This is a must see video:

For those of you who are contemplating or have started Permission Based (Opt-In) email marketing it can be a scary proposition; especially if you have a new or startup business. You know you’re doing it right by choosing Opt-in over blasting and spamming but *gulp* how do you build a nice plump email list quickly?

The great thing is that companies like Constant Contact®, iContact and MailChimp® make it easy to create a professional email opt-in form. Just place a “Join our Email List” or “Subscribe to Our Newsletter”  link on your website to the opt-in form.

With the opt-in links on your website the email addresses will come rolling in. Well, maybe. So what do you if they don’t? Ah, here comes the BEgg…

Networking is the age old technique of gathering contacts. Typical networking venues  include trade shows, seminars, industry groups, etc. After a networking event send a short email message to all the people you spoke with. Be sure to include a recap of your conversation then ask permission to add them to your email lists.

You may have an existing collection of customer email addresses, business cards and event sign-up sheets. Using these may be considered “Implied Opt-In” but it’s dangerously close to spam, so be careful. There are many who believe that, if handled properly, it is a legitimate means of list building. See article by Page Duffy.

Janine Popick’s article “29 Ways to Collect Email Addresses for Your Business” presents some great tips for email list building. Here are her top five:

1. Put an offer on the back of your business cards to get people to sign up for your newsletter.
2. Tradeshows – Bring a clipboard or sign-up book with you to tradeshows and ask for permission to send email to those who sign up.
3. Include a newsletter sign-up link in your signature of all of your emails.
4. Send an opt-in email to your address book asking them to join your list.
5. Join your local chamber of commerce, email the member list (if it’s opt-in) about your services with a link to sign up to your newsletter.

And finally, give your customers great educational content. Become the go-to source for information in your industry. Give them ideas on how to work better, faster, cheaper. Relevant content, not just about your product, brings them back for more; like a hot, savory, rich bowl of homemade chicken soup. See article by Ardath Albee.

In the end the BEgg usually comes first but growing an email list the right way will let you place a beautiful golden brown chicken on your table.

I hope this post gave you useful ideas on how to get your email list growing and please sign-up for our newsletter. How’s that for my BEgg?

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Yep, forgetting to aim can cause you to shoot yourself in the foot. It’s easy to get caught up in the technology features of email marketing systems like Constant Contact® and iContact®.

Sure, they make it real easy to send professional emails, newsletters and surveys but this can distract you from focusing on the real needs of your customers or prospects.

Ardath Albee a well known B2B Marketing Strategist (with whom I’ve had the pleasure of exchanging emails) gave a great example of an email campaign going nowhere in her blog titled “Don’t speak AT me, speak WITH me.”

In a B2B world, often it’s more like this:

• I send you an email to tell you about my latest white paper.
• You download the white paper.
• I follow up with a sales pitch.
• You ignore me.
• Next month I send an email to inform you of a product launch.
• You don’t open it.
• Then I send you an invitation to a webinar about some benefit that the new product we launched can deliver. You know, the product launch you didn’t show any interest in.
• You ignore that too.
• So, I send you our company newsletter about our new office building and a customer success story about a company you can’t even relate to.
• Say what? You’re still not speaking with me?

 Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?

I had to laugh when I read this tale of horror. I’ve been on the receiving end of that scenario many times. I’m sure your campaigns have never been like this… Or have they?

If they have, Ardath and others recommend that you try to engage and nurture your customers with targeted relevant content.

This is where developing customer personas and segmenting your contact list becomes so important. Organizing your contacts into many different persona lists will help you understand who your customers and prospects are and help you create relevant targeted email campaigns.

It’s here at the contact list management point that you need to shift from your email marketing system to calc{list}®. Email marketing systems advertise list management as one of their features but in reality they offer little more than add, edit and delete capabilities (more here).

Calc{list}, on the other hand, uses unique calculating contact lists that will give you unprecedented control over all your email campaigns. In Part 2 of this series we will explore how you can improve your aim by leveraging persona lists with calc{list}.

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Email marketing has come a long way over the last few years. Gone are the days when a business could just purchase a list of contacts and blast their sales pitch to everyone.

Sending any unsolicited email today gets you quickly labeled as a spammer. It’s not just about sending thousands of emails anymore. If you send me a sales pitch that I didn’t ask for, you’re considered a spammer. It seems a little harsh but it’s part of a backlash from overcrowded in-boxes stuffed with irrelevant messages.

Today growing and managing your contact lists is more important than ever because email marketing is still one of the most cost effective ways to contact prospects and customers. So how do we build great contact lists?

To the rescue comes the new breed of “Opt-In” email marketing services like iContact®, Constant Contact® and MailChimp®; and an entirely new way to manage contact lists called calc{list}®.

Permission-based or opt-in email marketing starts by collecting contacts that have requested to be on your mailing list. All of the email marketing services make it easy to create opt-in links on your website, newsletters, blogs, etc.

The important thing is to engage your prospects with content that is meaningful to them. Help them solve a problem. Give them insights that help them run their business better. Your email list will grow the more you engage your audience.

Once you have collected your contacts it is important to segment your contacts into various lists for highly targeted email marketing campaigns. It goes back to the meaningful message to a particular group. This is where calc{list}’s contact list management comes in.

Calc{list} makes it easy to capture, categorize and combine your contacts into an unlimited number of lists that you can synchronize with your favorite email system.  It even has ways to automate the management of your lists.

Every great email campaign starts with a well targeted permission-based contact list. Use an email marketing service combined with good contact list management and you’ll look much better than a cute Chimp!

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Let’s be honest here, if the ability to create contact lists and then add, edit and delete contacts constitutes “list management” then Windows Notepad could be a document management system! That is exactly the type of contact list management offered, even touted, by email marketing websites like Constant Contact®, iContact® and MailChimp®.

Sure Constant Contact and the others have substantially improved the quality of our contact lists by enforcing strict “Opt-In” email standards; and the email delivery feedback is fantastic! But what do we do with all that feedback?  Of course the Autoresponder has dutifully sent our new subscribers the ‘Welcome’ email but now what?

Should the new subscriber be added to any other lists? Should they be contacted by someone and if so who? Should they be placed in a particular marketing persona list or multiple lists?

What if you need to start a new campaign for all of the most recent subscribers plus contacts that responded to last year’s Presidents day sale but exclude the contacts that responded to last year’s Labor day sale? Are you starting to see the need for something more?

A contact list management system should make it easy to manage, compare and combine our contact lists. We need to work on lists as a team so it needs real-time collaboration too. Anything else? How about workflow to make sure everything gets done?

This is exactly the focus of calc{list}® with Passive Automation. It is the first and only program to focus on the problems and opportunities associated with contact list management.

I won’t go into the details or features of calc{list} today, but marketing professionals who are using email marketing websites, contact managers like MS Outlook or spreadsheets to manage contact lists need to stop right now and see what a true Contact List Management system can do. (next…)

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