Email Marketing – The Online, Offline Opportunity

Email Marketing – The Online, Offline Opportunity:from Business 2 Community by John W Hayes
Email marketers have multiple opportunities to target new subscribers and build their lists. It’s amazing how many marketers completely ignore their prospective subscribers and, as a result, struggle to develop new leads. Email capture forms should feature prominently on every page of your website. You should also be prepared to sell the benefits of subscribing to your email lists. Benefits could include discount vouchers, subscriber-only offers, etc. Remember “Free Newsletter” is not a benefit.
But, there are also multiple opportunities to engage with subscribers in the offline environment. The following scenarios and locations provide amazing opportunities to grow your list:
• Tradeshows: Collect the business cards or scan the badges of everyone who visits your stand or booth at a tradeshow and then add the names to your list. Follow up any tradeshow visit with an email thanking them for their visit and offering additional information, such as a white paper or product information sheet. You can then use the analytics from this initial campaign to either qualify or further segment your leads.
• At Point of Sale: How many retail outlets collect email contact details? Not many. This is a huge lost opportunity. It takes seconds to ask a customer for their email address, and if you sell the opportunity correctly (e.g., special offers, discounts, new stock announcements, etc.), you’ll find it is an unobtrusive and productive way to win repeat business.
• The Telephone: Again another underutilized list-building resource. You should aim to end every new telephone conversation with the question “Can I take your email address and add you to our database?” It’s really that simple.
• Old Contacts: Although it is not good practice to automatically add old contacts to your email marketing lists (e.g., people with whom you have not had contact for more than six months), it is possible to re-engage them via email or telephone.
Important: The success of email marketing is based on the permission the subscriber has given you to contact them with marketing messages. Never add an address without the owner’s permission, never share contact details outside of your organization, and do not add subscribers’ details to lists that will result in them receiving irrelevant communications.
Who Can Help?

• Your Colleagues: Sales is often reticent to ask their potential customers for additional contact information. A little training and demonstrating how email marketing will help them close more deals will go a long way to solving this problem. It may also be possible to incentivize your colleagues to collect email addresses by running a competition with a small prize at the end of each week.
• Tradeshow Organizers: Many tradeshows organizers hire out badge scanners that can be set up to automatically segment contact details according to product/service interest. Once this information is downloaded into a spreadsheet, it can easily be added to your relevant email marketing lists.
For more great tips on building creative email marketing strategies check out this free white paper from iContact.