In tougher economic times, email marketing is the best way to drive repeat business for your local store. It offers a simple three step process to ensure better sales numbers while using a minimal marketing budget. By providing promotions that your customers will be likely to associate with - in store or online -your new customers will sign-up for your newsletters and promotions, attracting them to your store/shop more frequently, and eventually making them a "lifer".

The best way to start attracting people to begin signing up for your email marketing campaigns is to make your promotions available and visible by your store's entrance. By providing a large colorful sign with a sign-up sheet, or a business card raffle box, you can have customers sign up to receive promotions that will entice them to come to your location more often. Make sure that you include other staff members in the promotion of the programs to customers. You can even create an incentive program for staff (such as a healthy on the job competition for prizes) rewarding those employees who collect the most names and adds them to the email marketing solutions newsletter and promotion list.

If you have a website, then another crucial feature that email marketing solutions can offer you is a web sign up box. The top-ranked email marketing solutions offers this free as part of your free trial and regular account status. In most cases, all you have to do is cut and paste the web sign up code so that your web designer can ensure it is placed on your web site. It is very easy to do, it takes little time to accomplish, and the results are that anyone who is viewing your site has the opportunity to sign-up for your promotions and newsletters online.

Using the web sign-up box in conjunction with email marketing solutions will keep your business up-to-date with an ever more tech-savvy market. It doesn't matter whether your customers are old, young or middle-aged; everyone is making their computer the central tool for obtaining information. By getting on board through email marketing solutions and having your website updated with a web sign up box, you are speaking directly to the needs of your customers. This will ensure that you brand stays ahead of the local competition.

Once you have your contact list, it is simply a manner of putting together a catchy email marketing solutions newsletter or promotion, then reminding customers of the reasons why they love your store or shop. The more effective email marketing solutions companies provide you with hundreds of templates to choose from, neatly organized and ready to populate. All you need to do is get some digital images of your products or location (make sure the pictures really show off the things that the people coming are going to be attracted to), get your text content together, and you can be sending out in minutes.

Email marketing solutions offer detailed tracking metrics that will provide you with great information on your customers. In the short term, it will help you better market to your customers, and in the long term, it will make them loyal to your business as you continue to meet their needs. Email marketing solutions offer the ability to export data on who has opened your emails, clicked on the links inside the email marketing solutions campaign (this might be in the form of product images that are linked to your website, or simple hyperlinks in the email), forwarded your email to a friend, and which emails have bounced. This is information that will detail what your customers' interests are, and their interest level in your store location, therefore giving you a great opportunity to focus your marketing techniques on the differing segmentation that emerges from this information.

Keep in mind that if, at any point, you have questions about email marketing; the more highly considered email marketing solutions will always have live telephone support as well as 24 hour email support to help you put together the best campaign for you needs. On top of this, the better email marketing solutions offer you tips and articles that you can access at anytime, which will direct you toward the best practices of email marketing.

Email marketing solutions will help remind your first time customers that they loved the products and services you offer at your store (remember customer service is the key to ensuring this). So, once you get them in the door, make sure you use email marketing solutions to keep them coming back. It's easy to use, cost effective, and can turn your local store or shop into a local success!