Email List Building

It takes time to build an email list but once you do you’ll have the names of people who are genuinely interested in what you are selling.  The one thing you need to remember is not to abuse a person’s trust once they give you their private information and email address.  Let your customers know that you value their trust and will respect their privacy.  You can do this through a privacy policy on your website where you promise not to sell information to other businesses or vendors.  You can go so far as to let your customers know what you will be emailing them and how often they can expect it.  Always provide people with the option to remove themselves from your email list.  This promotes customer confidence.

If you take part in joint promotion (we call it JV - Joint Venture in Internet Marketing) and/or co-branding with another online company make sure that you don’t trade e-mail lists.  What you can do is include information about that company in the newsletter you send to your customers.  All e-mail should come only from you.  You’ll lose your customer’s trust if they think you’ve sold their personal information to another business.  And this means that they will disregard any future communication with you and your business.

To get people to join your email list don’t ask them for much more than a few bits of information at a time.  You need to gain their trust before asking for too much information.  You can start out by asking for their name and email address.  Your future marketing promotions will help you fill in other information such as age and demographics.  It will take time to get a clear idea of who your best customers are and what they want to get out of your website and email newsletter.

If customers have trust in your business it won’t be hard to get an email list together.  Gaining trust is as easy as holding a contest, offering discount or coupons, regularly changing your website content, or providing informative newsletters.

Should you have on offline store, a great way to gather email addresses is by asking people to give you their business card if they want to win a free lunch.  Other offline methods of gathering email addresses include networking events and trade shows.  A good rule of thumb is:  if someone gives you their business card that has their e-mail address on it you can safely assume that it’s okay to send them an email at least once.  If they don’t respond back you should then assume that they are not interested.  Take these non-respondents off your e-mail list or follow up later.