Years ago, while still working in Career Services at a Cleveland-area technical school, I had built a database of businesses and organizations that could have an interest in what we had to offer. At the same time, students were completing their programs. The question for me then became how do we communicate with both groups without being too intrusive, but at the same time keep us fresh in their minds.
Answering this question laid the groundwork for our monthly newsletter, which was our first effort in e-mail marketing. Over time, we also utilized e-mail marketing to announce on-campus events.
My lesson learned during my technical-school years? No matter what other Internet marketing you do, the best first step is creating an e-mail marketing campaign.
These days, creating an e-mail marketing campaign is as simple as ever. Sites such as Constant Contact and iContact allow users to, for a fee, utilize their e-mail services. If you’re more tech-savvy, you can also set up mailing list programs such as Xigla or, for Linux users, Dada Mail to build your marketing internally. You customer relations management (CRM) software may even have a mass e-mail function as well.
For those starting from scratch, make sure to export your contacts to format that is easy to upload to your platform, generally CSV, and build from there. Again, based on technical ability, you can opt to use the editor from one of the e-mail marketing sites or build it from a Web editor.
You e-mail campaign should be about information about and related to your organization. Ultimately, you’ll want to save the hard sales pitch to your Web site. But starting out, you’re looking to generate more interest.
As you continue, you’ll find new interest by giving readers exclusive offers on your products or services. Also, you’ll have the ability to announce other parts of your Internet marketing efforts that can include Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media outlets.
So, are you ready to start building your foundation?
