Frugal Marketing for Entrepreneurs

Frugal Marketing for Entrepreneurs

By Wayne Van Dyck

How many e-mails do you send a day? You may just be missing out on a simple and inexpensive marketing tool. You should seize the opportunity to promote your business to a highly targeted market without spending a dime. This can be done by utilizing your e-mail signature line.

If your email signature line is blank or only contains your name and contact information, you're missing out on advertising to e-mail recipients that have opted to communicate with you.

These people are crucial members of your unofficial marketing network. They are prospects, clients, potential customer, press contacts, and colleagues. This makes your signature line the perfect, yet unobtrusive, space for a unique promotional pitch.

Try these tactics to make sales using your sig file: ¢ Highlight what your company offers. ¢ Offer an incentive for recipients taken a specified action. ¢ Play with eye-catching fonts and colors. ¢ Use the associated web address for the incentive, if it's also on your site. ¢ Give better visual positioning to the promotion rather than contact info. ¢ Change your signature copy frequently. ¢ Write a "signature" for different categories of recipients. ¢ Use less than 64 characters/line so that words don't wrap to a new line ¢ Never miss a chance to get your product or company noticed.

Another thing that many entrepreneurs don't realize is that the letters they send out are not merely solving a problem or answering a need, you can carry the e-mail idea over into every piece of mail you generate.

On your company letterhead simply add a line at the bottom of the first page. It should be a catch phrase or a slogan that "brands" your services or business. Try to come up with something unique, witty, and easy to remember so that every time it's heard the prospect thinks of you.

Some examples of this would be, "Good to the last drop," which is Maxwell House Coffee, "Finger-lickin' good," which is KFC, and so on. You get the message of what I'm saying. Play around with this until you come up with a pearl that is uniquely you.

If your business/service does not lend itself to this idea, then you can focus on increasing your credibility by using a "membership" tag line. For instance a funeral home would be less than tasteful using the line, "Our clients are dying to visit us;" but they COULD use the line "Members of The Undertakers Ass. of America" at the bottom of their letterhead. This establishes sense of credibility in the mind of the recipient, even if the letter they received was a direct mail advertising letter.

In today's marketplace when you're an entrepreneur you have to be inventive and creative to usurp the "big boys" on the block. I suggest that you read about the life of P.T. Barnum to get a better understanding of a truly magnificent entrepreneur.

It isn't always the almighty dollar that gets the best advertising for our business; it's the best IDEA that makes you stand out in this overly crowd market.

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Wayne Van Dyck is a former venture capitalist and builder of offline technology companies. He is the founder and developer of Simple Money Machines. Simple Money Machines is all the money making technologies in one, easy-to-use, hosted application… enabling non-technical people to set up online businesses in less than 30 minutes. It's made for people with 9-5 jobs, retired folks, stay-at-home moms and college students. To get a FREE copy of "STARTING A HOME BUSINESS MADE SIMPLE", go to: http://tinyurl.com/ykyoqx.

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