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eBay Stores come with a very powerful feature: store newsletters.
When buyers add your store to their favourites, you can offer them the
chance to join your mailing list. You can then send highly targeted
emails to people who you know were at least interested enough in your
products to add the store to their favourites. How Do I Send Them? First,
you need to get some people to sign up for your newsletter – this will
happen with time, as people buy from you and browse your store. Once
you’ve got a few subscribers, it’s worth sending out a newsletter. To
send store newsletters, go to My eBay, click ‘Manage My Store’, and
then click ‘Email Marketing’. Once you’ve done that, click the ‘Create
Email’ button, and you’re away. All you need to do now is write
an email subject and a message, choose any items you want to include in
the email, and specify who you want to receive it. The subject and
message can be something relatively generic, like ‘here are my latest
deals’ – it’s the targeting that’s important, and eBay’s is powerful.
You can choose to only send an email to people who’ve bought from you
in the past, or only to people who’ve opened your email before. It is important to note, though, that you can only send one email per week to a mailing list. The Ups and Downs. The
downside of store newsletters is this: they’re expensive. A basic,
$15.95 per month store only comes with 100 emails, while $49.95 comes
with 1000. Even the $499.95 anchor store only comes with 4000! Extra
emails for all stores cost 1 cent each. That’s $1 per hundred extra
emails. If your mailing list has a significant number of people on it,
then that’ll get really expensive, really fast. Surprisingly,
though, it can often be worth it, despite the cost. It’s very rare to
send out a newsletter to a mailing list of a hundred and not get at
least one sale, and you’ll often get three or four, even to small lists. Measure Your Success. Each
time you send an email, eBay produces a report telling you how well
that email did. You can view these reports on the ‘Email Marketing’
page by clicking the subject line of an email you sent. This
report will show how many people received your email, how many opened
it, the number of clicks it generated on your items and your store, and
the number of bids and Buy it Now purchases that resulted from the
email. Some of the numbers might be too low, though, as many people use
email software that displays email in plain text format and so stops
eBay from collecting statistics. Also, you will notice that you’ll have
more success if you send out emails regularly, as people will start to
expect them, and react in a more open way – don’t expect the Earth from
your first email. By now, you’re probably getting pretty good at
selling on eBay – isn’t it nice to have all those satisfied customers?
Not to mention the money… However well you’re doing, though, there’s
always room for improvement.
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Neil Harvey is the webmaster of http://www.justebooks.net/ offering ebooks and a free newsletter with hints and tips to help succeed online. |
