I work with clients from time to time that are basically ashamed they have never taken the opportunity to acquire permission to market to their customers via email. It’s not a big deal, and it’s better to start today then to wait another week, month or year!

Lets take a look at three tips to remember if you are just starting to build an email list to leverage email marketing for your business or organization. You can also view a quick list of other list building basics.

Tip #1 – Quality Beats Quantity
It’s far better to start with even just 25 email recipients that are current customers, people in your target market or those that have sought out your new e-letter than a list of 2,500 random emails. You want to deliver relevant and useful information to your audience, that is what will motivate them to buy or contact you for new or repeat business.

Tip #2 – Ask For Permission In Person
I often ask a potential client when closing an introduction meeting or phone call for the first time if I can add them to our monthly e-letter. I tell them this is a great way to stay in the loop with our offering and learn more on web design and Internet marketing. Chances are you can easily do the same, you just have to ask!

Tip #3 – Create Some Fun
There are a ton of creative ways to start an email campaign. Prizes, contests, free marketing are all great ways to stir up some excitement. This sports art website is leveraging a contest to build their email list, sign up yourself! A little bit of brainstorming and planning can produce a great kick-off and list build.

If you didn’t catch my drift above, starting today instead of continuing to put it off is the biggest tip I can give you. With a little planning and strategy you can start your email list and marketing in no time. You can always holler at us for a demo of our easy to use email marketing tool as well.

Email marketing is such a powerful and affordable tool, but I’m still surprised at how many small businesses fail to utilize it.  Many businesses I talk to just seem to be overwhelmed with content ideas for what they can do with an email marketing program.  With our email marketing services, we not only give a business a custom email design, an easy to use creation and management tool … we develop ideas.

This first installment of email marketing ideas is aimed at a small retail business that might be selling books, clothes, home decor, antiques, specialty items and so forth.  In the future I will be releasing other ideas for different types of businesses.

Idea #1 – Build a bigger list of emails!  Try give-aways, coupons or other rewards for joining your e-club or list.  Permission based email marketing is all about getting that email address, so test different rewards that help you gather email addresses and build your list.

Idea #2 -  Partner with a local band/music group that has a CD out or an upcoming show.  Promote them in your e-letter or e-offer and give away their CD or tickets to an upcoming show with a purchase.  You will need to find a group in line with your audience/target but it spices up your offer and they’ll love the intro to your audience.

Idea #3 – Find a community group or non-profit to partner with.  Donating a percentage of that month’s or a certain day’s sales to a local group is not only goodwill but good business.  They in turn will promote you and you give customers added incentive to buy with you.

Idea #4 – Use your e-letter to promote an “Our Treat” offer.  Let the coffee shop, bakery or ice cream shop next door or down the block give you coupons for a free coffee, pastrie or ice cream cone that you can place in every bag at purchase.  The partner business loves that you promote them and your customers love a free treat.

Idea #5 -  Set-up a “Power Hour”.  Advertise a specific hour that has super savings, a raffle or another promotion that can’t be ignored.  Promotions that have time frames add that additional motivation to shop and buy.  The best part is that only your email list customers find out about this special hour.

Well, there you have five email marketing ideas for a small retail business.  Maybe give one a try or mix a few together to see what it can do for you.  Feel free to share any additional ideas you may have or have tried.

I’ll just qualify post this as a bit of a rant right off the bat. Cheap hosting is killing small businesses by tricking them into thinking that their $5 or $10 is such a good deal, they don’t need to do anything else online. I have had meetings with numerous small businesses that basically brag on how cheap their hosting is. However, not one of them brags about how much business, leads or sales their website is bringing in. Do you see the correlation?

Hosting a website, at least the disk space and bandwidth is becoming almost free from many large providers. But only hosting your website will get you few results in today’s Internet marketplace. With millions of new pages hitting the web every day, you need additional Internet marketing services, tools and strategies to stand out online.

Here are just some of the additional website marketing services you should be looking into adding to your monthly fees of having a website:

• SEO – Organic search engine optimization can move you up the search ranks and produce traffic
• PPC – Pay-per-click advertising allows you to target terms, specific areas and even track it’s performance
• Email Marketing – Using permission based email marketing to stay in front of your customers is a must due to it’s cost effectiveness and ability to be tracked. It takes just pennies!
• Analytics – Your website can report to you just about everything going on with it. Data is king, leverage it!
• Business Blogging – Roll out new content, increase SEO, establish expertise, connect with customers and build a following.

Here at Five, we will never have a $10 monthly hosting fee or anywhere near that. We offer a monthly managed service that combines web hosting with a content management tool, web analytics (stats), support and basic SEO. From there we have further marketing services to customize what is best for our clients. It’s not our interest in hosting 10,000 websites that move little business, we’re into quality websites that make a difference to their owners.

Thanks for allowing me to rant.

Here are some valuable email marketing tips and links to other great blog posts on email marketing for those of you still wondering if you should do it. The biggest tip of all … do it. The features, benefits and low cost of email marketing make it one of the most valuable marketing strategies for many companies. The tips below are aimed at pushing you off the fence and getting you started today.

Email Marketing Tip #1
Understand how important it is. The consumer is giving you permission to market to them. “Yes I want to hear from you” and “I want to do more business with you” are fabulous statements. Signing up to receive email from your company is saying just that.

Email Marketing Tip #2
Start collecting email addresses today. You’ve probably seen graphs or numbers on what your savings account would look like if you started saving at age 16 (makes you want to slap yourself), the same is with building an email list. Simple accumulation of just 15 email addresses a month for the past 3 years would have you at over 500 addresses on your list. Any business can do this and a few simple list building strategies can get you to 5 or 10 times this number.

Email Marketing Tip #3
Any company, organization or service can put out valuable e-letters. Not just value in the form of a major discount on price, but value in product or service education, use tips and more. Take the time to make a list of possible content ideas and make two columns. One for money saving discounts or special offers and another for value added information or education. In many cases a great email campaign will include one of each of those in each send.

If my tips for why you should start email marketing today have somehow left you unconvinced, take a few more minutes and read from others:

• 10 tips for your first email campaign from Digital Web Magazine
• 7 long term marketing strategies on a budget (#5) from Small Fuel Marketing
• Start building an email list from Mike Alvero
• Email marketing for e-commerce from Website Werx

Feel free to share your email marketing “ah-ha” moment, additional tips or success stories with us.