Creating Email Lists for Marketing Campaigns

If you plan to do some internet marketing to promote your business, you should seriously consider email marketing as at least one tier of your Internet marketing campaign. Many business owners shy away because they believe all email marketing campaigns are purely spam. However, this is not true and not partaking in this type of marketing can cause you to lose out on a great deal of business. By not appealing to potential customers via email, you may be losing business to competitors who are.

Once you have made the decision to start using email marketing to promote your business you are likely facing the dilemma of where to start.  The first step of an email marketing campaign should be creating an email distribution list. This is essentially a list of email addresses to which you will email your advertising and promotional materials.

The best way to create an email distribution list for your email marketing campaign is to ask current customers.  The fish bowl approach is very effective for collecting emails at your physical place of business. Often, a weekly drawing will encourage participation. We would be happy to discuss ideas of attracting email addresses.  You can get more information at 4Front Marketing Services website. You may also ask interested potential customers to register with your website to receive additional information and periodic updates about your products, services or other information which might be of interest to them. This provides you with a database of email addresses from current customers as well as potential customers who have a genuine interest in learning more about your products and services.

Once you have a list, you can send emails or create e-newsletter.  These documents should contain a wealth of valuable information as well as a soft sell pitch for your products and services. This information will be valued by the readers and may help to persuade them to act.
One common way to gain a list of email addresses is to purchase a list from distributors.  This method is not very effective at all and we do not recommend it. One problem with purchasing an email list is that you have no way of knowing whether or not the members of the list would have any interest at all in your products or services. This is very important because while you may want to reach a large audience, you also want them to be members of your overall target audience.

When you purchase an email list you may be sending your email messages to some users who might be interested but this is largely coincidental and is not likely to be well received because the message was not solicited.  Internet users are very quick to delete materials they believe to be spam without even opening or reading the emails. In fact most service providers include spam filters which may automatically delete your emails if your messages are deemed to be spam. These filters run complex algorithms on the subject heading and content of the message to determine whether or not it is spam and are quite adept at weeding them out.  Therefore, you run the risk of having your email marketing effort turn out to be a complete waste if the majority of recipients never even read or receive the message. You would need to weigh the cost vs. benefit and make your own conclusions.

Please feel free to contact us for more information with no obligation at 4Front Marketing Services.