Yesterday I sent out an HTML email and have 7 new leeds from perspective clients and some existing clients. Hopefully I will be able to convert those into jobs, but I’m very pleased with the response.
I’ve changed the format of my email and used a strategy that I’ve been pushing with clients for awhile. In the past I’ve sent a very direct marketing message asking for business, but this time I switched to a newsletter format. I basically took three blog entries and sent those out as stories. The email contained a summaries of the blogs with a links to “read more” which directed traffic to my site.
The reason it works is that the recipient sees a story like “7 reasons why you should redesign your website now” and they want to read the rest of the story. You don’t send the entire story in the email because it’s too long and you want traffic to your site. Once my site, they can see our work and easily contact us for business.
I’m subscribed to several email newsletters and I like the free information they send to me. The senders build a level of trust, expertise, and good will by sending me free advise. Of course it’s “spam,” junk mail, and the rest, but who cares if I get something out of it? If I get annoyed, I can easily unsubscribe.
I’ve been blogging for awhile, so I won’t be running out of content any time soon. I’ll mix current news with advice and opinion from past posts. I never took this approach until now because my blog wasn’t integrated into my site until now. I could have driven traffic to my blog hosted on a third party, but this approach is a bit more elegant.
It was easy to set up. I spent 20 minutes or so. This is exactly what I’ve been telling client to do, so I need to follow through myself so that I can effectively direct clients on the process.
