Cost Effective Email Marketing for Small Businesses (Part 1)

Email marketing is without a shadow of a doubt one of the most cost effective ways to promote products and services from your online business. Whether it’s your latest summer sale or a new product launch you’re trying to promote, getting the message out to consumers by email notification is top choice in any marketing tactics.

In this two part article I want to look at websites that offer email marketing solutions for small businesses and so I’ll begin by saying that there are dozens and dozens of websites out there offering their services, I’ve used a few myself over the years! However before we go off venturing into signing up with one of these service providers, I’d like to share with you some basic preplanning steps to your email marketing campaign.

Collect Data or Out Source Data?

One of the first steps is building an emailing list or getting hold of one even. There are two stand alone ways of doing this;

First Method

If much of the sale of your products or services is done online, one of the easiest ways to collect email data is from your customers order history. However one other method I’ve used for Van Marciano Art is to provide an opt-in section in the checkout area, so to give my customers the choice to opt-in to my monthly email newsletters. Another method is to create a sign up form and place it on the home-page or the most visited page of your website. Both these methods have worked effectively for me; however this process can take some considerable time before you have a substantial list in your hands.

Second Method

The other option is to actually buy a bulk list of email contacts to target your specific market. Although this is a quick fix solution, it is not the most effective. Whilst collecting email data is practically free, buying bulk email contacts can set you back a good chunk of your marketing allowance, a big factor to consider. Another factor to consider is that there us no guarantees that the bulk email addresses you purchase is relevant to your niche market.

Ok needless to say of this, I have compiled a list of websites that offer the choice of buying bulk email contacts. Please look through them carefully reading the small print. Please also note that this list is not ‘my’ or ‘a’ recommendation of any type from Magnet 4 Marketing, its simply a resource list put together for you to use or discard, which will save you some time in sourcing out yourself.

http://www.electricmarketing.co.uk/
http://www.businessmailing.co.uk/
http://www.marketscan.co.uk/
http://www.email-point.com/
http://www.email-list.com/
http://www.nextmark.com/
http://lbm-data.co.uk/
http://www.directmail.com/
http://www.emailmovers.com/
http://bulkemailblast.com/
http://www.trimilion.co.uk/
http://www.worldwideemailaddresses.com/

In Part 2, I’ll take a look at website’s that provide email marketing solutions and how to get the most out of them.