. Some software will hurt your efforts if you do not use it wisely.

The best places to market your business is social sites. They are free and very popular.

If you are are a small business with a local location that consumers come into and not just online then Local marketing online is the way to go ( google local, yahoo local, twitter, facebook, myspace, Customer list very important for email marketing ).

Take the time and find some webinars that will help you look at what type of marketing you need for your business.

I would start with twitter, facebook, and myspace. Then look up keywords that you think a customer would put in google to find your business.

I will be having a free webinar for about 20 people coming up soon on twitter and how to use it for small business.

An excellent example of using Twitter as a marketing tool, as a customer service avenue and as a Community Builder is Zappos.

Let me know what kind of business it is and I may be able to be more specific on what tools you can use to promote it.

Jere answers:

Well it depends on what you are trying to do. I actually have an account as well that I use to get paid for services. I upgraded my account to a merchant account. This allows me to get paid for my social marketing services and my online products. You can most certainly get another account but it has to be a different bank account. I have like four different bank accounts. What I did for my online course is create a paypal button using my merchant account and placed it on my sales page.

You can take a peak at my sales page by going to http://www.viralflamemarketing.com to see how I use mine. Look at the bottom and you will see I have my paypal button. If you need more information on how to set one up I can create a short video for you showing you where inside the paypal account you need to look to create a merchant account. I can even show you how to set up a payment button. Just let me know if this is something you need and I will create the video as a free tutorial.

To contact me go to the contact us section of my website and let me know if this is something that would help you and leave me your email address.

Jere answers:

That is a form of “chain mail”.
AND chain Mails have a hidden agenda.

Any time you get an email that says—“forward this on to 10 (or whatever number) of your friends”, or>>”sign this petition”, or>>”you’ll have good luck/special blessings”, or>>that poor little cancer ridden girl in Florida, gets 50 cents per forward—-you can be pretty sure the “host” sender (usually an “address harvester”) has attached an email tracker program or Beacon which sends them a copy of every address you send it to.

The only purpose of the address harvesters is to get as many addresses as they can to sell to spammers, and they use “scare” tactic, or promises of wealth, to get you to forward it on and provide them with more addresses

If you feel that you MUST forward them—–at least put all your recipients on the BCC line (which hides their addresses).

Jere answers:

Check your sponsor terms and conditions.. Most have conditions against spam emails as a marketing method and will just take your profits away.