Crossing the Internet Communication Bridge. Your guide to getting started with marketing

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2 Introduction It is likely that you are losing out on additional profits by not crossing the internet communication bridge and reaching the leading edge of internet and marketing before your competitors cross it. So here are some of the key elements you need to understand to cross that bridge and boost your sales to schools. How many businesses out there are still not using a database of their existing and prospective clients and ing them regularly? There are some business owners and managers that are reluctant to adopt an ing approach. Research has shown that it is 5 times more expensive to find new customers than it is to retain existing ones. The way to retain and make profit from current customers is to keep in touch and the most cost effective way of doing this is through marketing. 2

3 Business owners sometimes worry that many people see all forms of ing as spam. What they fail to take into account is that ing has become an incredibly important form of business communication. You can now teachers directly who have opted to receive marketing s so why not take advantage of this direct and cost effective route to market? How to adopt effective marketing to the Education Sector; Make sure your s are innovative and stand out from the crowd. Don t see ing solely as a selling tool; see it as a bridge of communication to your market. Use it to address your customers needs and to keep them up to date with your developments and activities. Make your s imaginative, captivating, funny, anything that positions you apart from the competition. Request your customers address. Every time a business fails to capture a prospective customer s address they re turning down the opportunity to contact them for weeks, months and years to come. This is mad. However, with over 31,000 schools in the UK we understand it is almost impossible to capture all this data. Even if you can get a few thousand contacts a simple excel spreadsheet is not really the best place for this data to be stored. It is cumbersome to use and means you must constantly keep it up to date. Send regular s. Build relationships with your customers by keeping in touch with regular s. Provide valuable content in your s. This could be to do with your products or services which are on offer at the time or even poignant information which relates to the education world. If the s are not useful to the recipient then they are likely to get tired of reading them and eventually unsubscribe. 3

4 Use a specially designed ing platform. Don t use your computer s own application to send your marketing campaign. As your list grows it is likely that your ISP will begin to prevent you from sending hundreds of s and eventually your IP address could become blacklisted. You need a system that has been specially design to send bulk s, sending thousands at a time. Sprint Mail has the system to help you do this. Use accurate data Sprint Mail has launched the Education Database, an online database which offers you easy access to any type of UK education establishment s contact details. It is also updated and maintained by our Research Team daily so the database is up to date. Keep it personal. Use names of specific teachers to personalise your s. Sprint Mail have 100,000 + named teachers to help you personalise your marketing and build a relationship with them, thank them for their business, send them a special offer, give them some free advice relevant to their subject, send a newsletter, recommend a product or service they may be interested in, ask for referrals, share some news they may be interested in, ask why they ve not done business with you, and so on. The point of all this is that you could grow your business significantly just by adopting an effective marketing strategy, and with Sprint Mail it s easy. 4

5 What Next? Plan your educational marketing using our specialised marketing planner tool within The Education Database. Powered by Sprint Mail. We invest over 80,000 per year just in maintaining and cleansing the data to ensure our clients only work with the most accurate data available. If you are not already a subscriber to the Education Database then sign up for a free trial at or contact our Education Database Department at [email protected] and we will provide some more information. If you have any questions about any of our services or how Sprint Mail can help you sell more to schools please don t hesitate to contact us. Call us on Wee can talk specifically about your business and about how we can boost your sales to schools quickly and effectively. Alternatively us [email protected]. 5