Email marketing and Customer Lists.

A common theme amongst successful online businesses is great customer management.

Most of these businesses spend considerable effort in acquiring, managing and servicing growing email lists.

From slow beginnings they have worked at it and built lists that are worth rivers of gold to their business.

Your most valuable email asset: an in-house, opt-in list.

If you are online and you are not building an email list of customers and prospects, you may be making a costly mistake.

Why?

Because the opportunity to build opt-in lists will become more limited in the future as the volume of email rises.

Now is the time to build trust and start an email relationship with your clients and customers.

You'll need to make the collection of email addresses a top priority for every contact with customers or prospects.

If you have done your job well in optimising the website for search engines, the website and online ads will be primary drivers in an acquisition campaign designed to build your list.

You must have on each page of your website an email subscription form to capture addresses.

There are also other ways to acquire subscribers.

Consider as well offline media, especially direct mail; onsite promotions and events; print and broadcast ads.

Of all the components needed to successfully build an effective email list, the most important component is the value proposition to the consumer.

If you are forthright with regard to what you plan to give the consumer, you will build a list of interested prospects.

Don’t just mail boring price lists and sales slogans.
Give them something of value at the same time. This could be important information or something entertaining.

This way they will stay on the list and give you opportunities to continue to sell to them.

The best email lists concentrate on quality, not quantity.
Its better to have a list of 5,000 prospects who want to hear from you on a regular basis than a list of 20,000 who are only marginally committed.

Good email lists deliver as much value to a subscriber as the product or service it promotes.

Some important tips:

1. Deliver your most important information first. The key benefits and sales points must be communicated in the first screen people read.

2. Continually test your campaigns.
Gauge response by testing one element of your email at a time.
Start with the subject line.
Test headlines, body copy, layout etc.
Successful marketing copy is always tested, one element at a time.

3. Make the subject line your headline.
This is what people see first.
If it's strong, crisp, and compelling, they'll open your email.

Concentrate on this all-important element.
Don’t use tacky and misleading headlines.
If you can help them recognise the source of the email…you.
Place that into the title.

4. Personalise your message.
Whenever you email your customers you should always personalise the message.
When "John" sees Dear John, he is likely to recognise the mail as something directed specifically to him and probably coming from someone he knows.

5. Your message needs to benefit the customer. Customers will always asking "What's in it for me?"
The message should include a benefit, solve a problem, contain newsworthy information, offer something special, anything that represents a reason why the reader would be interested. B&BD