Email Marketing – What’s in it for YOU?

According to the Direct Marketing Association, email delivers the highest Return On Investment by an eye-popping margin: a whopping $57.25 for every dollar spent on it in 2005, $7.08 for every dollar spent on print catalogs, and $22.52 for every dollar spent on non-email Internet marketing.

We are all addicted to email 91% of Internet users between the ages of 18 and 64 send or read email every day. We use it constantly all day, every day in our personal and professional lives.

So, how can you use email to increase your businessbottom line (ROI) and decrease the Costs of Marketing (COM)?

Statistics reveal that it takes an average of seven touchesconnections to a potential client by phone, mail, etc to a make a prospect a client. The cost of this effort could be highor it could be essentially free!

Our local non-profit organization uses email to market all the time. Here are some things we do that may work for you:

1. Following an event, we enter the contact information from Future Members (those who are not yet members, but will be once they understand the benefit of a partnership also known as non-members) business cards. In our desktop email software, we created a template specifically for this use. It says, I hope that you enjoyed spending time with our members at last night’s event, Susie, and that you made some connections that might benefit your business today! Our organization holds these events monthly and if you would like to be included on our weekly e-news updates, simply reply to this email and I will add your contact information to our group list. I would also encourage you to visit www.aclskdj;sgjas.org to learn more about our organization and our members!

Typically, we hear back from the participant in the affirmative and then, armed with their permission, we add them to the Constant Contact (a volume email product which offers a high deliverability rate with a low bounce rate.) list for Future Members so that the next time we send out an E-News Update they get it. There’s the second touch!

2. Following that same event, we email our members who attended the event with a similar message and a list of attendees, encouraging them to follow up with those whose business cards they acquired and especially the Future members after all, the best sales people for your organization/product are those who already use it! Andtwo more touches!

3. When a business emails an application to our office, we immediately respond with a template message welcoming him/her to our organization and detailing the next steps. Each time, we receive an email back saying thank you for responding so quickly, I am looking forward to my partnership with you!Count that as another touch!

4. Our organization emails an E-News Update weekly to our membership with specific goals in mind keeping events uppermost in our membersminds, keeping members informed about issues that impact their business every day and reporting membersactivities. This keeps our members in touchwith us and each other!

5. Whenever we see a member’s picture in the local news, we send a congratulatory email to him/her noting where we saw the picture. Letting our members know that we notice their activities touchesthem uniquely!

6. When our organization is planning a new program or contemplating making changes in an existing program, we use Constant Contact to send our members a brief survey we ask their opinions and assessments of our plans and report back the results to them within a month of closing the survey. Our members then feel invested in the outcome and are more likely to participate. Andtwo more touches!

All of these touches are essentially freeand, at least in our experience, highly successful in converting Future Members into Current Members who are active and enthusiastic about our organization.

Submitted by Sharon Iovanni, Stoneham MA