Many local businesses go about each day doing their daily routines ignoring their online audience not knowing they could be sitting in gold rush of customers if they online tapped into their client email list. Email marketing is relatively inexpensive compared to other forms of marketing and is a great way to stay in touch with any audience. Here are five reasons as to why it is important for any business that requires local business to take advantage of email marketing.

1. The Recession Is Here: 2009 is going to be a strange year for all businesses large and small so it is important to use every piece of marketing ammunition you have at your disposal. Now is the time to stay on everyone’s radar screen.

2. Quick: Launching an email campaign is quick compared to other forms of marketing. Most email marketing providers offer a customization tool in order to brand it to your company with very helpful guides on how to build it. Once it is done just schedule it and it is as easy as that.

3. Your Competitors are Probably Already Doing It: Chances are you have competition no matter what you do and it is most likely that some of that competition is already emailing your audience. If you haven’t started it’s ok, just start now.

4. It is important to be Heard: Local business needs to be heard just as much as national ones do. If you are launching a promotion that you know will work it just needs to be heard dig into your email list and send out an email campaign. A proper email marketing campaign is the voice for your business. People will buy from perceived value so if your email company makes your business seem bigger than it really is the likely hood of someone picking up the phone and calling is high.

5. Online Is the Future: Online marketing is the future and it is here to stay. If you think your business does not need it you are most likely in denial. Get on board now rather than later because you will have much more to learn then.

There are many ways to communicate with your customer base these days. With more and more online platforms popping up every month it is sometimes difficult to keep up with everything. Between the holidays and the economy you will see more and more companies really getting into their email lists and taking advantage of all the contacts they have. Here are some tips that can help you with your email marketing campaign.

1. User Experience: an email recipient will be more inclined to read through your email and actually take interest in it if you give them something to do. A survey with a prize is always a good way to get your recipients to interact but thinking outside of the box like inviting them over to your Facebook page or Myspace and entice them to connect with your profile will help also.

2. Don’t Sell to Hard: If they open the email and they are bombarded with a hard sell technique chances are you will scare a few off to hit the unsubscribe button which is something you don’t want to happen.

3. Relate to them: Relating to your email recipients will allow them to relate to you. By offering them products and services to help them with they might be going through they will be more likely to respond to your email in a positive manner.

4. Don’t Sell: Sometimes just a resource email is the best email. By not pushing that hard sell in your email and by simply offering information that could help your recipient your email subscribers look at your company in a whole different light.

5. Think Outside The Box: Offer something that others don’t. If you have a regionally targeted business offer your email subscribers a networking event so others can meet other people and learn from each other. They will look at your company as a leader and the potential to bring in new clients will increase.

When dealing with any sort of online marketing it is important to keep yourself organized and keep your online marketing campaign planned out and outlined. If you know that you want to do a 12 month email marketing campaign do not try to wait until the day you want to send our your email campaign but rather take some time and plan out 2-3 months worth of campaigns.

When it comes time to sitting down and putting together your email you will know exactly what you want to put into your campaign. You can change and tweak as times goes if you have something new you would like to put into the email but organization is key with online marketing. Not only will this keep you organized but it will keep you on a schedule so you don’t stray off. Often times what happens is you might look at a calendar and realize you are a few weeks off from sending your email campaign. By sitting down and working on an outline that might span over a few months it will keep you from forgetting about your campaign. By outlining months ahead will also allow you to put a base down of information you want to send and then tweak consistently as times moves on depending on what is going in your company at the time. The revisions will allow you to send a nicely polished email that should only take a fraction of the time if you were just going to sit down in front of your computer and do it from scratch.

Email marketing is important to any growing company and you truly need to treat like one of your companies golden eggs. As your businesses email lists continues to grow those are people basically asking to be contacted. With that being said they want to be contacted with something newsworthy so keep the information relevant to something you would want to see in your inbox.

Many companies every year focus on growing their email lists by leaps and bounds but some are not sure what to do with the emails and some might do too much. What is the fine line between sending too many emails or not enough? When trying to answer this question you have to take a step back and take a step into the shoes of your audience.

Are they a fussy a group of people or calm and collective? Do they complain often or do you never hear a peep from them. These questions are important to answer because one thing you don’t want to do is irritate your audience with too many emails to where they don’t want to hear from you anymore. If your email list starts to diminish at a rapid rate then you need to analyze your frequency of emails or take a look at the email itself and make sure you have something good going out. Make sure your audience can use the information in their email to their advantage. If at any point your lists starts to feel like they are being spammed with advertisements than you might eventually generate a landslide of unsubscribers.

Taking a step over to the other side of the train tracks, you have 5 thousand email addresses and the last time you sent an email was last spring? That list is your golden egg and you could be missing out on a great opportunity to let your audience know that you are still on the map. Allow yourself to be on your audience’s radar. They have submitted their email to you at one point so you have permission to contact them. Let them know about new things that are going on with your company frequently. At the bare minimum once a month email or newsletter is ok.