Selling and Teaching via Email

Probably the most reliable way to get around the problem of email delivery problems is to shift the desire for communications from the merchant, which is you, to the customer. By turning the tables so the customer wants your emails, the customer will take the steps to white list your email sending address to make sure he or she gets every single email you send. And the best way to create that desire is to give them something of value in their email each week.

People come to the internet for many things including entertainment, discussion, free stuff and diversion. But one of the most common things that people want is knowledge. Yo have a specialized knowledge you can offer to your customers that will not only benefit them but it can be used as a marketing tool to open communications to your customers email inboxes in a far more effective way than any blind email or mass mailing could ever do.

There are several ways to offer training courses online including ebooks or videos. But what is most effective for the sake of opening a long lasting communication channel to your customers is an email course in which you step by step lay out your specialized knowledge about your field of expertise over a period of twelve to fifteen installments.

Sometimes this kind of offering is called an autoresponder series because the function of an autoresponder software package can be helpful with distribution of the e-course. An autoresponder is a specialized service or type of software that either automatically responds to events or emails by sending out a response email or it can be used to generate email traffic on a schedule. So you can use an autoresponder to send the next installment of your email course to those who "subscribe" to it and know that it will go out without fail on the appointed day.

Now probably the biggest challenge of offering an autoresponder email course is how to create the course. Few of us are writers and while you may have the knowledge, you may have trouble composing that knowledge in the form of a course. There are a couple of ways to solve this problem…

. You could hire a ghostwriter to compose the course for you.
. You could speak the course contents into a tape recorder and then have it transcribed into a written course that could be sent to customers in short email installments.
. You could even have a friend "interview" you to draw that specialized knowledge out of you. The interviews could be fairly free form and then you could take the transcriptions of the interviews and organize them by topic into an e-course to offer your customers.

Once you have the contents laid out, don’t publish the course until you look it over to see where in the outlines you can integrate marketing messages. Many of the products or services you offer as part of your business are directly related to your specialized knowledge. So by including links to your shopping cart pages or to web pages that can lead customers to purchase decisions, the course is both instructional and useful for promoting your web site and sales as well.

The next step is to get the course into the hands of your users. The first candidates to become "students" are the active cyber citizens who spend a lot of time on your web site. So look at the regular posters on your message boards and blogs or citizens of a chat room on your site or contributors to your wiki and open conversations with them about offering a course.

You can also create multiple ways to allow your customers to subscribe to the course series. An online sign up is always a good choice because you can harvest their email address there and then open communications to their email and see to it that your business email is added to their favored contacts spam filter list so they do not see the courses disappear into their spam bucket each week.

As the customer enjoys learning from your series, the added benefit of getting them used to an active interaction with you and your web site is put in place. And the course can be viral to be passed along to friends and family members so it recruits new customers as well.

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