What is the Best Way to Accumulate a Marketing List?
“What is the best way to accumulate a marketing list for specific niche markets for purposes of sending out marketing flyers/pamphlets?”
The purpose for building a list is to be able to communicate with customers and prospects. If they are already customers, keeping in touch with them insures they come back for more of your service. If they are prospects, you’ll need to spend time nurturing them until they are ready to buy from you. This is a very important area of marketing for any business and many business owners do little to harness the power of developing the lists they create.
There are 3 phases that need to be developed to begin building your list:
1. What value are you offering?
2. How will you capture and nurture contacts?
3. Where will you go to promote your offer?
The 1st phase deals with knowing who your best clients are and what they value most. Simply building a list for ‘the numbers’ means little if the people signing up have no real interest in what you do. Identify your best clients and the things they value about your service. It’s these values that you will be targeting with your offer. By offer, I mean what can you give away that’s valuable to them and affordable for you to give that will compel them to sign up for your offer?
The 2nd phase deals with the method of collecting contacts. First, you’ll need a place for people to go- a landing page or area of your home page devoted to your offer. This location should be very specific. In fact it should lead the viewer to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ conclusion. Lots of information is available on the merits of having a long landing page vs a short one but in the end, your prospects will be faced with deciding to participate or leave. Make your best case for them to participate. Then, you’ll need an auto-responder system- an online service that provides the sign up box, collects the details and automatically sends the information to the person signing up. This part is critical as the auto-responder will also be able to communicate to people on the list on a regular basis, allowing you to develop the relationship and eventually the sale.
The 3rd phase focuses on where you must go to promote your offer. This is what is known as the traffic building phase. It’s the hardest part because it takes time and effort to reach out to enough people. You also have the option of using SEO to rank your landing page but in the end, its not about raw numbers, its about attracting the right numbers. Think of places you go on the web- social media sites, blog and article sites, Q&A sites, etc. Create a custom URL for your page and post this URL wherever you leave a blog post, comment or communication. Over time, you will build a list of people who have some level of interest in you and your service. For more understanding of traffic building, watch this video- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqu4VGwuje8
One final word about building lists. The real secret is in nurturing your prospects so they feel good about receiving your emails. Try to sell them too quickly and they will unsubscribe quickly. Like any relationship that’s worth having, you need to be consistent and focused on continuing to provide value before you can ask them to buy from.
Steve Smith is a business coach who specializes in helping small businesses come up with a plan to succeed. To visit his site, click here.