If you have ever used a mass mailing email
marketing campaign, you know how they promote their services. The appeal is that, in theory, the service
has collected a large amount of valid email addresses that they guarantee will
go to real potential internet
customers. For a fee, they will take
your marketing message and broadcast it to that large customer base and the
outcome will be that you will see a percentage of those customers visit your
web site or respond to the email and from that percentage, a smaller percentage
will become paying customers of yours.
There are two problems with this marketing
model. The first one is that no matter
how you dress it up, by buying into that kind of marketing program, you are becoming
a spammer. Now, it is bad enough that
the explosion of spam in the email world has made life difficult for the
average cyber citizen and that those cyber citizens are the human beings you
want to turn into your customers. But a
by product of spam has also made life a lot harder for you and I, the average
internet marketing business person.
Life has gotten harder for us because of
spam because of the reactionary explosion of spam filtering software being used
by internet citizens and ISPs as well and those filtering programs are
aggressive and successful which means many of your emails never make it to the
customers but disappear into spam holding tanks to eventually be deleted. So because of this fresh problem, email
delivery failures have skyrocketed which has seriously harmed the value of
email marketing which is what we were hoping to use to prosper our online
businesses in the first place. Ironic,
isn't it?
The second problem with that marketing
model is that the large email mailing list that the service brags about is of
dubious value. For one thing, you may or
may not know how they harvested those emails.
The odds that every one of those email addresses is a valid customer
email are very low. You have low
confidence in that mailing list and the only thing that makes up for that low
confidence is the huge number of email addresses that they have on that mailing
list.
A large mailing list is not a good mailing
list if it results in a low percentage of new customers, customers who purchase
at low basket totals and customers who do not return for repeat sales. This is why a new marketing model is called
for that abandons the mass mailing approach and abandons your participation in
spam which only makes you an accessory to the crime.
That new marketing model calls for you to
look to your existing customer base of clients who are already active users of
your products and services and begin to build a much smaller but much higher
value email mailing list of customers you actually know and that you know are
high volume buyers who come back again and again to buy from you. This approach to building your email list
starts at the end, with customers who already fit the profile of what you are
looking for and it builds out from there.
You can use that solid customer base to
then build a larger customer base that will also be loyal customers who will
return solid sales to you for your efforts.
Through referrals, viral marketing, contests and give aways, you can excite your customer
base to share their love of your products and your web site and bring in like
minded friends and family members who will then become part of your high
quality mailing list as well. Then you
repeat the process and build your mailing list slowly over time.
This process results in a much smaller
mailing list but one that you can be confident that they will respond to your
emails. Whereas working with a mass
marketing service, you may see a 1% response rate and a 1% sales rate from that
response group, you can look for a much higher percentage of response and sales
from your high quality email contact list because you already know them and you
know they will come back again and again to buy from you.
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