No-Effort, No-Cost Marketing

Did you know there’s a valuable tool for marketing to your customers that requires almost no time and costs nothing?

Would you believe that you don’t need any marketing experience to take advantage of it?

Is this starting to sound like a late-night infomercial?

One of the easiest ways to market your business is to simply add an e-mail signature at the end of your e-mails. Every time I send an e-mail, the recipient can easily find how to reach me by phone and where to find BLI’s website, blog and Twitter.

You can add any of these items to your signature, as well as your company’s Facebook Page, or even a brief seasonal/promotional message. If your message changes each month, customers who receive regular e-mails from you will take note of what’s new.

Here are a few quick style tips for your e-mail signature:

• Keep the fonts simple. Don’t use a script or a fun/goofy) font. (I use Arial — the simple black dress of fonts.)
• Don’t overwhelm the reader with colors. Stick to just two or three — maybe colors that are in your company logo. (Black should probably be one of these colors)
• Scale back the size. Your e-mail font is probably in the size 10-12 range, and there’s no reason to have a signature that’s bigger than that. If you want it to stick out, use bold or italics on different parts of your signature.
• Make sure links to your company’s websites are clickable hyperlinks. (These are often underlined and blue.)
• Flee from too many images in your signature. Your company’s logo is OK, but don’t go overboard, and don’t make this image too big.

How do you change your e-mail signature? Here are how-to’s for a few of the common e-mail clients: Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or AOL.

In what other ways can you use your e-mail signature as a marketing tool?