[mrjosco]

All,

I am just starting my mobile business as I have been laid off. I have lots of experience in sales, cold calling and email marketing. I am not great at any of them - but who cares, right? I will get better as I go.

I have decided to start by focusing on one niche that I am very familiar with the business, and that is restaurants.

I have been a GM of a restaurant. I know that contacting them at the wrong time can be a death blow. When I ran a restaurant I immediately discounted any "idiot" who tried to drop off an application and/or do a sales drop in or call during an obvious lunch or dinner time. Do your research people!

This knowledge will mean I will likely limit my cold calling campaign to between 2-4PM, which should still allow me to call 80-100 people a day. Plus, not many have the stomach to go at cold calling all day every day.

Now, that gets me to my question. I want to do some email marketing in the off hours, but need help/ideas as to what you have tried and seen works the best.

My thought is to send an email that says, "I visited your website on my phone and it didn't work well" type of message, then offers a solution. Maybe a link to a landing/squeeze page and a phone number to call.

But I want to take it another level and use the google tool to show a mock up of their site and its "google rating" which is most often 1/6 or 2/6. This allows me to use a neutral 3rd party to "prove" their site is deficient.

So, using Aweber (or any other autoresponder) does anyone know how you can add a custom field to populate an image that is custom to that client? I am thinking a 'mail merge' type code that merges a custom image based on image file name instead of a custom name.

This technical tip and any other advice/ideas is appreciated.

I don't think I can do this without cold calling - but I want to supplement that with the only other 'free' method I can think of.

[WillR]

If you are going to use email then I highly suggest two things:

1. Using a link inside the email that takes them to a landing page where they can see their current website and mobile website side by side. If you do this then the email doesn't need to be long. You just need to get them to click on that link as the landing page will do all of the selling for you. It's important that this link has their business name in it to increase their curiosity. So something like yourwebsite.com/business_name

2. The landing page you send them to should at the very least have an example of how their current website looks when viewed on a mobile device and also an example of what a mobile website would look like for their business. By having the two side by side you allow the business owner to sell themselves on the idea rather than you having to sell it to them.

[jvform]

Originally Posted by WillR

If you are going to use email then I highly suggest two things:

1. Using a link inside the email that takes them to a landing page where they can see their current website and mobile website side by side. If you do this then the email doesn't need to be long. You just need to get them to click on that link as the landing page will do all of the selling for you. It's important that this link has their business name in it to increase their curiosity. So something like yourwebsite.com/business_name

2. The landing page you send them to should at the very least have an example of how their current website looks when viewed on a mobile device and also an example of what a mobile website would look like for their business. By having the two side by side you allow the business owner to sell themselves on the idea rather than you having to sell it to them.

This is very good advice that I should have read before posting my last thread. Thanks.