Read the following excerpt from my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Marketing Handbook’ to learn how to mange your customer database with online relationship marketing systems…
At its simplest, you can store your data in a spreadsheet like Excel, Open Office or Google Docs, and use a do-it-yourself online email marketing service like Mail Chimp or Constant Contact to send your emails.
You can manage your lists in your spreadsheet and each time you send an email newsletter you can import your contacts into MailChimp or Constant Contact. You can even set up forms on your website that load any database sign-ups directly into your database.
The purpose of this book is not to teach you how to use any of the above programmes to manage your marketing. There is a ton of information out there on using spreadsheets, and the skills you need are reasonably basic.
Also, Mail Chimp and Constant Contact come with great online help, and are relatively easy to use for those of you who are so inclined. However, if you are allergic to computers, there are also systems and services that handle all the technicalities for you. I’m going to talk about one of these systems – Web Genius – that I happen to be familiar with, but this is by no means the only option.
And yes, I do have more than just a passing interest in Web Genius, so I need to declare my hand. Web Genius is both the company I have developed over the past 10 years and the software system used to implement web marketing solutions for its clients. It is the system behind the online success of Web Genius clients like Shoe Clinic and Action Property Services mentioned in this book.
So there you have it – the official “shameless plug”. However, the fact it’s taken over 100 pages to do this will hopefully convince you that my main purpose is not to promote my own business, but to illustrate some important points with some technology that I am familiar with. Here are a couple of other business with similar systems you can check out if you want to compare other options: www.zeald.co.nz, www.bloomtools.co.nz.
Online relationship marketing systems allow you to set up the fields of your marketing database so you can easily target different segments via email marketing and also via the pages of your website.
If you are serious about your online relationship marketing, and are getting frustrated with doing it yourself and with the piecemeal nature of managing your data in various systems, these services would be well worth investigating.
To read more, you can purchase my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Internet Marketing Handbook’ by clicking here.
