Can/Should I Use Email To Advertise?

Email is an excellent medium to reach your customers and postential customers and you should use it to advertise your business. You should, however, use it wisely. You need to be sensitive to the fact that most people are regularly bombarded with SPAM -- unsolicited bulk email -- and they will often consider any advertising email to be SPAM. This, of course, isn't true but the thruth is less important than the perception. What your customers think about your email contact is what will stick in their minds when they think of you.

In addition, the CAN-SPAM act (see other articles on this site) details specific requirements for the content and nature of bulk email that you might send out to your prospects and customers. If you are sending bulk email (ie: the same message sent out to multiple email addresses) then you need to be aware of these regulations and you must follow them.

Despite these considerations email can be a powerful tool to get your message out to prospects and to acknowledge your customers. You can use email to simply announce your business or to offer incentives, discounts, and rewards. Properly timed email can help kick off a sale, contest, or promotion or generate traffic at the beginning of a holiday season. Here are a few guidelines you might want to consider if you are using email:

• Keep your email short and to the point. Long rambling emails will be ignored. Have one point, or at most a small number of points, and drive it home with concise, efficient, but effective, copy. Say what you want to say and nothing more.
• Don't make your email into a web page. Use simple text. Peopel are busy and don't want to wait for image files to download. Many will have pictures turn off in their email reader. If you can't say it with text you probably can't say it. Provide a link to a website if you need to make your point visually.
• Don't fill your email with links. On link to a web page that provides additional information/pictures is good. Several links is confusing and they are not likely to be followed.
• The KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle was never more apt. Your first paragraph should be short, to the point and contain the hook. If you don't have their interest after the third sentence you are not going to get it.

Keep the email addresses for all your customers. You can get email addresses from your PayPal history files. Offer an opt-in signup form on your website to collect email addresses from visitors to your site. If you don't know how to do this, or your website hosts doesn't support doing it, sign up with a service that provides a basic text link to their form. Building, maintaining, AND USING, a mailing list over the months can be the most powerful lead generator for your business.