Email Marketing 101

Do you want to stay in contact with 100's of contacts?

Using email as a marketing tool can be very productive as long as you manage your lists and campaigns with some fundamental guiding principals. eKzact Solutions has had good success using email as a means to communicate with clients and contacts employing these principles:

• Only add people to your list if you have met with them in person, if they are a member of your networking clubs or if they are a current customer.
• Always allow people to unsubscribe or opt-out of your mailings.
• Always provide your subscribers with a real email address to reply to and provide a telephone number for them to phone. These two points alone will support that your correspondence is valuable and intended to be helpful to the recipient... not just gratuitous advertising.
• Always send information that your intended audience will most likely find interesting or useful. We make it a habit to include tips, free software tools or updates about our business.
• Measure the success of your marketing email message. Use a utility that will allow you to see how many messages were delivered, how many messages were opened by unique viewers and how many times the message was viewed. Unique viewer counts will be less than total viewer counts because many people will read your message more than one time.
• Although our intention with our stay-in-contact program is to build brand recognition for eKzact and eventually to promote our web site designs, application development and our Internet consulting services, our ezines and mailings are typically not "in your face advertising". We have also employed the pure sales approach with positive results.
• Build your opt-in mailing list slowly and methodically to ensure that your list is loaded with people who will likely not simply delete your messages. If you choose to use 'spider' software to quickly build a list of email addresses from the Internet you will likely find your web site or mail server shut-down by your ISP. Your company reputation may also be impacted in a negative manner as a result of sending unsolicited bulk email. In our neighboring Country of the United States of America the sending of bulk unsolicited email is illegal.

With our eZine Mailing List Controller you can send one or hundreds of nicely designed electronic email messages to your clients. eKzact uses the same application to correspond with 100's of clients and contacts every month... and the results are always positive. In fact, we included tips from our accountant Stephen Weurth in our last ezine and the very next day I received a phone call from a client asking about Stephen's accounting services.

Step-by-Step

Sending Bulk Opt-In Email is a Sure Fire Way to Grow Your Small Business

Preparing your monthly ezine or email message is easy with the WYSIWYG editor. You can draft your message and send a test to your own email address.

Test you message against one or a few email addresses with different SPAM filter settings to ensure your message is getting through to the recipients.

After your message is sent, login to the web-based ezine or mail list controller to review how many people opened your message and how many times they have opened it.

Dr. Christine Fernandez chose eKzact to design a professional HTML email template for her monthly ezine. We also facilitate the sending of her news letter to her growing list of clients. Dr. Fernandez provides health and wellness through acupuncture and herbal remedies.

eKzact's ezine goes out nearly monthly to our list of opt-in subscribers. Employee our own guidelines we are pleased to say that very few people have opted out of our monthly distributions.

So Do You Want to Start An eMail Marketing Campaign?

If you think sending monthly updates, news, specials, industry tips and tricks out to your clients might be a good way to build your sales, then contact eKzact Solutions Inc. We have two solutions that we can deploy quickly for our clients including either a web-based campaign manager or a desktop software solution. If you would prefer to use a web based service, we can recommend some very good third party web services that your business can subscribe to.

Custom Design Newsletter or Pure Text.

You can choose to use any of the ezine controllers to send pure text messages or nicely designed newsletters. All of the applications, and web-based services that we provide allow either choice, or both at the same time. It is important to send a pure text version of your newsletter with your formatted version so that if some of the recipients have HTML viewing shut off in their email software they will still be able to read the text only version.

If you are an existing eKzact Solutions web site client we can quite quickly and very economically convert your web site template into an electronic newsletter or ezine template. If you are not an eKzact client we can still help you develop a very professional design for your email campaign. Contact us for a quick quote and you'll see just how reasonable our rates can be!

Demontration of Our Electronic Newsletter Contact Programs

If you think sending email as a marketing tool might work well with your existing marketing tools, but are not sure, please contact eKzact and we can take you for a tour of the applications. We will discuss your specific goals and help you to decide which mail list controller is the right tool for your campaigns. Some factors that may help us make a recommendation will include; how many people are on your mailing list and how often you intend to send a message to your list.