The 6 Most Essential Marketing Activities
6. Email or Direct Mail Marketing
Do you have a band of loyal customers and followers who would like to hear from you regularly? Do you want to keep prospects engaged until the sale is made, or encourage them to buy more? You can do all of this through social media, but in many ways mail (whether electronic or print) is still a very useful medium. Here are some things you should be doing through email or direct mail:
- Thank customers when they register or place an order, and ask them to contact you with feedback (and if you have a newsletter, don't forget to ask them to sign up!)
- Send them a holiday card or birthday wishes and thank them for their business
- Ask blog visitors to subscribe to a daily email with blog posts
- Send a newsletter (weekly, fortnightly or monthly) with tips, exclusive deals and news only to opt-in subscribers
- Thank users when they sign up or download content, and offer other content or services they might be interested in
Remember, if you are asking customers for their email addresses or business cards, they expect to hear from you. (I've lost count on the number of times I've dropped a business card into a box at a restaurant or painstakingly wrote out my email address in a notebook only to never hear from the business again.) So it's best to send at least a monthly newsletter where you tell them what's new and why they should pop into your store or buy from you online this month.
Now, none of the activities above are sufficient in themselves: you can use social media to ask people to sign up to your newsletter or read your blog post you can use blogging and other forms of content creation are great for SEO. And you can vary the mix according to, (as I said above) your audience, your resources and your inclination. And there's a lot more you could be doing: sending out press releases, hosting events, sending out samples.
