Building your database, one contact at a time

A carefully cultivated and well-maintained database is one of your best assets.  It allows you to reach out to existing and potential customers with information about your products and services.  With effective and consistent communication, you can often uncover new sales opportunities within your own database. 

Email marketing
One of the most widely accepted forms of communication in business today is email marketing.  Email marketing is so popular because it is relatively easy to master, inexpensive and can provide great results.  However, an important consideration for email marketing is making sure that the contacts in your database want to receive your emails.  You must learn the rules of email marketing to be sure you are in compliance with U.S. Federal CAN-SPAM regulations.  CAN-SPAM legislation was enacted in 2004 to address the growing problem of junk email and abuse.  To be compliant, in general, you must follow these rules:

1.     Contacts on your marketing list must opt-in.  In other words, the contacts on your marketing list must have given you permission to email them.

2.     Never email a marketing list which you purchase from a third party.

3.     Do not send email marketing to contacts you find on company websites, such as info@, sales@, or any other general delivery mailboxes.

4.     Send only content related to your business as promised and never questionable or explicit content.

5.     The email subject line should be reflective of the email content — be forthright.

6.     Always include an opt-out mechanism.  Most email marketing programs automatically include the opt-out.

7.     Include your legitimate physical address.

Building your marketing list
How do you get started with building an opt-in marketing list? 

·         First, start by including a ‘subscribe’ option in a prominent place on your website.  Make it clear that by providing their email address, they will receive periodic emails from your organization.

·         Next, gather business cards from those you meet at networking events, tradeshows and sales calls.  Be sure to ask those people for permission to add them to your email list. 

·         Customers!  Reach out to those who you have done business with in the past and ask them if they would like to be included on your email list.

·         Include a ‘forward to a friend’ link on your email marketing. 

Now that you are on your way to building your database, be sure to develop meaningful content which your subscribers will want to read.  Contact them on a regular basis, so they expect to hear from you.  Work with a reputable email marketing provider, such as Swiftpage or Constant Contact, who provide great tools to help you build engaging graphical email campaigns.  Contact us today for a trial at info@toplineresults.com — we’ll help you get started.  Subscribe to our email newsletters.