Build up a contact list and grow your business.
People have a fascination with Google. The most common question we’re asked is “Will my new site appear in Google?”.
We agree that a good ranking in Google certainly helps things along, but it’s really only a part of a bigger campaign. It’s all got to be backed up with a bit of advertising, some networking (both in person and online with social networking applications) and, most importantly in our opinion, a database of relevant email addresses.
Email marketing, when carried out properly, is an extremely effective form of marketing. The difficult part is getting the list of contacts. You can purchase a mailing list of 10,000 addresses from a reputable company, but that’s really just the same as printing 10,000 leaflets and sending them around the doors. A typical response rate for this is around the 1% mark, so if you send enough out then you may actually do alright, but we think there’s a better way of doing this.
For the most effective long term strategy you need to begin collecting email addresses from interested customers now. You need to have a ‘subscribe to our mailing list’ function on your site, you need to be able to add addresses manually, and you need a way of managing these contacts and communicating with them via some form of mass mailing system. It’s a slow burner, we have a customer who we advised to start building a database of contacts around 5 years ago. Today they have over 11,000 contacts, every one of which actually asked to be kept up to date with news and special offers. We can expect a far better response from this than from the 1% response rate from a leaflet drop!
The best systems include features like auto-responders where a specific email is automatically sent out after a user subscribes, and link tracking where you can view which hyperlinks within the email a subscriber followed. You can then target an additional email to specific subscribers based on this. One company who is particularly good at this is Dabs (http://www.dabs.com) who sell computers and IT equipment online. They continuously profile their customers depending on the links followed in previous newsletters, so that when new newsletters are sent to you they contain all the items that you are more than likely going to be interested in. Have you followed a link to the ‘monitors’ section of their website from their email newsletter? If you have then you can bet that a relevant email telling you about monitor special offers will be on it’s way to you very soon!
So, what packages are on the market? We can recommend a very good third party system that does all of this, and we can install it for you if you’re not sure about doing it yourself. It’s not cheap at around £300, but it’s very, very good. Alternatively, we could custom build an email marketing application to integrate into your existing content management system. If you don’t need the system to do absolutely everything but have a specific list of requirements then this can be a cost effective way of getting started. At the other end of the spectrum are the basic systems that allow you to collect email addresses via your website, send out an email to all these contacts, and that’s it! There’s no link tracking, no autoresponders, nothing custom coded and nothing fancy, but it works. Every elmnet web hosting customer has access to a system that does this as part of their hosting plan – there’s no additional charge for this.
Whichever way you decide to go we think it’s vital that email marketing to a targeted database of interested contacts is something that you simply cannot overlook. We really think that it’s more valuable than a Google number 1.
Well, said! Always be armed with a stack of business cards, a notebook and a pen that works. The hardest part I find is asking people for their contact details and not sounding like I’m after the hard sell.
Next question, how do you actually get people to fill in their details on the website, plenty people look, lots love the work/product, but clinching their details is a different matter. Is this something people are getting wary about? Are people worried about having their details stored electronically after all the very public slip-ups of recent months?
Ha! Now that’s the trick! How to get people to sign up?
I think that you have to word it so that signing up to your database is going to be beneficial to them. There has to be something in it that they want. People don’t sign up for fun, they sign up if they are really interested in what you have to offer. Try and think of it as being more a case of ‘If you sign up look what you (could) get out of it’ rather than ‘Please sign up so I can take your money’!
It’s so important to build up these contacts that we’re considering putting together a competition. I’m still thinking about the details at the moment, but I reckon that a ‘Sign up here and win a custom coded content managed website’ competition may do the trick. It’s targeted, there is a benefit for the subscriber, and I get a database of potential customers who all want websites. And if they don’t win the competition then everyone who enters gets 20% off should they choose to ask us to build one for them.
In your case how about a similar theme? ‘Sign up here to win an original painting worth £1000 – and 20% off any purchase if you sign up and don’t win’. Remember that your customers can always buy again from you, so it’s probably worth taking the hit.