According to a survey in Sept 2008 (the start of the recession) by Marketing Sherpa, email marketing was holding up well in the face of the need for companies to closely examine the return on investment on their marketing expenditure. This was in comparison to, for example, print advertising and direct mail - both of which are seeing significant reductions in focus from marketers.

However, although marketers are still seeing return on investment from email marketing, there is a key shift in focus. Marketers are doing much more email campaigning to their own lists, and much less to lists that they buy in. This is very likely to be due to two factors: The cost of buying in lists, and the results yielded from email campaigns to these two different types of list. The marketers questioned in the survey were very much moving towards campaigning to email lists that they had built themselves.

This being the case, it is worth spending some time considering ways in which you can acquire your own list of email addresses to campaign to. Below are a range of methods that we have found work for our own particular business. You can try these for your business and see which work for you.

Start with your customers
Many companies overlook the most obvious source of potential revenue - selling further products or services to people or businesses that have already bought from them. Make sure that your customer records are kept properly up to date including the key contacts and their email addresses. You need a way of storing a number of contacts within a company, and of recording which of your products or services each contact might be interested in.
You should assign the responsibility for keeping your customer records up to date, so that everyone is clear who has the authority to ask for records to be properly looked-after.

Newsletter sign-up
Your web site is the perfect place for you to collect the email addresses of people who are interested in hearing more about your products and services. You can provide this information via a regular newsletter, which might contain press releases, new product information, and perhaps special offers.

Think more like a publisher
There is a growing trend in consumer and business buying behaviour - people want information before they are interested in buying. This information can be in the form of white papers, surveys, customer feedback, product comparisons, and a whole range of other information types. You can offer useful, informative content on your web site - in exchange for a name and an email address.

Pick up the phone
If you are in business-to-business marketing, your target market may be relatively small - perhaps a few thousand companies. In this case it is perfectly feasible to run a project to gather the names and email addresses of the key decision-makers in these target companies. You will run across some organisations that operate a ‘no names’ policy - meaning that they will not give out names or contact details for their employees. If this is the case, you should accept the policy and move on to the next call.

Referrals
Don’t forget that you can ask your existing customers to ‘recommend a friend’ or a business contact to receive your email correspondence. This again can be included on your regular customer newsletter, or as part of a regular customer service phone programme.

So, in conclusion there are very good reasons to want to build your own email marketing list - as this will yield better results from your campaigns. We have suggested five ways in which you can build up a list of email addresses to which you can market your products or services. And remember, acquiring email addresses is something that needs to be part of your routine so that over time you build a valuable resource for your business. There’s no time like the present, so start today!

i-Exl helps you to improve your marketing skills via jargon-free training - delivered via the web. i-Exl e-learning courses are easy to follow and fast to complete - which means you can make a difference to your business straight away. We care about the results you get, so our approach to training is refreshingly different. We GUARANTEE better results for your business, or your money back.

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