Let’s assume that you do not dispose of a rich and living customer database that can be used as a basis for your email marketing campaigns. Or that you are a starting company and only have a small list.
Where should you start to build an email marketing database and identify the consumers and companies that are truly interested in your email marketing messages?
Or in other words: where do you find the people that are willing to give up a part of their privacy in exchange for receiving more or less valuable information from your company?
We provide you with some techniques to start building your email marketing list from scratch.
- A subscription form on your website
This one is obvious but we provide some tips to do it better: integrate a subscription form for visitors of your website to subscribe to your emailing list. Some rules of thumb: keep the form simple and don’t ask too much details. If potential subscribers see themselves confronted with too many questions they will not subscribe. You can enrich the profile of the new subscribers further in the marketing process. Clearly state your privacy policy and your unsubscribe policy, clearly explain the visitor what he can expect when subscribing to your email list (including a link to an example or to the archives with your previous emailings). Send an automatic email confirming the registration and finally: give the form or the visual element that sends to the a clear spot on your website. - An extra field in other forms
Some companies offer the visitors of their websites different contact possibilities by filling in forms. Also many companies offer the internet user all kinds of useful tools and services (white papers, password protected zones with added value content, and so on). To have access to these services the website visitor is often requested to subscribe or leave behind some personal data. Add an extra field to these forms on your website where visitors have the option to subscribe for your email list. Of course here too the same rules of thumb as in the previous technique are valid. Attention: do not try to trick the visitor by putting the form field where he can subscribe in some invisible spot on your webpage and/or by putting “yes, I subscribe’ as the default value. Create trust and give the visitor the freedom of choice, don’t push. - Using offline interactions
To build your own email marketing database you can use virtually any existing contact moment to invite your customers or prospect to subscribe to your email list. These contact moments include face-to-face contacts, offline vehicles (from your letterhead over brochure to invoices and business cards) and interactions between the customer and the various departments of your company: pre-sales, sales and after sales. - Using third party lists
There is a huge offering of email newsletters and permission based marketing programs that you can use to start building your own list. These programs vary from enewsletters from ‘neutral’ publishers to opt-in email programs that are managed by specialized email marketing companies. The advantage of using these programs is that you can ask the publisher or marketing company to identify the customer segments that fit most to the target group you aim to reach with your email efforts within their own databases. Some companies offer the possibility to ‘hire’ email addresses, others send your emailings out themselves while others simply give you the possibility to advertise in their newsletters. Attention: don’t buy email addresses from list brokers that do not work with permission based programs and make sure that your content is relevant for the third party list. - Set up a viral recruitment campaign
These days more and more companies are using the internet for marketing purposes. Often the purpose of these campaigns is to build a database that in its turn can be used for your email actions. Online marketing campaigns built around concepts of prize games and so on include viral marketing components: the participant is challenged to invite as many friends and colleagues as he or she can. Often the purpose of viral campaigns is to gather email addresses. - Email signatures
Probably you have already noticed that many people ‘sign’ their individual mails with a standardized message including their contact details. Often marketers use these ‘email signatures’ to include corporate messages. You could use the email signatures to invite the recipients of your email to subscribe to your newsletter. Some marketers have a corporate email signature policy and use tools to make the email signatures uniform across the company.
Source: Social Email Marketing
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