Email Marketing To Your Existing Customers


  • Marketing to your existing customers is probably the best way to drive sales quickly.  Unfortunately, this is an often overlooked marketing strategy for many small business owners.

I was having a conversation with a small business owner just a few days ago and I asked him,

“how many unique customers do you have registered to your website who have made a purchase?”

His response, “I think about seven thousand.”

While we were on the Skype call he quickly logged into his site and found the actual number to be over eight thousand.

So I asked him, how often do you contact these customers with promotions of some type based on past purchase history?

Dead silence, and then.   “I have never done that.”

I was stunned but not surprised.

Marketing and Sales

  • Let’s be clear about the difference between marketing and sales.  Marketing is discovering what products and services your potential customers desire. You discover what this product or service is through careful market research.  Marketing also involves educating your potential market about who you are and what you do.

As Peter Drucker stated in his book, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
“the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.” The marketing process will help you create and keep your customers.

  • Sales on the other hand is converting that potential customer into a customer.  If you’ve conducted a successful marketing campaign, the potential customer already knows who you are and what you offer.  Effective marketing makes the customer want to buy.

Now you have good information to design a seamless and automated sales system to deliver products or services.

Jeffrey Gitomer says in the Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness, “People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy.”   So, make it easy and painless for them to buy from you.

The Five Steps to Begin Marketing to Your Existing Customers

  • Get your list.  Hopefully, you already have this in some type of electronic format.  You are now going to need an email marketing system with built in auto responders  to allow your customers to either opt in or out of your marketing program.
  • Sign up for an email marketing service such as Aweber or Infusionsoft.  The major difference between the two is that Infusionsoft will also act as a Customer Resource Management system ( CRM ) where Aweber is strictly an email amarketing platform.
  • Define the campaigns you will run.

The advantage of Infusionsoft over time is that you will be able to segment your customers by buying habits and patterns.  You don’t want to direct a promotion campaign toward a customer for widgets if their sales history suggests they only buy umbrellas.

  • Write specific relevant copy.  If you don’t know how to do this find someone that does.  Outsource this function by finding someone on eLance or Guru
  • Automate the entire process

Email Marketing Helps to Automate Your Business

You want the sales function, fulfillment, and follow up automated so you don’t even have to think about it.  The only part you should ever have to think about is designing the system on the front end and then verifying later that the system is performing to expectations.

Take yourself out of the loop so you are not the bottleneck.  Sit back monitor the system and watch the cash register ring.

Implementing and automating your email marketing system is just one more strategy you can use as a small business owner to free your time and increase profits so you can get involved and make a difference in your community.

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