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Effective Email Marketing for Your Wholesale Business
By Sarah Pearson Published: 09/03/2009
Email marketing is a method that businesses have been using online for a long time now to effectively promote their businesses and rake in sales and customers. Email marketing is basically sending out an email to people to let them know when you are having a sale, a special offer, a new product, or something along those lines.
There are several ways to go about getting the email addresses to send your announcements to. You can buy a list from a company, though this is not the best approach, because then your announcements will be unsolicited emails and likely end up in the addressee's spam bin instead of being read. You do not want your company to be associated with spamming, so this is not the best route to take. It could lead to you getting blacklisted by certain spam blocking software and programs, not to mention it's just not a legitimate and aboveboard way to conduct business these days.
Instead, to use email marketing methods effectively, you should build your own list. When customers purchase from your website or just sign up for an account, include an option that adds them to your mailing list. Also include a place on each page of your website, perhaps in the sidebar, that lets them quickly sign up for that same mailing list. Let them know that signing up means they will be alerted to any special offers and sales or other events of interest. If you want to take it a step further to make it more interesting, you can offer a newsletter. Newsletters can contain informational articles about your products or niche or industry, as well as include the notifications of those special offers, so you are offering your potential customers more incentive to sign up to your list.
Using this method, you will eventually build a nice list of email addresses that have voluntarily been given to you by their owners. This means the list will be targeted – as in, people you know are interested in what you have to offer – and it will not be spamming, because people that have signed up have given you permission to email them. You already know they want to hear from you, so each time you let them know about a sale, you have a much higher chance of them actually coming over to the site to make a purchase.
