Internet citizens and anyone who has used
email for any length of time knows that they have to be on the alert for
unwanted emails. This suspicion is one
of the reasons it is difficult to use unsolicited emails for internet marketing
any more. Instead a far more effective
method is to create excitement in customers you already know is through some
promotion that they want to hear about in their email box. And when they are excited to see your emails
arrive, they will be sure to add your business email address to their favored
email contacts list and you will have circumvented the spam software problem
that has been the cause of your email delivery problems all along.
There are many ways to generate excitement
in your customer base but perhaps no other one is so additive for your
customers as a contest. For the cost of
a small prize, people will work tirelessly to satisfy the terms of the contest. And by structuring the contest so the
customers must get their clues via email, you are opening that door of email
communications for future promotions and marketing. That alone might be worth the price of the
prize.
The great thing about creating a contest is
you can structure how it works to take the customers to your web site or have
them collect clues that are directly related to y our products or services and
the contest itself can become a big marketing "commercial" that the
customers want to be part of. A contest,
along with the obvious value of helping to resolve your email deliverability
problems, can serve to generate web site traffic and energize a sluggish site
or a function on your web site that you want to see get more attention.
Do you have a blog that isn't getting
enough traffic? Hide a clue on it and
challenge the contestants to come and search for that clue. Want to see a banner ad get more clicks, let
the contestants know the next clue is hidden behind that banner ad and then put
the clue on your affiliates page. The
clicks to that banner or affiliate link will skyrocket. You can often cover the costs of the
promotion and the prize through the increased traffic to your web site
entirely.
An online contest can also help drive
business to a brick and mortar retail operation that you may be using your web
presence to support. This is a wonderful
way to meet your online customers face to face by using the contest to take the
customers to your store to look for a clue. As they move through the aisles of
the store, in addition to eagerly looking for the next step of the contest,
they will be shopping and very often, buying things which is exactly what you
are looking for.
A contest that you set off via email is
also a powerful viral marketing tool.
Your customers will naturally tell their friends and relatives about the
contest. And as more people hear about
the contest, you may see a surge of requests to join in on the fun coming
through your online message services.
Just be sure to take those customers to an email registration so you can
harvest their email addresses and get your business email placed on their
favored contacts list too. In that way
you cleverly expand your marketing base while drawing new customers to your web
site.
You may find that once you get started
having contests via email and contests that incorporate every aspect of your
online presence, it might become a habit you want to repeat often. The increased traffic, sales and expansion of
your customer base can be so lively that there is no reason not to use this
marketing tool often.
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