Email marketing and email newsletters are only as good as your list. And building your list takes time, creativity and attention.
That’s why list building is not a one-time activity. It’s an “all the time” activity. Why? Because you (or your sales staff) are always meeting new vendors, prospects, customers, and business partners.
Here are five quick tips to grow and maintain your list.
- Add a custom field to your contact database. By simply adding a check box or two to your CRM, you can easily indicate who should receive your email updates. Many CRMs already have a field dedicated to tracking email newsletter subscribers. Explore the features of your CRM to make the most of the contacts in your database. Adding one small step, or check box, to a contact record makes it so much easier to run reports and export a custom list from your CRM.
- Give Privileged Access to High Value Content – Think beyond “special offers” and discounts. Create high value content for your industry and offer it on a “subscriber only” basis. Examples of high value content include: videos, white papers, industry reports, or other data that your readers can’t get anywhere else.
- Networking – Networking events can serve two purposes….networking and list building. Go to events with a goal to get 5-10 business cards. Then immediately follow up with a personal email and an invitation to become a subscriber of your email newsletter. And if you’ve got that “high value” content from the previous idea, then your invitation is that much more attractive.
- Receipts – While someone is signing their credit card receipt, why not ask them to include their email address on the receipt itself. Then at the end of the day, enter them into your account, and send them an email thanks them for their purchase welcoming them to your list.
- Create a newsletter archive so your users can preview past content before subscribing.