1. Existing Email Contact Lists — customers who you've already contacted via email are eligible to become part of your email marketing list. Pulling subscribers from your email contact book is an excellent place to start. As a rule of thumb however, make sure these contacts are active, and have been in contact at some point in the last 24 months.
2. POS (Point-of-Sale) — For "brick-and-mortar" stores the POS system is also an excellent resources for starting and growing your email subscriber list. Most out-of-the-box POS systems provide a field for inputting your customers' email address. Some of our current OpusMailer clients have also resort to the old standby of pencil and paper at their checkout counter. Claiming: "Sign-up to receive Special Discounts and Incentives", in order to encourage customers to provide their email address.
3. Existing Customers — Anyone who's bought a product from your in the last 24 months is also eligible to be emailed. Keeping track of your customers with hopes of making repeat business out of them is a huge part of the success of email marketing, or as we like to say: "Remind & Reward"
4. On YOUR website — Within the OpusMailer "Manage Subscribers" Tab click on any list you've already set-up, or set-up your first list. From the next screen, there's a link in the right-hand column to "Create A Subscriber Form". Clicking that link and after entering some basic, yet specific information, you can generate a code-snippet for a sign-up form that can be placed on your website. When someone fills out the subscriber form on your site, their automatically subscribed through OpusMailer. Seamlessly integration between your website and your email marketing. Using the same priniciples as the pencil and paper, explaining the benefits of subscribing to your list are helpful in encouraging people to volunteer their information.
5. Old-Fashioned Business Cards — Again, if someone has given you their business card and said, "Please contact me about your product/service", then they too can be added to your email marketing list. Same rules apply to business cards as your email contacts, only those contacts who you've received in the last 24 months are legit.

These 5 places are a great place to start mining the email subscriber list your didn't know you already had. In contrast here are some places where it's not a good idea to grab email addresses, and may get you in trouble regarding the CAN-SPAM Act.

1. DON'T Use Old Email Address (older than 24 months ) — Outdated contacts aren't very helpful simply because these people are unlikely to remember giving you permission to contact them. Remember that email marketing is most effective when it's targeted at people that are genuinely interested in your product or service.
   
2. DON'T Use Third Party Lists — There are many "grey-list" retailers on the internet, our recommendation is to avoid doing this for a number of reasons. First off, the estimated return on email marketing (over $40 : $1 in 2009), no longer applies to you if you get a 3rd party list. Secondly you run the risk of getting your email address black-listed with the ESP's (email service providers, such as: Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, etc.), this will not only render your email marketing useless, but also render your email addresses associated with your website useless. Finally you'll get us in trouble, the server we use to deploy our emails has managed to stay in the good-graces with the major ESP's, a batch of bad addresses could give us issues, in which case we may lose privileges to send email for anyone. You do want us to continue eating, don' t you?
3. DON'T Steal — Simply put, don't steal email addresses off the internet, or from local government business listings, or the like. It's simply bad news, bad results, and bad reputation for anyone who expects to gain any business from doing this.

We hope that this blog-post has helped to answer the "Golden Question". In the future we plan on explaining how to then take your starter email list, and utilize OpusMailer to grow your subscribers.

Tagged: email, list

Planning

Every project that is expected to run on time, on budget, and on scope will inevitably have a planning phase. With home construction, as well as web design, the first step in planning involves getting a handle on the scope of the project. It is important to understand how many people will be living in the house, in order to know how many bedrooms, and bathrooms the house will need. Perhaps our house is not a house at all, but a shopping mall instead. The financiers of the world's first 3 bedroom 2 bathroom shopping mall would be considerably disappointed if the details of the project aren't discussed prior to design. Understanding the purpose of your website is a lot like understanding the intended use of your building, you need to know: 1.) Who is using this website.  2.) What they are expected to get from the website.  With web design we start by determining who your possible user personas are, making a list of the possible scenarios for the different types of users and the different expectations that come with each. The list of residents for a house may include a mother, a father, and two children, but in some instances it may have a grandfather living with them who's in a wheelchair.  As a home builder you wouldn't put all the bathrooms and bedrooms on the second floor of the house, knowing that the grandfather would be living there. With website user personas, considerations and accessibility options may need to be made in order to make services accessible to all possible user types.

Where are the differences? The differences in the planning phases of home-building and website design are in the fact that website design is a more democratic process. This sounds great aloud, but what it means is that website design must be done to take into consideration the greatest good for the greatest number, and that some very specific cases may not get their potential full-consideration in the design of a website. This is a result  of the size of the potential audience a website can reach. The closest equatable example from the home-building world is planned communities where one design is chosen as the "model home" and this model is designed with a multitude of democratic considerations based on who may live in the house. In the case of the grandfather, or the potential for grandfather rather, this means that the model home will have at least 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom on the first floor, and at least 1 entry that is ground accessible. This is why it's important to establish who your target audience is up front, based on who the current and potential users of your product are, and how to best reach them. Two drastic examples from the web: a website selling sports equipment and a website selling hearing aids. The complexities around the use and design of BOTH of these product are maybe easiest explained through the use of online video content. The sports equipment website may make concessions regarding audio accessibility in order to provide its target audience of 18-24 year old men and women with the most riveting user experience possible. Where as the hearing aid website will certainly need to take into consideration any audio content on it's site, videos will need to have captions, or potentially no video at all.

Next Post: Design

Tagged: website

Utilizing email marketing as a channel that can broadcast targeted messages makes it a powerful vehicle for building a personal dialogue with your customer base. It represents a key component of marketing your business in a web 2.0 world, where you're expected to provide your customers a personalized experience. Developing a relationshiop with your customer base isn't always about going for the hard-sell either. It is commonly a good practice to offer them interesting information in an email campaign that they can take away and utilize when engaging with, or making decisions about your product or services.

As part of setting up any new email marketing account, we take the opportunity up front to discuss how your subscriber data is being collected, and what customers segments matter to your business. We can provide forms for your website that will collect your subscriber list and automatically add them to your email marketing console. OpusMailer allows you to send segmented campaigns quickly and easily. We also offer multiple options for developing the emails you send as well.

Tagged: email