Offline marketing in general is providing services that you’re comfortable with to local area businesses who need those services and either don’t know how to do themselves, or they have better things to do with their time. Usually both of those situations, in general, and when they do, you have an obvious and potentially popular and very profitable service on your hands.

Why Providing Email Services to Local Businesses Should be Your First Choice

Local Businesses See used to sending out direct mail newsletters occasionally to the customers who had signed up for their programs.

Typically it’s a flyer with some information that would be interesting to people who shopped in their stores, along with coupons that they could redeem when they stopped by again, with expiration dates.

These run fairly well, but the cost are pretty high. Let’s assume, they send out around 1000 flyers. That involves photocopying each page that many times. They are printed at the local Copyshop on coloured newspaper so it would stand out.

After the copying was done, it would be assembled and stapled shut. Then they have to print out laser labels of the names on the listing, affix them to the flyers, and lick and paste postage stamps on each one.

It typically costs around a dollar per flyer between the postal charges and print and labels.

Once mailed, customers would start coming in to redeem their coupons within 2 days, typically.

If someone would walk through door and tell the local business owners that all that could be done for almost nothing, and there would be no restriction to how many names they could mail to, there’s an extremely high chance that they would love to test it,  because of the money savings, and the ease of doing mailings more often.

Your action plan

So why not be the one who walks through the door telling the business owners about you, providing email service?

Start to explain to local business owners the fact that you could help them get more of their current clients, who already know, like and trust them, to visit more often.

Who wouldn’t be interested in that bargain, right?

It would be current customers that I’d go after, not new ones, but current customers often bring in new ones through word of mouth.

Now keep in mind that local business owners are good at what they do, whether that’s stimulating pizzas, treating patients( doctors, dentists, chiropractors, etc .), landscaping services, auto servicing, plumbing, or whatever.

They aren’t good at setting up computer systems to keep in touch with their client base. Nor are they good at designing forms to capture those names at a phase of purchase. Nor are they good at setting up autoresponder sequences that will offer the people on their list a discount if they visit within the next 7 days. Nor ideas what email service do for their business.

These kinds of things are something you could do for them, couldn’t you?

You could also design a squeeze page for them and a very simple basic website, which would serve to capture names of possible.new customers as well, while you’re at it.

You could also write broadcast emails for the business whenever they have special events or special vacation discount periods, and broadcast the information to the entire list.

So what you would be doing would sort of involve being their trusted provider for email service, and perhaps so much more on online marketing.

Local businesses might be expending hundreds or thousands of dollars monthly on display ads in the Yellow Pages, that is becoming less effective each year. They might be throwing their money away with coupons on the backs of supermarket register videotapes, or on paper placemats at local diners. They might be sending out coupons in the mail together with other local businesses… And pretty often there are no measurable results.

The point is, they’re accustomed to spending money with a objective to bring people into their establishment, and you’ll be helping them by providing email service.

Depending on the business, your service could and should be the most cost effective for them, and give them the biggest return on investment of any of the other options.

So an initial setup fee (to cover the cost of designing the squeeze page, the flyer that’s kept by the register to explain the fact that the business has an email listing and the benefits of joining, and the setting up of the initial autoresponder service) could easily earn you $500, $1000, or more.

And after the initial setup, your ongoing service and assistance in regular broadcasts to that listing, including setting up maybe 2 broadcasts a month informing the list of special sales and discount offers, could earn you an extra two to three hundred dollars a month.

You could also host their email list on your account … in fact this is one route I would start out. I would give them a 14 day or 30 day trial where you would help them define everything up, no charge until after the trial period, and show them at the end of the trial how many customers signed up. These customers would be visiting the business with their special coupons redeeming the offers and would prove the benefits of your email service.

If they decide not to become your client after the trial, you would delete the names on the list.

So if you’re hosting their email list, you would patently charge for that based on the size of the list( much like Aweber and Getresponse have costs based on tiers of number of subscribers ).

Doing that would lock them into a profitable monthly maintenance fee for you. Or if they wanted to take over the listing on their own account, you would define them up with the email provider, employing your affiliate connection of course.

What business would want to stop your email service once a bunch of clients signed up, right?

So there you go. Find one new customer for your service every week and the setup fee would net you typically $1,000, plus monthly upkeep fees of typically $250. Once you’ve been doing this for 6 months to a year, you’ll have a very nice recurring income, and if you have trouble doing all the servicing, you are able to outsource some of the tasks, or hire federal employees or two as you grow and expand.

If you weren’t doing all the cold calling or doorway to door canvassing yourself, you could close a lot more than one new account a month, I’m sure.

Upsell more services

And then, once you’ve gotten a client, and once they’re happy with all the extra business that’s coming in their doorways, as I’m sure they will be, you now have clients that will look to you and trust you to recommend other services you offer like…

Perhaps a redesign, or initial design, of their web site, or of their blog.

Perhaps writing the regular blog posts for them, including getting them optimized for SEO purposes. After all you know more about getting them to the top of the search engines than they do.

Perhaps SEO services for their existing blog or web site, to help them reach more new customers.

Perhaps social marketing where you set up or improve upon their Facebook fan page so that they are able to keep in touch with those people more than only a couple days a month( you can post on their page for them regularly, for a fee of course ).

Perhaps a pay per click advertising campaign on Facebook or Google or Yahoo/ Bing or elsewhere to get new leads.

Perhaps designing a short report or even ghostwriting a book for professionals or service providers of some form, so that they are able to publish under their name and gain greater respect and authority in your community.

Perhaps sending out press releases to announce special events held by the business.

The prospects are endless, and if you’re not comfy doing all those various services, either you are able to decide not offer them, or you can find someone to outsource to. You’ll become the center of attention. Done right, the business proprietor will be happy to recommend you to his friends in the community as well, and the cycle begins again.

An imperfect start now is better than a perfect plan tomorrow

The whole point is, you have these skills, and they don’t. They have skills as doctors and accountants and eatery cooks and hairdressers and plumbers and owners of bars and so much more. They’ll be thrilled to outsource to you and pay you well for what you can do for them, which is to bringing more clients in the door.

Most businesses appreciates that a client is a client, not caring so much whether it’s a new one or an existing one. You’ll assists them keep in touch and maximize the revenue from existing customers, and you’ll do that well.

Good luck, and let me know how you do with this method.