Email still is the most preferred medium of communication. People spend 45% of their online activities on sending or reading emails. I don’t know about you, but I check my email first thing in the morning before Facebook, Twitter. Oh. Yes!
I’m just amazed that some people don’t use the opportunity to collect email addresses at different touch points of their activities. Jeffrey Gitomer, the sales guru says that “Over the next millennium, the single most valuable asset you and your company will posses is your email list. Build it, grow it and guard it with your life.”
Email marketing is probably the cheapest, easiest and most effective way to build relationship with prospects, customers, members, and clients.
Barack Obama’s campaign was probably the best political campaign – ever. The campaign has built their list to a huge list – some 3M people are on the list. We know the results. He is now our President. Every time he was scheduled to speak at an event – there would be volunteers out there scouring the crowd collecting ‘personal’ information – the kind of permission-based information that would be used later for voters’ outreach, volunteers recruitment and for contributions. The list is then used over and over and over again.
We’re no Barack Obama, but we can certainly grow our email list from at various touch points.
Here are “The 5 tips for Building a High-Quality List that Leads to Sales, via Constant Contact.
- When you network, ask people you meet if you can sign them up for your newsletter. The number one cardinal sin in networking is trying to close the sale right after meeting someone new. Rather than push your services, push your newsletter. It’s a great way to have people get to know you on a “trial-basis.”
- Contact your professional trade organization for their member list. A few trade organizations provide their chapter lists to members for free while others charge a modest fee for the national list. Once you get the list, send your colleagues a direct mail letter, with your free newsletter being the offer.
- Recommend other good newsletters in your newsletter. I’m a firm believer in “sharing the wealth.” If you think your readers would enjoy another newsletter, by all means, recommend it. Usually people are so surprised at being positively noticed, they’ll give you a reciprocal recommendation, resulting in many new subscribers.
- For presentations, include your newsletter info on the last PowerPoint slide. That last slide on PowerPoint presentations is valuable real estate. Don’t use it to list only your name and company name. Put your newsletter URL there instead.
- Develop a no-cost guide people can download at your site. Offering high-value content on your site is always a good thing. Write a press release about your no-cost guide or report and send it to trade publications. Give people the option of subscribing to your newsletter at the same time they download the guide.
The other few places where you can collect email information:
– SOCIAL CONNECTIONS
The best thing right now is you have social networking sites at your disposal, where you can connect or reconnect easily with people, that were not available before. You can exchange emails with your social networking connections. LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, Twitter – just to name a few sites.
– BLOGS
There is this symbiotic relationships between blogging and email. Darren Rowse with ProBlogger, is using email alongside his blog. His blog helps him to drive up people to sign up for his newsletter. And the email drives people back to his blog. He was able to grow his subscriber base by 800 people per day using this technique.
image: ProBlogger Continue reading “Grow Your Mailing List Without Trying Too Hard”
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