by: Karen Talavera

I preach a lot about getting email out of the silo it’s often relegated to within companies or marketing departments, and these days I think most marketers realize how important good email integration with other marketing (especially digital) channels and sales systems is to success. But once you’ve created a regular email communications program, or developed your smart auto-responders, are you remembering to strategically use email to strengthen and encourage relationships with your list members in other channels?

Yes, I’m talking about using email to grow and deepen connections with your people outside the in-box. Why would you want to do that? Lots of reasons, but here’s the biggee:

People use multiple media platforms for communication. Conversations started in one channel don’t just stay there. Simply because a customer signed up for your email doesn’t mean they’re not also following you on Twitter or Facebook and might want to communicate there too. If you’re a retailer or other brick-and-mortar business the dimensions broaden because your customers and prospects will interact with your brand in your storefronts, at your events, or both. Not to mention direct mail and telephone.

Today we have seemingly endless ways to research, shop and buy what we need and want. To an increasing degree, those purchase decisions involve multiple interaction points and channels along the path to a “buy” decision.

So the more platforms you build your customer relationships in, the stronger they become. Here are four proactive ways email can help you do this:

Link to Social Media

The obvious tactic these days is to direct your email subscribers to your points of presence on popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Less obvious is including a compelling reason why they should connect with you on social media in addition to email. Contests and sweepstakes can work well in building social media fan/follower bases rapidly, but don’t overlook couponing and the promise of exclusive treatment, content or access for your social network community members only.

Integration is easily done with graphic icons included in your email message or message template which link to your profile pages on social networking sites.

Drive Store Traffic

Need feet through the door? Invite your email subscribers to visit you in person instead of through your online storefront by using email for alerts, announcements and reminders specific to in-store sales or events. “In-store” only specials are a great way to direct response offline vs. online. Store openings, clearances, benefits, or community events are also great ways to draw your target market into your actual place of business.

Promote Events

For event organizers, email is an obvious pre-and post-event communications channel for delivering vital information to attendees, but how many of us not in the events business remember to promote where we’ll be through email? Anywhere you will publicly be is technically an “event”. Events are not just conferences and conventions, but also speaking engagements, charity benefits, community gatherings, meet-ups, seminars, workshops, teleseminars, webinars, trade shows, craft fairs, cross-country roadshows, festivals, sports games, concerts, networking meetings and countless more!

This one is vital, because chances are the majority of people on your email list will not have had the chance to interact with you offline or meet anyone from your company in person. Even if you’re a retail business and they’ve shopped in person, a store location might be the only place they’ve ever encountered your brand offline. In an increasingly impersonal world, people are hungry for face-to-face connections. Leverage every opportunity you can to make them.

Connect to Online Content & Community

Use email to both promote and drive awareness of your blog, videos, webinars, audio, or other content and information hosted online in order to gain subscribers, increase audience sizes and leverage distribution. For example, you can distribute new blog posts via email for those who’d like updates sent straight to their in-box (vs. checking an RSS feed). Here’s more about how to make your blog and email friends.

Plus, promote and feature the proprietary content and communities you host online from within your email by announcing it, linking to it, inviting comments, etc. Remember, just because they’re your email list members doesn’t mean they’ll know what you’re up to elsewhere online unless you tell them!

A major objective of your marketing should be that it’s memorable. After two weeks, people remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, but 50% of what they see and hear. Your prospects and customers are more likely to learn and retain information when it’s presented in multiple modes, and your content will get more attention if you offer people multiple formats by which they can consume it.

Helping your people interact with your content, and you, in multiple ways makes you memorable. And when they’re seeking a product or service in your category, the more memorable you are, the more likely they are to buy from you.

About the Author
Synchronicity Marketing’s Online Marketing Content Planner is a fantastic and super-affordable tool for planning your annual email, social media, blog and digital messaging calendar. Karen Talavera runs Synchronicity Marketing and writes about email, social media and other online marketing conversation channels on her blog Enlightened Emarketing. Follow her on Twitter (@SyncMarketing) or Facebook for daily tips on digital marketing trends, facts and new ideas.

There are very few business owners that I know who LOVE to sell! For most of us, heaven would be a never-ending line of wonderful customers — people who love who love us back.

They work with us because they get unparalleled value. Their needs and wants, perfectly match what we easily deliver and they never, ever, ever moan and groan about price. In fact, they can’t believe they’re getting such a great deal for the quality of product and service they receive.

This isn’t some pie-in-the-sky dream. It’s reality for those business owners who word a powerful four-step process that you can use to make marketing easy and effortless.

1. Identify Your Strength: What could be more fun than building a business all around the most wonderful person in the world? If you’re going to build a successful business, you will be spending a lot of time working on it. So you might as well be doing the things you love to do that you’re good at and that come easy to you.

2. Profiling Your Ideal Customer: The biggest mistake small businesses make is trying to serve EVERYONE? You couldn’t possibly service every single customer out there, so don’t try. Why not just work with your favorite customers. Difficult customers aren’t really difficult, they are just customers who want things that your system doesn’t easily deliver. Focus on those customers who appreciate your strengths and value them. When you’re profiling your ideal customer, focus on their demographics (size, location and industry) as well as their psychographics (what’s important to them, their communication style, etc). One of my favorite customer profiling tips is to create a collage or magazine cover focusing on your ideal customer. Choose a picture that most accurately represents your customer, then create articles and headlines that you think your customers would appreciate that you can help them with. It’s a terrific way to focus on your customer as a real person and not just a company.

3. Finding out what’s important to them: This is the most powerful part of your marketing. So many times, we focus on the features of our products and services and not on WHY these features exist in the first place.

4. Build an irresistible offer: Now that you have the list of what’s important to your customer, and how your business meets those needs, then you’re ready to start creating an offer they can’t resist. Combine what’s important to your customer, with what you offer and call out the payoff or the benefit that your customers will get and they will be hooked for a lifetime.

Becoming the obvious choice for your ideal customers doesn’t come from some magical marketing tool or strategy, it comes from combining your unique talents and strengths with what’s important to your customer and then creating a product or service offer that they can’t resist.

Once you have that, all you have to do is hang out where your ideal customer likes to hang out. You’ll be ready with a terrific branding story that’s rooted in your genuine passion and real customer need. Follow these simple 4-step plan and you’ll become a marketing magnet for your ideal customer, every time, regardless of price.

About the Author
Ivana Taylor is the publisher of DIYMarketers.com and the President of Third Force a firm that specializes in helping companies find their best customers and be the one they choose – regardless of price. She’s an expert and book editor for Small Business Trends and a contributor to AMEX Open Forum.

“I hate to market myself” is a very common complaint I hear from many of my clients. Some are introverts, who are naturally averse to self-promotion, while others just don’t realize that they also wear the hat of Marketing Director when they start their own business and unhappily discover that they are responsible for getting their own clients and customers. Trust me, it’s imperative that you get over this stigma (or move beyond it), for without marketing, nothing happens.

What are the best ways for introverts to promote themselves in a way that doesn’t feel overly promotional? Here are 6 proven strategies to help introverts easily and effortlessly market themselves:

1. Stepping into the shoes of your ideal client and target market. Do you understand what your target market needs and what their problems are? What about the biggest pain or complaint of your ideal client? Being able to accurately describe both your target market and your ideal client will help you greatly in understanding them. Take 30 minutes and jot down some notes about both and see if you can craft your target market profile and ideal client profile. Once you have created these, your copywriting for your web site, your ezine, and your emails becomes so much easier, because you can create each piece of your marketing content as though you’re sitting down and having a one-on-one conversation with a specific ideal client or member of your target market. What you have to say then feels authentic and not salesy at all.

2. Discover and use your “profitable essence.” I borrowed this term from visibility expert Nancy Marmolejo. By this I mean discovering what you’re brilliant at doing and getting recognition (and money) to do what you do best. Once you figure out what makes you unique, the notion of selling yourself dissipates, as you then find yourself effortlessly doing what comes naturally to you.

3. Share your knowledge. Introverts often value knowledge over people, and so what someone knows becomes more important than whom someone knows. Because introverts enjoy research and amassing knowledge, it becomes very easy for introverts to share what they know. How can you do this online? Easy. By writing a new article every week that is published online. Or, by publishing a weekly email newsletter. Perhaps you offer a value-packed giveaway from your web site that entices visitors to sign up on your list. Or, you offer much of what you know about a topic on your authority web site.

4. Teach what you know. Introverts may not realize that skills that they have are unique to themselves and aren’t a skill set that everyone possesses. Once realizing their uniqueness, many introverts like to teach others about what they know. This might mean delivering your signature speech at in-person association meetings, or perhaps holding a teleseminar or webinar and presenting your information online. Or, perhaps you seek out opportunities to be interviewed where you set the tone of the interview by providing a list of questions to be asked.

5. Seek out for 1:1 opportunities. Introverts function much better in small groups or 1:1 than we do in crowds. So, seek out opportunities to speak 1:1 with someone. Perhaps you answer questions on an online forum or ask others to submit questions to you. Or, you request prospects to set up 20-minute strategy sessions with you so that you can get a feel for what they might need and you can demonstrate to them what you can offer to them.

6. Network selectively. Yes, you can network as an introvert, but not all networking opportunities are created equal. The key here is finding groups in which you feel comfortable.

One of my favorite networking groups held monthly meetings where there was a guest speaker on a relevant topic. Part of the meeting entailed being seated with 7 other women where each of us got to deliver a 60-second elevator speech to the others seated at the table. If we wanted to know more, we passed our business cards with a note on the back to a particular speaker to follow up after the meeting or at a later time. Each meeting typically involved 2-3 rounds like this, so at the end of a meeting, each of us had a list of people who were eager and willing to hear from us. I loved this group because it structured my networking for me and I didn’t have to make idle chit-chat with people I didn’t know.

Another option is to participate in an online social network, like Facebook or Twitter, which gives you the ideal opportunity to connect with like-minded people 1:1 virtually.

Marketing isn’t an evil part of business for the introvert. Think of marketing as an extension of sharing yourself and your expertise with others who desperately need what you have to offer. These 6 strategies will help you successfully market yourself without sacrificing your natural introverted tendencies.

About the Author
Introvert Marketing Coach Donna Gunter helps professional service businesses stop the client chase and create online businesses that drive clients to them. Want to learn specific Internet marketing strategies that get results for introverts? Discover how to increase your online visibility in this free ecourse, Introvert Marketing Toolkit: 9 Strategies to Make a BOLD Impression Online, at ==> http://www.IntrovertMarketingToolkit.com

Lyn Prowse-Bishop conducts a preview interview of Kathie Thomas on the importance of networking for the upcoming Online International Virtual Assistants Convention 2011.