Microsoft Certified Partner -- Customer-Ready Marketing Kit


	Overview
	Tips

Maintaining communication with customers and prospects is the cornerstone of any successful business. As you have most likely noticed, e-mail marketing and email newsletters are quickly becoming a popular method of keeping in touch and moving the sales process forward.

In fact, e-mail marketing is revolutionizing communications. For powerful results at the click of your mouse, many businesses are turning to this medium as a means of getting their messages out to customers. For additional information on keeping in touch with your customers on a regular basis, see Jim Cecil's Nurture Marketing Solution.

If you choose to engage in e-mail marketing, there are several things you must consider and be prepared for:

Know your audience
When you communicate via e-mail you must capture the readers attention immediately. To do this, it's imperative that you know your audience. If the customer does not see that your solution solves a business problem that they are encountering, the customer will delete your message without reading it. As with any form of marketing, you must know your audience. There are few things more insulting than receiving an e-mail advertisement that is clearly intended for another audience. For example, if you were promoting support services that eliminated the need for internal IT staff you would not send the e-mail to the IT administrator. You can rest assured that mistakes of this nature will not open the door to further communication. So before you decide to move forward, ensure that you know your audience and that your message is reaching the appropriate people. Make the distinction between an IT decision maker, a Sales Representative, and a Business Decision Maker before you define your content. Also, take the time to find out if you are communicating to a small, medium or large business as each has a different core set of business problems that need to be solved.

Define Appropriate Content
It is important to keep the messages you are sending fresh, interesting and relevant for your customer base. Some areas to consider when you define your content include:

Is there anything happening in your industry or in the economy that you can highlight and share a new perspective about? Is there anything else happening externally (e.g. Microsoft launches a new product, a politician has made a decision which impacts the IT community etc.) that you can leverage to deliver your message?
Make sure to position your news service as more informative than pushy and sales-focused. No one wants to see too much Spam mail and at the first sign of a hard sell, most consumers will delete the e-mail.
You should have several pieces of your newsletter (if not all pieces) which point your readers back to your Web site. Once they are within your domain, they will be exposed to even more messages about the success of your company.
Contact information in every possible vehicle should be clearly placed within the newsletter and within the content pages on your Web site so your readers never have to search or dig for a way to contact you immediately.
Include a call to action that offers value. An expiration date will create a sense of urgency and will activate the customer to responding now.
Always include a way for the customer to be deleted from your e-mail newsletter or e-mail communication. Make it easy for the customer to be removed. Never force the customer to call you to request removal.

Supporting Infrastructure
Depending on the size of your target, it may be in your best interest to purchase an e-mail marketing software product. If you search the Internet, you can find several products that will help you sort lists, develop messages, track subscriptions to a news service and manage the "unsubscribe" process for you.
If you are sending on a smaller scale, Microsoft Outlook can serve as an effective Customer Relationship Management utility by using the distribution list feature.

Permissions
It is imperative that you attain permission to e-mail your target audience if you want to begin a successful e-mail marketing relationship. Spam is one of the ugliest words in the industry right now and it would be a mistake to align your company with it. Be aware of the current laws regulating Spam e-mail in your region and country.

There are several methods of attaining permission from your customers which include: allowing your customers to sign up for the e-mail newsletter at seminars or events you host (see the Seminars section of the Customer-Ready Marketing Kit for more information about how to do this), allowing them to sign up your Web site or sending them a mail and giving them the option of "unsubscribing" to the e-mail news service.

Collecting names at events or from your Web site is the preferred method of e-mail communications as the list will be of higher quality given that these recipients have elected to learn more about your company or your IT focus.

Maintaining a Schedule
Unless you are sending out an individual e-mail one time, you must define a schedule for the drop of your e-mail messages. Depending on the message content, message size and your target audience, you may choose to send them weekly, biweekly or monthly. It would be inadvisable to send them less often than once a month, as customers will not have the continuity of messaging they need to keep your company top of mind when they have technology decisions to make.

Measurement
As with any other form or marketing, it is crucial to track your results and measure the impact that your efforts are having. Ensure that your company asks every single customer who contacts you how they heard about you and what attracted their attention. Every person in your company who responds to customer queries should be documenting this information in the same fashion so it can be analyzed when you define your annual budget and make decisions about how to invest in marketing.