Marketing Tips, Ideas, and How-To's

For the best chance for success, marketing your business and marketing your web site should go hand-in-hand. Because of this, we've included in this section a few ideas which can get you started. These can work for offline promotion as well as online.

On a shoestring

Put your web site address with a business ad on

• Business cards
• Your letterheads
• Your invoices
• Receipts - either your own receipts or advertise on other receipts (grocery stores etc.)
• Bumper stickers
• Small promotional item giveaways
• Postcards
• Your fax cover sheets

Never go anywhere without business cards. Leave a business card everywhere you go: with store clerks, service people, restaurants, anywhere!

Make your business cards valuable: Pay a little extra to have your business cards printed on both sides. On the reverse side, print a coupon saying something like "10% (or your choice of amount/percent) off when you present this card at our store or enter this code at our web site." Have similar business cards printed for your employees. Offer an incentive reward for the employee who drums up the most business with his or her business card. To track sales and incentives, be sure to include on the card a different coupon code identifier for each employee. This which tells you which employee's card resulted in the sales.

Postcards

Postcards can be either distributed or mailed at much lower expense than a letter-type ad, and response rates are usually higher. If possible, put a small basic order form on your postcard as well as your web site address, business address, and phone number. Don't just mail them. Leave small stacks of unstamped cards whenever you can get permission to leave them at lobbies, office waiting areas, libraries, or any place your target customer may frequent. Remind people their order will be processed faster if they call or order online.

Customer incentives and rewards

Offer incentives and rewards to current customers for referring new customers to you. Rewards can be merchandise, services, discounts, or prize drawing entries.

Contests

Holding a contest is a great way to spread the word about your products and to encourage people to subscribe to your email list. Contests can be about nearly anything: Name it, Solve it, Find it, Answer it, Refer a Customer, ... your imagination is the limit.

Email lists

First, this caveat: DO NOT SPAM to promote your business or web site. You will end up losing your web site, your internet service provider connection, or both. What is spam? Definitions vary slightly, but basically it's unsolicited email. Most web hosts and internet service providers (isp's) have adopted fairly strict spam policies which state: If you can't prove that your recipient is a past customer who has actually completed a business transaction with you as your customer, or if you do not have a confirmation email from any non-customer recipient requesting specificaly to receive commercial email from you, then it's spam.

What about rented, borrowed, or purchased "opt-in" or "safe" email lists? Don't waste your money. Without that direct confirmation email in your possession from the recipient agreeing to receive your email, most web host providers and isp's still consider it to be spam. The only "safe" list is one made up of your actual customers, or of people who signed up at your web site, in which they were required to return a confirmation email before being added to your list. You must also provide an "opt-out" choice in every email you send.

That said, how on earth do you build a list? With the bad name spammers are giving to just about all email, why would people be willing to receive email from any web site?

Offer something of value. People are more willing to sign up for a list if they expect to get something out of it: to receive discount coupons, rebate offers, gift certificates, prize notifications, information about special sales, helpful news and information, how-to articles, freebie downloads, contest results, new web site features, etc.

Let your subscribers know in advance, when they sign up, how often to expect an email. Once a month is plenty. Send emails more frequently than that and you may find a high rate of unsubscribes.

And finally, never ever share, sell, or rent your list to anyone else or you will find people abandoning your list in droves.

next  >> Hints for Success, Section 5: Keeping it Fresh