if you want to create email databases that facilitate sales, your listed contacts must want to hear from you and be accustomed to electronic communications. Email lists can be bought from companies that promise focused demographics and former customer participation for your marketing. Yet the response percentage from an unsolicited email campaign is extremely low, and the cost per sale is astronomical! Thankfully, there are several reasonable means of collecting email address from interested prospects, along with their consent to receive your emails.
Instructions
1. Ask for an email address. Request an email address during every phone contact. Include email address requests in telemarketing scripts. Add an email address line to customer information collected on service call forms. Have all agents answering incoming calls ask for an email address from anyone who calls for any reason! Be sure to also ask for a customer’s consent to receive email from you.
2. Add an email address space on all mailed billing invoices, order forms and inquiry replies. Include a check box to confirm permission to send emails.
3. Advertise joining your email list on brochures, letterheads, business cards and press releases. Simply ask people to subscribe to your email list at www.your-web-address. Postage and printing costs are what you hope to reduce in the future. Let current expenditures on such help the cause.
4. Make it worthwhile for customers to give you an email address. Offer paperless billing discounts, coupons or free shipping on email based trade. If profit ratios cannot absorb promotional costs, then offer valuable information. A company selling auto parts can feature a professional mechanic’s tips for do-it-yourselfers in a monthly newsletter. The more you can offer email contacts, the more likely they are to remain on your list.
5. Post an email address collector on your website. Place it right on the home page, and on any other page where it’s appropriate. Make it user friendly and ask for permission to send email. It’s also a good practice to include a privacy policy that assures visitors their email address will not be given to any other organization without their expressed permission.
6. Use email appending. Hire a third party with an email database to find email addresses that match up with your customer’s information. Many business have no trouble acquiring physical addresses and phone numbers from customers. An email appending service can help businesses attach an email address to this information. Then simply send one email asking permission to send email contacts that include valuable offers or information. Do not pester customers with additional messages if they fail to reply.
7. Use partnerships or opt-in lists. If you’re running a ski resort, then it’s fairly simple to offer discount lift tickets or snowfall reports to customers of a ski equipment supplier. Retailers asking permission to email customers can also ask if they want to receive offers from other associated companies. Ask a partner company to host a link on their website in exchange for one on yours.
8. Advertise in newsletters and discussion lists. These are exceptionally specialized, target specific avenues of adding newcomers with interest in your business. If your company makes bicycle tires, then newsletters and discussion lists on bicycle racing, BMX and mountain biking are read by many of your potential customers.
9. Use viral communications. Ask a current customer to tell a friend about your product or service. Offer something of value to both parties to seal the deal. Give a code to a customer for them to email to a friend. Offer a discount, gift or free shipping to the new customer with their email order. Then reward the referring customer with something of even greater value. Only ask for a few referrals and make your customers contact them. Don’t ask customers to give information for you to do the contacting.
10. Include a subscription invitation on all email contacts. Existing participants will forward certain offers to interested friends. Make it easy for those friends to add themselves to your email database.
11. Personalize your offers by asking email customers for information on their interests. A clothing retailer won’t care to send information on a ladies shoe sale to the men in their email database. By the same token, free tickets to a baseball game will only be valued by a sports fan. A solid privacy policy can overcome a customer's resistance to offering such information.
