Creating Email Lists for Marketing Campaigns

Initial email marketing efforts

If you plan to do some Web marketing to promote your business endeavor, you should seriously consider email marketing as at least one tier of your Web marketing campaign. Many business owners shy away from email marketing because they believe all email marketing campaigns are purely spam. However, this is not true and not utilizing this type of marketing can cause your business to lose out on a great deal of new revenue.

By not appealing to potential customers via email, your business may lose a great deal of revenue and market share to competitors who are using email marketing campaigns to reach customers around the world. However, the first step of an email marketing campaign should be creating a subscriber or opt-in list. In this article we will discuss some popular options currently being used very successfully by other Web marketing professionals which we hope will help you to learn more about what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to email marketing.

Once you have made the decision to start using email marketing to promote your business you are likely facing the dilemma of compiling an email subscriber list. This is essentially a list of email addresses to which you will email your advertising and promotional materials. One common way to gain a list of email addresses is to purchase a list from distributors. However, this method is not very effective at all and we do not recommend it.

Avoid for-sale lists

The problem with purchasing an email list is you have no way of knowing whether or not the members of that list would have any interest at all in your products or services. This is very important because while you want to reach as many subscribers as possible with your email marketing campaigns you also want these subscribers to be members of your overall target audience. In other words, 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 since the message was not solicited.

Internet users are very quick to delete material they believe to be spam without even opening or reading such material. In fact some Internet service providers include spam filters which may automatically delete your emails if your messages are merely suspected 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 out spam and “suspected” spam. Therefore you run the risk of having your email marketing efforts result in a complete failure and an even bigger waste of time if the majority of recipients never even receive or open the message(s).

Build a list from scratch

A far better way to create an email subscription list for your email marketing campaign is to ask current customers as well as interested potential customers to register with your website to receive additional information and periodic updates about your products and services as well as 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 your products and services and who are interested in learning more about these products and services.

Once you have a list of interested customers or potential customers you can send promotional emails or create digital newsletters for distribution to the members of your email list. These documents should contain a wealth of valuable information as well as a soft sell pitch for your products and services. This is a better method of approaching email marketing, because the information you send will be valued by your list members and may help persuade them to try your products and services. You might also want to include useful links to your website as well as other websites which may be of interest to your readers. Content you provide should also contain a portion which urges readers to take a specific action such as making a purchase, or at least, learning more about a certain product or service.

Author: Admin

Hi, I'm Tony, a Web Services Consultant (WSC) from Central New Jersey. Currently I manage the online activities and business operations of TPJaveton & Associates, a Web-based entity I established at my New Jersey residence in 2009. View my full bio here!