By Jim Hingst
Photo by Torsten
Dettlaff from Pexels
In this article, Jim Hingst provides tips for
building an Email Marketing List. He also discusses the advantages of developing
your own list versus buying or renting a list.
Advantages of Email Marketing
Compared to other marketing programs,
such as traditional magazine and newspaper advertising, direct mail and social
media, email marketing is significantly lower in cost, generates a higher
response rate and is easy to track results.
Using an Email Service Provider (ESP),
such as Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com),
you can easily design a mailing by use of a stock template. Well-design email marketing
campaigns are effective in:
● Generating sales leads that lead to sales;
● Increasing repeat orders;
● Driving traffic to your website or blog;
and
● Encouraging visits to your store or
tradeshow booth.
Email mailings can utilize a number of different
formats. The templates that the ESP provides to layout your message, makes your
mailing look professionally-designed. Formats that you may use for your
emailing include:
● Newsletters
● Press Releases
● Invitations to Visit Your Tradeshow
Booth or Special Events
● Follow-Up Mailing Following Tradeshows
● Announcements of Specials
Why Building an Email Marketing
List is Better Than Buying One
When
you compile your own email list, you can qualify the prospects prior to inclusion
in the list. Purchasing or renting a list is more of a shotgun approach. The costs
for these lists may be quite high.
The advantage
of using a purchased email list is that immediately expands your universe of
prospects among the demographics that you are targeting. If you use a list broker,
you should qualify them by asking a number of questions. Pertinent questions
include:
1. Does the broker specialize in business
or consumer lists?
2. How was the list compiled?
3. When was the list last updated? The reason
that this question is critical, is that the turnover on many lists are as high
as 25% each year.
4. Are the broker’s lists rented or sold? Keep
in mind that rented lists are contracted for a limited number of uses. These lists are seeded with dummy names, which
the broker uses to tell how often you use it, in the unlikely event that you
violate the contract.
5. In what format is the list provided? Does
the list include contact names, mailing address, phone number and email address?
Building an Email Marketing List
1. On each of webpage and blog
post you should include a Call-To-Action (CTA) requesting that the
website visitor include his email address. The Call-To-Action could request for
more information, or subscribe to a newsletter or ask for a representative to
call. As with other direct marketing endeavors,
include a benefit in your offer.
2.
Promote your email newsletter on your social media platforms, such as Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest. You should clearly explain to the respondents
that they are subscribing to a newsletter.
3.
Involve all of your employees in an effort to collect business cards, email
addresses and phone numbers with each interaction with a prospect. Many of your
business interactions will involve email. Your employees need to capture the
customer contact information and do some of the groundwork in qualifying the
prospect. Make it clear to your employees that everyone is responsible in one way
or another in your company’s sales efforts.
4.
For each of your existing customers, your salespeople should develop a customer
profile, which includes email addresses of key contacts, who are involved in purchasing
decisions. Ideally you should have a Customer Relationship Management Software program to help you manage the information on your prospects and customers.
5.
At tradeshows and other industry events, collect contact information for all
visitors to your booth. At my last employer before retiring, I compiled a list
of more than 13,000 visitors in Excel. This list was updated with each mailing
through the Email Service Provider (ESP), such as Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com).
After each tradeshow
event, I would send a follow-up email letter immediately after the event closed,
thanking the visitor for his interest and recapping the key products that had been
featured in the exhibit. Each email included several links to the company
website and my blog. I could gauge the effectiveness of the emailing as I tracked
the upsurge in activity on the blog.
6.
If you belong to industry associations, they will often share these lists. If
you want cooperation from these associations, maintain good relations with
their key personnel. If an association will not give you the list, they may
offer it on a rental basis.
7. Offer to send a FREE
e-book or sample product, if your visitors to your website or blog complete a request
form. To encourage visitors to complete the form is to keep it simple. Limit the number of questions on the form to
the absolute minimum.
Conclusion.
Today, businesses invest
a tremendous amount of time, money and effort in developing their presence on
social media platforms. While social
media deserves important consideration in your marketing plan, it generally is
not as effective as email marketing. If email marketing is not part of your
program, you need to rethink your strategy and include it in your plans.
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