Keeping in Touch: Micro Mailing for the Solo Entrepreneur.
As a small business, very small business actually, we have to always keep one eye on business development. We always want to be the first person that comes to mind when potential customers have a project that we can do. You could create a mailing list and send out bulk emails with any of the email marketing tools that are out there. However, email readers are notoriously unwilling to read another generic, nicely formatted newsletter. If you are sending these out, you would be fortunate if one fourth (25%) of your recipients actually read your email.
That is not what we are looking for in customer contacts. We want to have personal communication with potential clients. So, instead of collecting a thousand email addresses of questionable value, we send out “micro mails” using Ofuz.
An Example Micro Mail:
The past three months have been a pretty busy time for us . Philip has been deeply engaged in white papers and other collateral on virtualization subjects, including deep technical dives and sales focused documents to show the value of virtualization in the new IT environments. He is working so much on virtualization that he has started to act virtual himself. On really busy days he loses his normally shiny presence and I can actually see through him.
We tried to make the case with the IRS come tax time that since he was virtual he did not need to pay actual taxes. They did not go for it.
- A Learning Management System and courseware for a client that is developing a complex — but really really cool — software tool that will help to control the Bonneville dams. A lot of people need to be ramped up on a whole new mission critical user interface and we are going to build a learning tool to get them all ramped up.
- We have been investigating podcast, both audio and video, as a way to deliver our customers’ message. Research has shown that by adding podcasts to your marketing delivery, you can increase your exposure. We see that as a way to multiply the value of content across multiple platforms. We could take your white paper and affordably turn it into a podcast that appeals to a whole new audience.
We hope your endeavors are keeping you just the right level of busy. What kinds of things are you working on these days?
Tips for Your Micro Email Campaign
- Keep it brief or they won’t read it at all.
- Let people know what service you offer.
- Give them ideas of how you can help them.
- Give them something of value or something entertaining
- Ask about how their business is going.
- Like any good marketing piece, end with a call to action. Some times I like to couch this in the form of a question as I did in the example above: “What kinds of things are you working on these days?”
How to Make A Micro Email
- Click Settings (top right of the page).
- Click Sync.
- Click Google.
- Click Import Contacts.
- In the Email field, type your Gmail address and then click Import.
- Click the Contacts tab.
- Click in the white space next to each contact you want to tag.
- The white space around the selected contacts will become light yellow.
- In the text box above the selected contacts, type the tag you want to assign to those contacts.
- Click add tags.
When it is time to create a message, use the Search by Tags feature to select all of your prospects.
Then, send a simple, readable email to these prospects. Don’t go overboard with formatting; this is a personal email, not a bulk newsletter. Use the Insert Merge Fields to add business name, contact name, and the contact’s position wherever it is appropriate in the email.
Tags: email marketing, howto, online marketing
