There’s on inescapable fact of selling online and that’s that there is a cost involved. There are fees to sell on marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon, or have your own website there’s hosting, software and if you’re serious about your business advertising costs which almost certainly includes paid search such as Google AdWords.
Once you’ve attracted a customer your ultimate goal should be to retain them and convert them into a repeat customer. Repeat customers are effectively free customers and one of the easiest ways to keep them buying from you is email marketing. If you’ve built an email marketing list (don’t forget both eBay and Amazon policy means you can’t contact past marketplace customers), then a new service from iContact is worth considering.
iContact have just launched a free service for email creation, sending and tracking capabilities for up to 500 subscribers and 24 designer templates. The free service is designed to give individuals, community organizations and small businesses without a large budget access to email marketing, social marketing, event marketing and surveying.
The social media integration with Facebook and Twitter allows users to create and share links to their email communications from within the application. iContact will automatically post a web version of the email message and report related views and clicks on the user’s tracking dashboard.
If you’ve never tried email and social media marketing then iContact’s free service is an ideal no cost option for a trial. If you’ve not built an email marketing list then you should add opt in links to your website order flow and of course in all communications with your customers.
6 Responses
Fantastic, cheers Chris. I’ve got a growing list of subscribers and I’ve been scratching my chin for a while now about how best to utilize it, this will give me a nudge in the right direction.
Signed up and will use. The free starter package looks pretty good with subscription options as the database grows.
Top man Chris. More like this please!
I would recommend mailchimp.com – It also has a free version but instead you can have up to 2000 subscribers and a sending limit of 12,000 emails per month.
They also have a comprehensive suite of monitoring features and a range of add-on tools.