E-Mail List: Why Your Business NEEDS One

The golden percent in business - 20% of your customers make you 80% of your profits.

When you're a seller you will notice that a big source of your income is from repeat customers - (the 20% in the online handmade marketplace).  That is why building positive customer relationships and keeping in touch with your buyers is important. 
Once you have made a sale, it is your time to act and make sure that you give your customer every reason to buy from you again.  One great way to do that is through an e-mail list.

Building a voluntary e-mail list with your customers is going to give you a huge advantage as a seller.  You can keep customers up to date with your latest goods, sales and promotions.  When it comes to selling product, if they don't know it exists than there is 100% chance that they won't buy it!  Keep your products and shop out there to remind people that yes, you still exist, and yes your still selling your top quality goods.

Now, how do you to turn customers and would-be customers into subscribers?  Here are several suggestions:

1. Make it easy to subscribe - put a subscription sign-up box in plain site on your site or blog.
2. Offer exclusive coupons and discount codes through your newsletter when customers subscribe, and let them know you do!  Offering one that subscribers will receive immediately (like through drip mail) is a great incentive for would-be-customers to subscribe and make a purchase.
3. When you ship product, make sure to include among the cute packaging a card or something with your newsletter subscription information - and if you give product discounts through the newsletter, make sure they know!
4. When you do promotional giveaways of your products, make signing up for your newsletter on of the entry options.
5. Send valuable information in your newsletters and make every letter count!  You can send them different ways you have found to use your product that will make their life easier and such.  Make the time they spent reading your newsletter worthwhile for both parties.

There are lots of ways to build a positive e-mail list.  Get creative, but stay authentic.  Don't overdo it either, because that will put off your customers, not make them loyal fans.

Now, you can manually send out e-mail letters to every subscriber yourself if you want - but this is a big waste of effort and time.  There are a lot of good free programs out there that offer to manage your accounts for you.
One I recommend and use myself is Mad MiMi.  They offer a free start-up program that I feel is preferred over most others because its based on the amount of subscribers instead of a trial period.  When you're first starting and building an e-mail list, you really don't want to have to pay a lot of money to keep an account after 30 days.  Instead you want to build your list up until you have enough subscribers that you can upgrade your account. 

This makes more sense, because if you have to pay $10 a month and you don't even have 10 subscribers by the end of your trial period, that just isn't going to be very profitable.  Mad Mimi has one of the best free accounts I have found and they make everything from layout to sending very, very easy.

So, you really don't have any excuses to put off using this profitable marketing technique any longer!  Set up your account and add your subscription box to your blog in just minutes and get your list to work for you!

*Disclaimer - an e-mail list doesn't guarantee increased sales, it just improves the likelihood when your customers receive continued exposure to your products and sales.  If your newsletter happens to not generate any sales for whatever reason, I cannot be held responsible.  I am an affiliate with Mad Mimi and my links are included in this post.  Rest assured that if I'm promoting a product, even an affiliate, I believe that what they have to offer is beneficial for my readers.*