Today's Topic

One of the many great marketing tools included with your reseller account is Express Email Marketing, our advanced and highly effective e-mail marketing software. Express Email Marketing allows you to stay in touch with your customers through newsletters, product promotions and other announcements. As well, Express Email Marketing lets you build and manage your customer/subscriber list; conduct surveys from your Web site and/or through e-mail campaigns and track the recipients’ responses to your e-mailed campaigns.

Through Express Email Marketing campaigning you can ensure that your customers are continually kept informed about your business and product offerings. For example, if you add a new product to your reseller store, you can inform your customers of this by creating and sending them a promotional e-mail message. Similarly, if you are planning on discounting a product, Express Email Marketing ensures that your customers will be aware of your promotion. In a sense, Express Email Marketing allows you nurture your customer relationships simply by staying in touch with the customers.

Express Email Marketing is strictly permission-based, which means that potential recipients of your e-mail campaigns must opt in before you can send them anything. This opt-in system ensures that your campaigns aren’t mistaken for spam, and that your reseller business won’t be accused of distributing junk mail.

In the following, we’ll zoom in on the main features of Express Email Marketing and explain how you can use them to promote your reseller business.

Build and Maintain Your Subscriber List

The key to successfully marketing your reseller business with Express Email Marketing is to compile a comprehensive list of subscribers (subscribers are the addressees that have opted to receive campaign mailings from you). Bluntly put: It is no good creating enticing e-mail campaigns if you have no one to send them to.

As you build your customer base, Express Email Marketing enables you to compile a mailing list of customers with whom you can share your announcements. Express Email Marketing even allows you to import your existing reseller customer list and its members to your Express Email Marketing subscriber list. Fortunately, Express Email Marketing provides you with the tools you need to build and maintain a solid subscriber list for your promotional mailings.

Besides manually entering applicable subscriber information, Express Email Marketing allows you to add to your subscriber list by importing your reseller business’ existing customer list and by using the “Opt-In Magnet”:

* Synchronizing customer list with Express Email Marketing subscriber list – Express Email Marketing lets you add your entire customer list to your subscriber list, thus easily creating an audience for your promotional mailings. You can even set up Express Email Marketing to perform the synchronization every night, thus ensuring that all customers (except those who opt out, of course) are added to your subscriber list. This option is particularly useful if you have an established reseller business with a comprehensive list of customers.
* Using the “Opt-In Magnet” – This feature lets you create an opt-in link that you can place on your reseller Web site (or any other Web site, for that matter). That way, Web site visitors interested in receiving mailings from your reseller business can add their names to your list simply by clicking on the provided link.

Be sure to actively pursue new subscribers as a continually growing subscriber list means that your list of past, present and future customers is growing, too.

Keep Your Customers in the Know
Express Email Marketing lets you to create and distribute various campaign types: Announcements, Product Offerings, Newsletters, etc. Based on professionally-designed templates that allow you to convey your message in enticing manner – you can even customize your campaigns by adding your business logo and/or any other graphics to them –, each of the campaign types will help you stay in touch with your customer base and inspire your recipients to invest in more of your products and services.

As a reseller, you should use Express Email Marketing to inform your customers about sales and other promotions, and about new or improved products and services available from your store. For example: If you decide to run a promotional campaign with a discounted price on .com. net and .org domain registrations, Express Email Marketing ensures that your customers are aware of the offer.

To build such a campaign, simply make the necessary pricing adjustments in your Reseller Control Center; then open your Express Email Marketing account and select the Create Email Campaign option. Next, select the applicable campaign type – most probably Product Promotion, but any campaign type you deem applicable for this promotional mailing will work – and choose one of the available templates. Next, enter your campaign name and e-mail subject; then type in the body content for your campaign. Don’t forget to insert a link to the applicable page in your reseller store. If needed, you can customize the campaign’s background and hyperlink colors so that they match the color schemes of your reseller Web site.

As described in the recent blog article Part II: Creating a Custom Home Page - Advanced Users, you can even place a domain search box in the body of an outgoing e-mail campaign, thus allowing your customers to start their domain search directly from there.

If you’d rather design your own campaign layout, you may instead select the Custom HTML option and paste in your own code. In fact, you can grab the HTML source code from any of the announcements found in the Newsletters/Announcements section of the Marketing Tools menu in your Reseller Control Center and use that code as a template for your custom campaign. If you know how to do it, creating a Custom HTML-based campaign allows you to create a campaign with the exact design and contents that you like, without having to rely on the existing templates.

A very basic e-mail campaign might look something like this:

Big domain sale!

Limited time offer: Register your .com, .net or .org domain for only [[insert price]]!

Hurry. Sale ends on [[insert date]]!

REGISTER YOUR DOMAIN NOW!

When you have finished creating your campaign, you can proceed to defining whom to send it to and when the campaign should go out.

Similarly, you can use Express Email Marketing’s Newsletter and Announcement campaign formats to inform your customers about any other issues, events, etc. that pertain to your store – or anything else you think might interest the recipients, for that matter.

For example: You can create a campaign that promotes the fact that your reseller store just started offering, for example, Quick Blog. Or you can inform the customers that the latest edition of Quick Shopping Cart, if you are offering that, includes a host of cool, new features. Basically, you can use Express Email Marketing campaigns to keep your customers in the loop on anything you like.

Understand Your Customers – Create Surveys
Another very useful feature of Express Email Marketing is the ability to create and distribute surveys of your customer base and obtain vital information about your customers’ opinion about your store, its offerings, etc.

Surveys allow you to get an idea of your customers’ opinions, directly from the source. The feedback may help you tremendously in improving the marketing of your store and in helping you carve out a crucial niche for your business. You can compose surveys that inquire about customers’ opinion about your reseller store’s product selection, pricing policies, storefront layout, etc. You can even prompt your Express Email Marketing subscribers to suggest ways of improving your store. In fact, you can ask your customers directly what they like and dislike about your reseller store.

It’s easy to create and distribute surveys: Express Email Marketing lets you select question types and compose the questions in any way you like. And once you’re done composing the content, you can put a link to the survey in any of your outgoing e-mail campaigns. Or you can simply place the link on your reseller Web site.

Analyze Responses
When you have distributed your campaigns and surveys, you can review and interpret the campaign responses and survey feedback with Express Email Marketing’s Response Analyzer feature.

The reporting tools tell you how many campaign messages you have sent, how many were opened by their recipients, how many recipients responded, etc. As well, you can review survey results by survey, question, etc. To the extent that such information is available, you can even break down the responses by the subscribers’ age demographics.

In summary: Express Email Marketing provides you with the tools you need to stay in touch with, nurture and expand your reseller business’ customer base. With Express Email Marketing, your can keep you customers in the loop on anything that goes on with your store. If you use Express Email Marketing to your own advantage, you can help ensure that your customers keep coming back for more of your products and services, rather than looking to your competition.