Free Marketing: 101 Low and No-Cost Ways to Grow Your Business, Online and Off

CHAPTER 51

AUTOMATED POWER MARKETING: CUSTOMER AND PROSPECT E-MAIL

Once you understand the basics of e-mail marketing you can begin to easily follow-up with customers and prospects automatically. Like I said, I manage over 50 e-mail lists in my business on complete autopilot. On any given day we have hundreds of different subscribers joining different lists and even moving automatically from one list (prospect list) to another list (customer list) seamlessly.

However, I won't get into the semitechnical details of setting all of this up, because that information can easily be found on the websites of any of the services mentioned in this part of the book. But I can tell you some of the lessons I learned about following-up with my customers and prospects using e-mail.

No matter how small your business is, you should use e-mail in as automated a way as possible. For example, the vacation settings in a free Gmail account can be used to instantly reply to every customer that sends you an e-mail. The reply e-mail could have a link to a special offer or to a blog site with additional information. That is about as simple as e-mail automation gets, but it's better than nothing. Of course you'll still reply to each customer with a personal message after they get the autoreply.

For the rest of this chapter, though, I'm going to assume that you are interested in using a serious e-mail management tool, such as aweber.com, or any of the other e-mail services that I've listed on my resource page. ...