No one knows for sure what this holiday season is going to hold in store for local businesses. It may be a good year, it may be a another off year. One thing we can be reasonably sure of is that it won’t be a banner year – the economy is still too fragile for that.
How does a local business make the best of the situation? By laying the groundwork to take best advantage of recovery as it comes. Those that gain the most momentum during recovery will maintain their lead in the following years.
One of the most basic ways to gain that momentum is to build and properly use a mailing list. It’s an old axiom in Internet Marketing that the money is in the list. The same can be said for local business marketing. With a list, email or snail mail, you can economically and efficiently stay in contact with your customers or prospects.
In today’s world, EVERY business has to excel at direct marketing and an email list is the most efficient and cost-effective way.
Email is both cheaper and more efficient, but having a conventional mailing list lets you reach that part of your market without Internet access – a shrinking minority today.
Mailing to a conventional list via the postal service (Direct Mail) is a proven method of stimulating business with a long history of success. Response rates can vary widely and return on investment (ROI) tends to be fairly low because of the expenses of design, printing, preparation and mailing. But Direct Mail can be quite profitable if you keep an eye on expenses and track your results thoroughly.
That being said, if getting a solid return on investment is your main goal, you can’t beat a well-designed email marketing campaign. In fact, the Direct Marketing Association says that for 2008, the average ROI for email marketing was $45.65 for each dollar invested. That’s an ROI of 4,565%!!!
And 2008 wasn’t exactly a banner year for business.
Ready to get started?
To begin an email marketing campaign, you need to do two things:
- Build a quality list of prospects or customers.
- Email to that list in a way that achieves maximum deliverability.
In today’s post, we are going to cover #1, building a quality list. We’ll cover #2 in our next post.
The importance of building a quality list can’t be overstated. There are far too many low quality lists maintained by businesses with big dreams and plans that would be far better served if the list was built and maintained with future value in mind.
Just what is a quality list? A quality list is one that is made up of subscribers who want to receive the information you will be sending, with as few bad, malformed or undeliverable email addresses as possible, which is maintained and kept clean of expired, non-existent or other addresses that cause a higher than necessary bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of emails received by a mail server that can’t be delivered to the intended recipient for any of a variety of reasons.
The most common reasons I see for bounced emails are “mailbox doesn’t exist”, “user is unknown”, “account is suspended” and “mailbox is full.”
Suspended accounts and full mailboxes are out of your control and are often temporary. The email program I use tells me how many times an email to a specific recipient has bounced. I never delete them until enough time has passed for them to make their account good or empty their mailbox. In most cases, I allow five bounced messages before suspending mailing to them.
“Mailbox doesn’t exist”, “User is unknown” and other such errors are both preventable and permanent. So how do you prevent them and why is that important?
Let’s answer the second part of that question first.
Sending a large number of undeliverable mails to an Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) mail server could result in your emails being banned from that server. ISPs are fighting a never-ending battle to prevent SPAM emails from being delivered to their customers. Spammers rarely clean up their mailing lists and routinely have high bounce rates. So ISPs often track the percentage or email sent to them from domains and/or IP numbers and block mail from persistent violators.
If you are blacklisted by ISPs, your email won’t get through. If your email doesn’t get through, you will have wasted your time and money. Once blacklisted, it can be very difficult, if not impossible to get the blacklisting reversed. It’s much better to avoid the situation in the first place.
How do you avoid mailing to bad email addresses?
By building a quality list from the start. The most reliable way to do that is by using double opt-in for new subscribers. In double opt-in, when a person signs up for your mailing list, the system immediately sends them a confirmation email. In that email is a link that the new subscriber has to click to verify that was actually them that signed on to the mailing list. If they don’t verify, they don’t get the emails.
This is valuable even when a customer signs up for your email list at your place of business. Errors in filling out your form, illegible handwriting or mistakes in transcription will almost always mean that some of the emails you collect will come up as invalid. Having these folks confirm is the only way to be sure that you got the email address correctly.
How do you get new subscribers to follow through on the confirmation process? Offer them something in return. A report, a coupon, an e-book, anything of real value to your prospects. And make it clear that they receive their bonus only once they have confirmed their email address.
I get a lot of questions from business persons who say they have a big list but it’s unresponsive. In almost every case, that list was a business-to-consumer (B2C) list where subscribers were added to the list without confirming. Many are uninterested and many never even receive the email because it ends up in their “Junk” folder. And because they didn’t sign up and are not expecting something in return, there is no reason for them to look for your email. Low quality lists produce low quality results.
The first step in achieving success in your email marketing program is to build a quality list. Start today and begin reaping the rewards tomorrow and for the future.
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