What Is an Email Database?
Your email database consists of contact points for former, current, and prospective customers. Valid email addresses can provide you with a low-cost and practical way to deliver your marketing messages and to encourage repeat business from loyal customers. Making sure your email database is up to date can help you achieve improved results from your marketing campaigns.
Why You Should Never Buy an Email List
You may be tempted to buy an email list from a commercial provider. Resist this urge. These email lists typically include a significant percentage of defunct or non-functioning addresses. Additionally, unsolicited and unexpected emails result in your messages landing directly in the spam folder of your recipients. This could damage the reputation of your company in the online community.
Building Your Email Database
Taking the time to acquire email addresses in the right way can help your company achieve improved results for your marketing and promotional campaigns. Here are nine of the most effective strategies for growing your email database organically.
Make It Easy for Your Customers to Sign Up
Your email opt-in box should be clearly visible and easy to recognize. Take time to look at your landing pages to ensure that your sign-up box is easy to find and that it attracts your attention immediately. This can increase the likelihood that your customers and guests to your website will share this information with you.
Establish Incentives for Email Sign-Up
To put the odds more firmly in your favour, offer a discount or other incentive for opting into your email database. This can give you an edge in acquiring email addresses for your online promotional campaigns. E-books, applications, and other items of value can motivate your customers to provide their email addresses for future promotional communications from your company.
Provide Engaging and Entertaining Email Content
Making sure your emails offer useful and interesting information for your customers can sometimes result in these communications being forwarded to others within the target industry. This can expand the reach of your emails even beyond your email database and can encourage added sign-ups on your website or landing pages.
Target Your Communications
Creating separate mailing lists for customers interested in different products and services can help you zero in on your most likely clientele. This targeted approach can also increase your relevance and enhance the reputation of your company in the modern online marketplace. Customers are more likely to sign up for emails that pinpoint their precise interests and needs. This can ensure that your investment in customized landing pages and sign-ups will pay off in increased growth for your email database.
Connect with Your Social Media Audience
Don’t discount the power of platforms like Facebook (however insidious), Instagram, and other social media sites to promote your products and increase the size of your email database. Including a sign-up box on these websites can help you capture your social media audience and communicate with them more directly and on a more regular basis. Adding an opt-in reminder at the end of your corporate YouTube videos can also boost your visibility and provide you with more addresses for your email database.
Leverage Local Events
If your company attends trade shows, local expos, and other gatherings in your community, these events can provide you with outstanding opportunities to collect addresses for your email database. Be sure to let your new email contacts know that they have joined your corporate family by sending out a welcome message. This can be a good opportunity to make the right first impression for your products, your services, and your company.
Build Your Blog
Making regular blog entries can attract positive attention to your company in the online world. This can also provide you with opportunities to engage your customers and encourage them to sign up for your email communications, which can then alert them to new entries on your corporate blog that may be of interest to them. Your company’s blog can be a valuable source of leads that can expand your email database as well as your customer base.
Create Buzz for Your Business
Designing a viral campaign that builds public awareness and engagement with your company can boost interest in your email campaigns. One proven method for building your database is to provide your customers with an incentive to invite their friends and colleagues to sign up for emails as well. This can potentially create exponential growth for your email database in a relatively short time period.
Offer a Free Webinar
Planning and advertising a free webinar can attract added attention to your company. Requiring a valid email address for registration is an ideal way to build out your database while providing a real service for potential customers. Webinars offer significant benefits for your business, including the chance to promote your own products, establish your company as an authority in your field, and to build visibility among your target audience in the consumer marketplace.