If you have ever used a mass mailing email marketing campaign, you know how they promote their services. The appeal is that, in theory, the service has collected a large amount of valid email addresses that they guarantee will go to real potential internet customers. For a fee, they will take your marketing message and broadcast it to that large customer base and the outcome will be that you will see a percentage of those customers visit your web site or respond to the email and from that percentage, a smaller percentage will become paying customers of yours.
There are two problems with this marketing model. The first one is that no matter how you dress it up, by buying into that kind of marketing program, you are becoming a spammer. Now, it is bad enough that the explosion of spam in the email world has made life difficult for the average cyber citizen and that those cyber citizens are the human beings you want to turn into your customers. But a by product of spam has also made life a lot harder for you and I, the average internet marketing business person.
Life has gotten harder for us because of spam because of the reactionary explosion of spam filtering software being used by internet citizens and ISPs as well and those filtering programs are aggressive and successful which means many of your emails never make it to the customers but disappear into spam holding tanks to eventually be deleted. So because of this fresh problem, email delivery failures have skyrocketed which has seriously harmed the value of email marketing which is what we were hoping to use to prosper our online businesses in the first place. Ironic, isn't it?
The second problem with that marketing model is that the large email mailing list that the service brags about is of dubious value. For one thing, you may or may not know how they harvested those emails. The odds that every one of those email addresses is a valid customer email are very low. You have low confidence in that mailing list and the only thing that makes up for that low confidence is the huge number of email addresses that they have on that mailing list.
A large mailing list is not a good mailing list if it results in a low percentage of new customers, customers who purchase at low basket totals and customers who do not return for repeat sales. This is why a new marketing model is called for that abandons the mass mailing approach and abandons your participation in spam which only makes you an accessory to the crime.
That new marketing model calls for you to look to your existing customer base of clients who are already active users of your products and services and begin to build a much smaller but much higher value email mailing list of customers you actually know and that you know are high volume buyers who come back again and again to buy from you. This approach to building your email list starts at the end, with customers who already fit the profile of what you are looking for and it builds out from there.
You can use that solid customer base to then build a larger customer base that will also be loyal customers who will return solid sales to you for your efforts. Through referrals, viral marketing, contests and give aways, you can excite your customer base to share their love of your products and your web site and bring in like minded friends and family members who will then become part of your high quality mailing list as well. Then you repeat the process and build your mailing list slowly over time.
This process results in a much smaller mailing list but one that you can be confident that they will respond to your emails. Whereas working with a mass marketing service, you may see a 1% response rate and a 1% sales rate from that response group, you can look for a much higher percentage of response and sales from your high quality email contact list because you already know them and you know they will come back again and again to buy from you.
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