November’s Midweek Spark theme is The Money Is In Your List.
No matter the type of business you are in, whether it is online, services based or a traditional brick and mortar business, you need to stay in contact with your customers and prospects. This isn’t something new. Traditionally, businesses built up their contacts and had marketing initiatives that consisted of print and/or telephone campaigns. What IS new is the ease, and complexity, of using email and social media to consistently engage your market.
The best way to stay in contact with your customers and prospects is by building an email list. You want to focus on building your email list, not just your social media list. Why? You own your email list and it is permission based. In social media, the social media platform owns the email list and you have not been give permission to contact individuals one-on-one. For example, in Facebook, although you are friends with someone and/or they’ve liked your fan page, you do not have their email address. Facebook does, as a result you do not have their permission to send them information directly.
Social media is a great place to draw people in and to start to build a relationship with them, but you do not own the relationship. It is important to draw them from social media to your own list, where you can truly own the experience they have with your company.
5 Top Reasons to Build Your List
1) Keep in Touch – A list allows you to keep in touch with all of your customers (current and past) and interested prospects. Through consistent communication, the people on your list get to know, like and trust you.
2) Lead Generation – If you build your list correctly, by only adding people who have agreed to be on your list, you’ve captured a list of people who know, like and trust you and are interested in your products and/or services.
3) Cost effective – Email marketing is the most cost effective way to market your business, particularly because you are marketing it to people who are interested in what you offer. With today’s email marketing tools, it is simple to set up and automate the process. Imagine a restaurant that has built a list of loyal patrons. Using an email marketing tool, they can easily send all of them an offer of 20% off their next meal.
4) Follow up leads to sales – The sales stats are clear – most people do not buy on the first “conversation” with a business. Through an email list, you can build the relationship and keep them informed of different offers. They might not be ready or interested in your 1st offer, but they will be aware of it. However several months later, they may be ready to take advantage of another offer you make.
5) Repeat Business – If they like you the first time they did business with you, they are much more likely to do business with you again. Communicating regularly with customers keeps you top of mind when they are ready to buy again. For example, Pet Smart sends me a $5 dollar off coupon for pet grooming each time I visit with my poodle. Not only are they top of mind, but they are also offering me a saving for being a loyal customer.
One important reminder about list building: You want to build a quality list, NOT a quantity list. A small list of people who are interested in what you provide is worth much more than a large list of random people. That’s why it is so important to allow people to choose to be on your list and to target people in your niche market.
Next week Topic: Ways to Grow Your List
I’m curious to hear about your thoughts on list building. What do you like? What bothers you? Please share by clicking here.
I love to see entrepreneurs follow their passions, serve more people and create the lifestyle of their dreams.
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Great advice and tips Heather, thanks for sharing.
Merle:
Welcome and thanks for stopping by.
Great list Heather!
I love point #2….. ” by only adding people who have agreed to be on your list “. I hate it when people automatically add me to their list when I give them a business card. I lose all respect for that person. Thank you for sharing your wisdom!
Phyllis: Thanks for commenting. I think 3 or 5 years ago it was standard practice to add business card information to your list but not anymore. A better practice is to follow up directly with the person who gave you their card, offer them something to join your list. If they do great, if not let go and move on. Most email marketing programs discourage or block manually entering email addresses.
The other practice that I see work is to ask people directly when they give you their business card. For example, “I have a great gift you’d like, an eBook about…, can I add you to my mail list so that you’ll automatically receive the eBook?”
Great post Heather! I look forward to your next topic 🙂