- Trick #61: Brand Your BusinessAnd Market It
- Trick #62: Link to Your Other Listings
- Trick #63: Set Up Product Cross-Promotions
- Trick #64: Encourage Add-On Sales
- Trick #65: Optimize Your Listings for Search
- Trick #66: Create an Email Mailing List
- Trick #67: Gain Exposure by Writing Reviews and Guides
- Trick #68: Use Google AdWords
- Trick #69: Feed Your Store Listings to Google Product Search
- Trick #70: Promote Your eBay Listings in the Real World
- eBay Business Profile: Balkowitsch Enterprises, Inc.
- A Rags to Riches Story
- How to Grow a Business
- Managing the Business
- Selling Strategies
- Keys to Success
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Trick #66: Create an Email Mailing List
Savvy sellers keep good records of all their past auctions—and past buyers. Then you can create a list of buyers who want to be contacted when you have similar merchandise for sale. (Make this an opt-in list; you don't want to spam anyone.) When you have new items for sale, send out emails to interested customers, and watch the orders arrive!
The easiest way to create an email mailing list is through eBay. If you run an eBay Store, eBay offers free email marketing; it's a nice perk, and it really works. eBay lets you add a Sign Up for Store Newsletter link to all your listings, and then create up to five different mailing lists to target different types of customers or product categories. You can even use eBay's email marketing tools to measure the success of your email newsletters, which makes it easier to fine-tune your promotions in the future.
All eBay Store owners can send a total of 5,000 free emails a month to subscribers. If you want to send more than this, you'll pay an additional penny per email for each message above the base 5,000.
Creating an Email Mailing List
To create a new email mailing list, follow these instructions:
- Go to My eBay and click the Marketing Tools link.
- When the Marketing Tools: Summary page appears, click the Email Marketing link in the Store Marketing section.
- When the Email Marketing: Summary page appears, as shown in Figure 7.5, click the Create Mailing List button.
Figure 7.5 The Email Marketing: Summary page.
- When the next page appears, enter a name for this mailing list, and then click the Save button.
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That's it; your mailing list now appears on the Email Marketing: Summary page.
Adding Subscribers
You can't manually add subscribers to your mailing lists. Subscribers have to opt in of their own accord, which they do from your item listings and eBay Store pages. Whenever users add you to their favorite sellers list, they have the option of subscribing to your email newsletter. In addition, they can sign up when they visit your eBay Store by clicking the Sign Up for Store Newsletter link at the top of the page.
Once someone has subscribed to your newsletter, they appear in the subscriber list at the bottom of the Email Marketing: Summary page. You can manage the list of subscribers by clicking the Email Marketing Subscriber Lists link; the resulting page lets you block subscribers from receiving emails.
Sending Emails
To create an email newsletter and send it to your subscriber list, follow these steps:
- Go to My eBay and click the Marketing Tools link.
- When the Marketing Tools: Summary page appears, click the Email Marketing link in the Store Marketing section.
- When the Email Marketing: Summary page appears, click the Create Email button.
- When the Select a Template page appears, as shown in Figure 7.6, pull down the Type of Email list and select what type of newsletter you want to send.
Figure 7.6 Selecting a template for your email newsletter.
- Still on the Select a Template page, select a template for your email newsletter, and then click the Continue button.
- When the Create Email page appears, as shown in Figure 7.7, enter the necessary information: which mailing list(s) you're sending to, whether to send emails on an automatic schedule, whether to display your Store header, the subject of the newsletter, the message of the newsletter, which items you want to showcase or list, and whether to display your feedback. When finished, click the Preview & Continue button.
Figure 7.7 Creating your email newsletter.
- The next page displays a preview of your newsletter, as shown in Figure 7.8. If you need to edit anything, click the Edit Email button. If you like what you see, click the Send Email button to send the email to your selected recipients.
Figure 7.8 Your email newsletter, ready to send.
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