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Using Email in Your BusinessUsed correctly, email can be a type of push-pull marketing for your arts and crafts business. You can push your message, with permission only (down with all spam!), to your readers and customers and entice them back to your website with any special offers. Used incorrectly, especially in the get rich quick scams, email spam is a scourge that needs to be eliminated. Unfortunately, however, it probably never will be eliminated, and I suspect that it will get worse rather than better. Therefore, it behooves each of us to learn to deal with it so that it bothers us as little as possible. That said, there are some great ways to use email to do the preliminary contacts with your customers, and two of the most popular are email newsletters and autoresponders. I should tell you that I wrote this page a couple of years ago, before I started using Site Build It! for much of my needs, and over the winter of 2005, I'll be moving more and more in that direction because it offers everything I need in one place and I don't have to be concerned with all the technical details. I host AYearFromNow.com on Site Build It! and I like it more and more. Slowly, but surely, I'm moving some of my web presence from traditionally hosted sites to Site Build It!. Even though I have the knowledge and experience, SBI helps me get more done in the same amount of time. They've made major advances over the last couple of years and I'm looking forward to seeing how it gets even better over the next two or three years. AutorespondersAutoresponders are the follow-ups of the Internet that evolved from the faxback systems of over a decade ago. Some autoresponders will send a single follow up message and most webhosting companies offer this type of autoresponder at no additional cost. Some email client programs, such as Eudora, can also serve as an autoresponder. You can key off of a subject line or an email address and have Eudora respond with a pre-determined message, if you like. However, I don't know of any way to get Eudora to deliver a scheduled series of messages, as many of the multi-message autoresponders will. Also, this method will only respond whenever you next check your email, while an autoresponder that is always online will respond within seconds of a request, usually. If you know how to install a Perl cgi (common gateway interface) script, you can get programs that can run on your server and handle your response needs. It was only about seven years ago that I wrote my first autoresponder in Perl, and it took me a week or so to research it and write the code. Time has passed and several companies will sell you autoresponder scripts that you can install on your own server after paying a one-time fee. This gives you complete control over how you want it to work on your domain and you won't have to pay monthly fees to a 3rd party provider (see below). Installing these scripts has even gotten easier over time. If I had it to do all over again, or if I decide to host autoresponders on my domain, I won't program it myself, I'll just buy a license for AutoResponse Plus, install it, and put it to work. If you don't have the technical skill or inclination to host your own, there are companies that will host autoresponders for you. Some will do a single email follow-up and others will do multiple follow-ups over a set period of time that you can define. I've read numerous studies about advertising and following up on contacts. Various experts have asserted that it takes from 7 contacts to over 27 contacts before a new customer starts to really notice you and decide to purchase what you offer. If you're like many marketers, you've probably given up before you've actually made an impression and gotten your prospect's attention. When a customer purchases from you, they (generally) like to hear from you again. They've already made the decision to become a customer and it's easier to purchase from someone you already know than to take the risk of purchasing from someone you don't know. I was assuming in the previous paragraph that you're trying to sell someone something and that's not the only use of an autoresponder. It can be used to automatically let someone know you received their email message -- which can be important since not all email is delivered. It can also be an easy way to publish a white paper or a position paper and make it automatically accessible to anyone who wants to read it. You can write up a Frequently Asked Questions list and put it on an autoresponder. Or a list of your favorite recipes, book titles, consultants, songs, or whatever you want to make available. Most of the Perl scripts that I've looked over require access to Cron, a standard feature of most Unix operating sytems. Cron allows you to specify when certain tasks should be done and the system will automatically launch the process at that preset time. Many of the lower-cost webhosting services don't provide access to this feature, but more are starting to offer it -- such as Hosting With Us and AssortedInternet.com. If you're an old code-head like me, it's not much trouble to set up and manage a simple autoresponder script, but if you're not skilled at such things, I think the best way to approach this is to use a service that hosts your autoresponders and does all the management behind the scenes. If you'd like to see what's available, I like The CGI Resource Index for information about scripts you can host on your server and some that are remotely hosted. The scripts and services range from free to costing many hundreds of dollars. There are several free services that host autoresponders and several companies that host paid services. I've tried several of the free services and like some of them. I've found that it's much more difficult to decide what I want to say and when I want to say it than it is to deal with any of the technical features of these beasties. Setting up most of them is a pretty straightforward process, once you know what you want to say and when you want to say it. (For help in deciding what to say and how to present it, see Yanik Silver's Autoresponder Magic ebook.) Here's a couple of the free autoresponders I've used and like. I tend to prefer the autoresponders from GetResponse.com. You can register for more than one, if you'd like. If you become successful at what you're promoting, you can upgrade the free version to an ad-free professional version that adds more features. The free version allows you to program several sequential messages over a period of time of your choosing. I recommend this company's products. Here's some of what GetResponse.com says on their site: UNLOCK THE MOST POWERFUL SECRET TO DOUBLING YOUR SALES! NEW, FREE intelligent software allows you to follow-up with prospects FAST, REPETITIVELY and CONSISTENTLY! SAVE time and money. GRAB YOUR FREE VERSION NOW! Get a FREE bonus report: "How to Double Your Sales With a Proper Email Strategy"! Don't wait, go now. I have good reports on a couple of the paid services that come highly recommended. It's up to you to research these companies and decide which ones fill your needs. It's been my experience that most of the free services would work just fine for what I offer, although I'd probably prefer AWeber if it ever gets to where I need a great service with an ever-expanding list of features. AWeber.com offers paid autoresponder service and has a reputation for quality and reliability. I'd have a hard choice deciding between the professional responders at GetResponse.com or AWeber. Their site has a lot of information, but the easiest way to find out about their service is to try the demonstration by entering your email address and name in the box below and pressing the "Send Demo!" button. Over a period of days, you'll receive a series of emails detailing the service and showing you how effective the follow-ups are. Eventually, you'll forget about them, and another reminder will show up in your email. (If you decide you don't want to receive any more, you can easily unsubscribe.) Why don't you give it a try and see for yourself?
Email lettersInstant Sales Letters - This is a collection of letters designed to help you write effective sales letters by filling in the blanks. They can be effectively used in email and snail mail letters. Get to the Point! Painless Advice for Writing Memos, Letters and E-mails Your Colleagues and Clients Will Understand by Elizabeth Danziger. Email newslettersThere are some excellent and informative newsletters floating around the Internet these days, and there are some really awful ones. Unfortunately, the awful ones outnumber the excellent ones -- but, I guess, that's to be expected. I'm sure I've sent out some fairly awful newsletters over the years, but I keep trying to learn how to write a truly informative and useful newsletter. I've yet to succeed in that endeavor, however. I don't pretend to really know much about newsletters, but I recognize a great one when I read it. One of the best ways to learn about this field is to read A Beginner's Guide to Ezine Publishing by Brian Alt. He publishes the Email Publishing Digest, and if you're seriously interested in email newsletter publishing, you may find it useful to subscribe to his newsletter. Another good source of information is at Ezine-Tips.com. The only advice I'll deign to offer is please make sure your readers want to get your newsletter -- make it an opt-in or even a double opt-in list. And, make it easy for them to unsubscribe if they decide they don't want to hear from you any more. Mailing listsSeveral of the above services and/or software offer mailing list maintenance and will send your newsletters and other messages to your list of subscribers. If all you're looking for is a simple, easy-to-use mailing list, I particularly like Yahoo! Groups and Topica. I currently manage nearly two dozen lists there and I am very happy with their service and the tools I get to use at no cost. Of course, they post an ad on every message, but I don't mind that. Since I got started on eGroups, which was later bought by Yahoo and became Yahoo Groups, I've been happy. I subscribe to a couple of lists hosted by Topica.com, and recently I opened a list there because of their stance on spam. I'm considering making use of their paid service for hosting one or more newsletters in the future. There are other services, also, that host both free and paid mailing lists. As an old "list mommy" who managed a number of lists on a Majordomo server, I'm more than happy to leave all the system administration to Yahoo Groups or Topica and concentrate on just running the lists and trying to decide what to say. Yahoo handles a few more situations (such as mail loops) a bit better than Topica, or that's my perception at this point. If you want to present the most professional appearance and don't want distracting advertisements on the messages you send, then a paid service or a script you can install as a cgi on your web host may suit you better. A program such as mailloop, mentioned above, should serve your needs just fine, if you are a Windows user. Just remember that some of the paid services handle the technical aspects behind the scenes for you and if you're using a program on your server, you'll probably have to do more of the administration.
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