You are the newest of the noobs in your small business. You started out with a lot of energy, but the customers just aren’t coming. Or, the ones that are coming are not coming back.
You know you’ve got a great product to offer, but it just seems like the message isn’t getting out. No one really knows about this place. So, you’re asking, “how do I get more customers?”
You are frustrated, and thinking of calling it quits. “How DO I get more customers?”
Well, hold on for a moment. If you muster just a bit of courage I’ll answer the how do I get more customers question and show you
Other small business owners like you are not facing this problem. Not anymore, anyway.
Why your customers are drifting away
The problem is that even the people who visit your website and know about your product don’t have a reason to come back. They found you the first time, but then they just drifted away.
You have no way of reaching your customers directly. No way to tell them to come back to read your great new article, to see the new version of your product, or to see your latest offer or whatever. There’s no trigger. No signal for them to come back to you. “How do I get more customers?” You connect to them, that’s how.
Your customers aren’t connected to you
How do I get more customers? Well, how did you get more friends? Think about this for a second. When was the last time you called your college roommate? I mean on the phone, where you actually talk to one another, you know, with your voice? Building and maintaining a relationship with your customers is no different than building and maintaining a relationship with a great friend. You either communicate with one another, or the relationship wanes, it drifts. Kind of like your current customers, don’t you think? Without you reaching out and touching them, they drift.
So if your customers are drifting in and out without staying, my question for you is “what are you going to do about it?”
How do I get more customers?
The solution doesn’t lie in you having a 90%-off sale. Instead, you’re going to do something far less painful – you’re going to create an email list and start connecting to your customers. Sound daunting? It’s not so bad. You just need a little guts, a little direction, and a good swift kick in the pants. Well, maybe not that last part.
Email marketing is the most effective way to reach your customers, repeatedly. It generates the best return. And yes, it generates a better return than even the mighty social media.
Four easy steps to start email marketing
- Find an email marketing software product that fits your needs and budget
- Learn how to use it (not as hard as you think)
- Put email sign-up forms on your website (not nearly as hard as you think)
- Start sending
Lets not make it more complicated than it is! Those are the basic steps.
Find the best email marketing solution for you
So how do you know the best email marketing solution for you? Although I’d love to just tell you that Thought Reach’s email marketing solution is the best for you, let’s be honest, there are a lot of great email solutions out there. Below are some of the most popular ones. They are popular for a reason.
- Constant Contact – big enough for a superbowl ad, but not too big for its britches
- Aweber – the darling of the high-end blogging and small business community
- And little old us, Thought Reach (so gimme a break, I included our email marketing product, go cry me a river)
How do I learn how to use an email marketing tool?
“I’ve never done email marketing before.”
“I’m not very technical.”
“My mother warned me about people like you.”
Yes, I’ve heard all of those lines before. What you have to realize is that small business email marketing products are designed with you in mind. They walk you through a step by step wizard so you don’t have to learn all this mumbo jumbo and hoo ha and all that. Upon logging in to your new email tool, you’ll be greeted with the simplicity of something that looks like this:
After you’ve gotten a couple of things setup, you’ll walk through another simple wizard that guides you through:
- Who do you want to send this email campaign to?
- What is the SUBJECT line, FROM email address, REPLY-TO address?
- What content do you want in the email body?
- Automatic testing (where we test for spam content, proper formatting, and things like that)
- Press the Send button! (or you can set what time and day you want to send)
Put email sign-up forms on your website
There are many types of forms that you can use on your website to get visitors to sign up for your email list. They can be simple one-field forms like this
or they can be popup forms, slide-in forms, or simple links that lead to a separate email sign up page, like this.
Creating these forms is simple. Just login to your email tool, grab the code that they give you, and drop that code onto your website. Don’t know how to put that code onto your website? Either get your web guy to do it for you, or just let us know, we do some of that work as well.
It’s not about what you don’t know
The main thing is to not get overwhelmed with what you don’t know. Just have faith in yourself and go take a look at the email marketing products listed above. You CAN do this. You just don’t know how, yet. “How do I get more customers” is a question your Aunt Edna asked two years ago. And yet she’s grown her macrame/crochet/bridge-playing/needle-pointing/ladies auxiliary/garden club website into a megalopoly with over 3.8 million email subscribers. And she’s eighty years old. Yes, you can do this.
In the comments tell us what’s holding you back.