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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. The next email will give you ten tips for being an even better seller.
About the Author
Kirsten Hawkins is an Ebay and internet auction enthusiast from Nashville, TN. Visit http://www.auctionseller411.com/ for more great tips on how to make the most from Ebay and other online auctions.