Several Ways To Keep Your Opt In Email Leads Engaged In Your Business

How do you keep your leads once you have established an opt in email list and have sent out your first newsletter? Your best course of action is a plan of regular contact to everyone on your opt in list. How do you do this and still keep it interesting?

Personalized email is a great tool to keep and hold the interest of your contacts. Following these hints will not only build rapport, but will make each of them feel special to you and your company, which indeed they are.

Be polite. Response is higher if emails are personalized. A simple "Hello Jane"� goes a long way toward instilling a sense of familiarity. Most people certainly prefer receiving mail with his or her name on it and they usually just trash un-addressed mail or mail addressed to "Occupant"�. Your opt in program or service will make it easy to send personal responses to your leads and, if you are a small business with less than 100 names you can probably do it yourself.

If your lead has already purchased something from your company, a reference back to that product is a good way to keep in contact. Is the buyer satisfied with the product? Send a questionnaire regarding customer satisfaction about the item. This is a personal email that will give the buyer a feeling that the company is looking after his interests and that is exactly what you are doing. This is also an early warning system if there does happen to be a problem with an item of merchandise.

Is your company local, or does it have branches scattered across the country? Regardless, you can use a reference that is local to the lead if you add that information to his file. For instance, if you're old enough, you'll remember that Rice-a-roni is a treat from San Francisco, but the "Friendliest Staff In the World"� could be in your outlet in Omaha or Chicago or any other city that is local to your lead. Of course, you will have to be sure that you know what city your contact is in and that you send the appropriate email.

Appeal to members of groups or organizations by offering limited time discounts to affiliated members. "As a driver for the Greater Tulsa Bus Service you can receive a Special 20% Discount on uniforms"�. Once again, you must know that your recipient is within the parameters of the offer.

An image of the product model that the client purchased can be very effective in keeping the opt-in interested in your emails. A photo of a blue Lotus winning a race could be sent in an email to the purchaser of a brand new blue Lotus along with a note about what a winning car he now owns.

One thing you must always keep in mind is that using this type of email requires that data be kept absolutely up to date. What can give a client a warm fuzzy feeling if based on correct identification information, can wreck a relationship if the data is wrong.

One easy way to get leads to look forward to your next email is to always send information that is pertinent to them. This is sometimes easier to say than to do and requires some research on your part. A good start to developing your email is to write down 25 topics that relate to your product and that would be of interest to your members of your opt in list.

Next, do an Internet search for information related to those topics. Choose the 12 best results and design a newsletter around each one. Include a link back to the information source and you have an interesting email that will appeal to your leads and uses a source outside your company. Leads who have indicated an interest in receiving information about your product will be interested in related information and will appreciate the effort you took to send it.

At your company year-end send out a thank you to your clients for their continued support. Each of these should contain information that would be important to your client, and all should have some reason that they should be opened and read at the time they are sent. This could be anything from a birthday sale or discount to an invitation to a year-end celebration.