Category: 
July 19, 2009
Email list building is a common marketing practice these days. There are very few businesses that you can go into these days that don’t ask for your email address or ask if you want to sign up for special offers or updates through your email. This is the first step you should take, as well, when building your email list. Start by asking your customers to fill out a short piece of paper containing their name and email address. This will give you the opportunity to keep in some sort of contact and communication with your customers.
Email list building sounds easy, right? Well, it can be if you go about it the right way. These days, with everyone asking for email addresses with the amount of spam on the internet, it is getting harder and harder for you to be able to get a person’s email address from them for your email list building database. So you’ll have to find some way to encourage them. If you are an in-store individual requesting an email address for building your email list, try pointing out the benefits, like newsletters, promotions or other benefits they might receive by having their email address on your email list. This is called direct contact collection. You are collecting the email address for the email list directly from face-to-face customers. For those of us with websites, adding a simple form for email collection is usually the best way to go about email list building. Simply write a short paragraph about why your customer should be giving their email address to you and then request the email by putting in a submission form.
If you already have an email list, try this email list building option. Ask your customers for referrals. If they like your site and what you have to offer, request the email address of friends and family so you can send an invitation to those people to take a look at your site. Or, depending on the site, offer a referral program where customers can earn something for every so many people they get to sign up and give you their email addresses. A third option in the email list building process is telemarketing. In this process, you build your email list by contacting customers over the phone and letting them know they could perhaps avoid the call if they signed up for the email service.
Try to use as many of these as you can when attempting to do email list building. This will help you to create a large email address base.
Julia Gulevich
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/email-list-building-how-to-get-started-building-your-own-email-mailing-list-113437.html
Horaayy..there are 2 comment(s) for me so far ;)
Is it possible to get a mailing list of unsigned musicians?
I have just built a music website and it has regular users visiting, but I am not satisfied with the number and level of users.
The target users should be the unsigned musicians,so I am wondering how could I get them comming? I have tried using music forum and myspace but it didnt work that well, so I am thinking if I need start to promote by sending emails. Now I am confused where and how could I get a list of their email addresses? (I don’t mind if I need to pay for getting it)
Any good suggestions?
Thanks
okay, here are some suggestions.
First: forget this idea about getting your hands on a mailing list. That’s like, very 1998. Even if it’s a so-called "opt-in" network, basically what you would be doing is spamming, and there is no need to do that. People are getting very good at blocking, ignoring, and deleting spam.
There are several ways to get more visitors to your site. Here they are:
1) links from relevant sites. e.g., directories, music sites, and so forth. just email the owners of all sites you can find, and ask for a link. search for "music site directory" to find directories of music sites, and apply to them. build links, links, links.
drop in on webmasterworld.com and check out what webmasters are talking about re link-building. They’ve even got a whole forum on it.
Never, ever stop building quality links to your website.
Never, ever buy a program that does this automatically, or submits your site to directories automatically.
links have two values:
1) people click on them
2) search engines use them to rank your site in results pages.
here’s the second way of getting traffic: buy it.
Yahoo and google both run "contextual advertising", which means that you can buy ads.
When someone does a search, for example "unsigned musician websites", your ad will appear next to (or above) the search results.
You are charged per click.
third way: offline marketing, ie marketing in the real world. Are there specialty publications that your target audience reads? get an ad, or an article in there.
References :