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Many of my customers ask me what the most powerful form of online advertising is, and I always respond with the same answer, personalized email advertising (you must build a list to truly succeed online).

Email advertising allows you to personalize, respond automatically and provides a gateway for instant feedback.

In fact, it’s extremely easy to set up if you are using the proper software or service to manage your list. If you’re getting thousands of subscribers a month, you’ll be able to ’subscribe and un-subscribe’ your opt-in’s automatically.

Why is it good to personalize your emails?

You can gather thousands of prospects interested in your niche, and using the proper approach begin prospecting for business with email without getting complaints or being accused of ’spam’.

The key is that with the personalization functions offered by many services and email software programs you can highly personalize your emails in a way that, at least appears, like you have personally visited or know a great deal of information about your prospect - that you know them personally.

When you use someone’s name they tend to trust you more, than if you where calling them ‘friend’ or ‘dear subscriber’.

Keep this in mind when choosing your list host.

We discussed “personalization” - an incredibly powerful tool to help us market better with email in the last lesson.

People in general repond in a more postive way when they see their name scattered throughout the message and letters they read.

Today let’s take a closer look at how we can prospect for new customers.

The question marketer’s have been asking for decades is: “Who is my customer?”

Then came, “Where can I find my customer?”

Finally, “What characteristics, habits, and hobbies do my customers have?”

To find out who, where and what your future customers are… you should be mining the data in your current customer list. You where smart enough to compile one, weren’t you?

Now you can put a profile together of your past customers which will help target your future customers and prospects.

Even doing this work and finding common characteristics of your past customers is not good enough.

Often we will completely miss the opportunity to market our products and services to a new market. Since the ‘market’ is not always staring us right in the face. we should not only look at *common* characteristics of our existing customers, we should be looking for those customer that are at the **fringes** (’fringe’ customers are those that don’t match ANY of the common characteristics of our current customers).

What made them buy our product?

What did they use it for?

The answers to these questions may be more profitable - in the long run. Because these ‘fringe’ buyers do not match the *common* characteristics of our current average customer, they may be representative of entirely NEW markets that are not so obvious, but could be highly profitable.

Remember, people buy our products and services for their reasons, not ours. There may be markets out there that want our products, but we haven’t been able to identify them. Ask your ‘fringe’ customer why they bought, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find that there may be several thousand NEW prospects out there for you to contact and sell!

One of the most fascinating marketing books ever written is by Lorin Deland, “Imagination In Business”. It was published in 1909, and even today it is pure genius.

It is believed that he was the first one to ask the question “Why should anyone do business with you over your competition?”.

Deland was a ‘business consultant’ who specialized in sales and marketing at the turn of the century, yet the book reads like it was written just yesterday.

In his book he explains how a retailer came to him for advice. The retailer was on a busy street, and had 4 main competitors on the same block.

He asked Deland how he could garner more business with so much competition.

All of the retail stores were fairly close to each other and all were selling the similar merchandise.

Deland stated that the retailer was really only entitled to one-fifth of the business on the block, as there where in fact 5 stores. He then explained that for every dollar above that amount the retailer wanted to make, there must be a reason why he deserved a bigger share of the marketplace. And he had to create that reason, if he was going to get any more of the business!

Deland also said that if he discovers he’s getting more than his share of the business, he should discover what that reason is, “some customers travel on the line of least resistance, you must make that line of least resistance lead directly to your store”, Deland said.

Deland continued, “Again and again you must ask yourself, ‘Why in the world should these people pass four other stores and come into this one?’”

There has got to be a reason for people to do business with you over your competition. What is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) that sets you apart from your competition?

Is it a better product? Better service?

You must discover your USP and then show your prospects why they should do business with you, and not your competition.