Boost your Sales and Kick Start your Business

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by Stewf

Boost your Sales and Kick Start your Business

Follow the steps outlined below and you will increase your sales and your client base, which will lead to additional profit and growth in your business.

Despite what any e-mail or website will inform you, there is no easy way to grow your business. It certainly will not happen with you sitting in an armchair or indeed when you are asleep overnight. The reality of the situation is that all successful business owners have got there by working hard, but also crucially working smart. Hard work is not a guarantee of success on its own, but couple that with smart work and you will be on the fast road to success.

I will spell-out what I undertook to achieve the success I have had, and I am confident that if you follow my guidelines that you can see the same level of success as I did.

To start with, a little bit about the success I have had so far. I am not fantastically wealthy, far from it. I have achieved modest, maintainable sales growth on an ongoing basis that has added approximately 10% to my profits month-on-month. I have no special skill sets and nor did I spend vast sums of money to achieve this success. My business sells in the B2B marketplace which is where this process works best.

Sadly, this is no special secret plan that I have devised. The truth is smart working is rarely something that is a stupendous idea. It is just about taking a few moments to step back from coalface, look at your business and work out a viable plan. For me this meant focussing on the reality that to get necessary growth in my business I needed to either grow my customer base or get my average order value up. Hardly rocket science that one is it!

The way I did it was to focus on e-mail marketing. Now first off, I have to say, if you are ready to stop reading please bear with me. I too, was sceptical to start with, but I had to face the fact that I could not employ a sales person to do fulfil this role, and I would not be able to find the time I needed to do what I would call the normal sales work. To date I had always proudly stated that I had never worked with a customer I had not met face to face, and I was not going to compromise that standard. I have to say that I have learnt the hard way and had a few knocks en route, but here is my eight point strategicplan that sums up how I made it successful.

1.    I rapidly understood that you cannot send e-mails to lots of people using standard e-mail software. The spam filters available nowadays just cut your e-mail off without it getting anywhere near a recipient. I tried many different programs, but have chosen Interspire which is a web based software, as my program of choice. True it does cost, and there are some very good lower cost/free programs out there as well (PHP List comes to mind), but it fulfils all my requirements and more.

2.    Make sure you have a good relationship with your ISP as you will certainly have rules you will have to adhere to regarding how many e-mails you can send and how quickly you send them. There is a incredibly fine line between legitimate marketing and spamming. Make sure you are not on the wrong side of this line.

3.    Having mentioned the spam word, it is appropriate to cover that issue as well. There are some crucial rules you need to follow when sending e-mails. Firstly, if at all possible obtain your e-mails by having interested parties subscribe to your website and have them give you their e-mail. This is  the opt-in method. It is hugely more successful as you are emailing somebody who has actually asked for your email. This is the only way you can function if you are sending emails direct to consumers. If your business is B2B, then you can obtain a mailing list of some description and use that. If you go down this route, then there are three vital things you must do:

a.    The emails address you send your emails from must be a monitored and legitimate email address;

b.    You must only send business related e-mails to the emails you have;

c.    You must always have an unsubscribe link on every e-mail you send. It should be needless to say that this function works effectively. (The program I use does this automatically.)

If you follow these rules your marketing campaign will beperfectly within the law.

4.    Make your e-mails pleasant to read as well as having the offer within it. Remember to make the subject line of the e-mail stimulating and try to avoid filling the e-mail with multiple images. This  just slows down the system and annoys recipients. Take your recipients on a journey with you; do not send identical emails every week, vary them so the readers get to see the full resources of your company.

5.    Try wherever possible to send to your emails at the same time each week. Do not invade your prospects inbox every day, nor mail infrequently like once a month. A  weekly email  received at the same time every week will be   more likely to be opened.

6.    You will find a number of programs that offer the ability to verify the email addresses in your list. I can advise you that I have 6 of them running on my laptop. When I run my list through each program, they all indicate which addresses are either valid or not valid. Even after I sent emails out to the list I had, I could not tally up any of the verifier programs as being particularly effective. The best way I found was to send the emails in small bundles and handle the returned emails as they arrive. If the software you use does this automatically even better.

7.    You will no doubt get many bounce-backs, that cannot be sent or the e-mail address you have no longer exists. Make sure you delete them from your list straight away as this will just irritate your web hoster who will assume you are a spammer and block your account.

8.    Start small and build up slowly. Get 1,000 addresses and send those to see how you get on. You will learn far more, and be respected by your web hoster if you steadily grow rather than trying to send a vast number of emails out over night.

This is my 8 point plan to success in email marketing. I can truthfully say that I never broke any of them. I began using a free bulk email program and I bought a mailing list. I quickly learnt that the better the software the more likely my email was to go through. I also learnt that some words and phrases also activated spam filters, from that point onwards none of my emails offer FREE or NO OBLIGATION items.

I have set up my own subscribe page on my website, but to kick start the whole process I bought a mailing list. It was excellent value, but as can always be expected, it did contain a number of incorrect emails. However, by working smart and carefully, I removed most of them and now have created a list which is significantly smaller, but works very well for my needs. The reality is, it is well worth the money even after you take into account the inaccurate addresses.

To start off, the mailing list was the only place I spent money, and I can categorically say it was excellent value for money. I now send 1,000 e-mails a day, every week, and I receive on average 15 responses a week. Now I can imagine a number of marketing departments being scornful of this, telling me how poor my response is. But in reality, I spend 90 minutes of each ady sending out the emails, and 15 responses a week is an amount I can control and has lead to me growing my business by the percentages I mentioned earlier. I am currently winning on average 4 new customers a week.

Now in the current business environment, who is going to laugh at that?

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