How to Build an Email list From Scratch: A Brief Overview

If you plan to market your products or services online. It is worth considering Email Marketing as a major pillar of your online marketing infrastructure.

Are you planning to employ Digital Marketing as a major advertising channel for your small business? If you plan to market your products or services online. It is worth considering Email Marketing as a major pillar of your online marketing infrastructure.

A substantial chunk of small business owners shy away from email marketing because they believe all email marketing campaigns are purely spam. You know, those annoying, unsolicited emails you get from largely unknown companies.

The truth is, Email Marketing, when executed properly can help you acquire new customers as a relatively low cost. Ignoring "Email" could mean you loosing-out on many customer-acquisition opportunities.

Does Email Marketing Work?

The short answer to this question is "Yes", Email marketing is still quite an effective, and popular means to advertise your small business.

In Fact, the data shows that we send over 74 trillion emails a year. According to a 2017 Communicator Email Benchmark Report, this number keeps going up each year. Consumers still use email to communicate as well as to discover new products and services from companies.

The open rate for email sent in North America is 34.1 percent, with the mobile click-to-open rate for U.S. marketing email at 13.7 percent and Desktop at 18 percent. The average open rate for political emails is 22.8 percent. The iPhone is the most popular mobile device for email opens.

Consumers are on track to send and receive 281 billion emails per day in 2018, with an expected 3.8 billion email users worldwide by the end of the year. In five years’ time, there’ll be even more email, with an expected 333 billion emails sent.

All the available facts show that email is still alive and well.

How Can I Get Started With Email Marketing?

The first step of an email marketing campaign should be creating an email Subscriber list. In this article, we will discuss some popular options for doing this and help you learn more about what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to email marketing.

Building an Email List for Marketing

Once you decide to start using email marketing to promote your business you are likely facing the dilemma of compiling an email distribution list. This is essentially a list of email addresses to which you will email your advertising and promotional materials.

One common way to put together a list of email addresses is to purchase a list from distributors. However, this method is not very effective at all and we do not recommend it.

The problem with purchasing an email list if you have no way of knowing whether or not the members of the list would have any interest at all in your products or services. This is very important because while you want to reach a large audience with your email marketing you also want this audience to be members of your overall target audience.

When you purchase an email list you may be sending your email messages to some users who might be interested but this is largely coincidental and is not likely to be well received because the message was not solicited.

Consumers will quickly delete materials emails they believe to be spam without even opening or reading the emails. In fact some Internet service providers include spam filters which may automatically delete your emails if your messages are deemed to be spam.

These filters run complex algorithms on the subject heading and content of the message to determine whether or not it is spam and are quite adept at weeding out spam. Therefore you run the risk of having your email marketing effort turn out to be a complete waste if the majority of recipients never even read or receive the message.

A more effective way to create an email distribution list for your email marketing campaign is to ask current customers as well as interested potential customers to register with your website to receive additional information and periodic updates about your products and services as well as other information which might be of interest to them.

It helps to offer your users something of value for free in exchange for their email addresses and permission to contact them with other offers in the future. You can offer a free ebook or discounts on other products. You can also offer some kind of niche industry information or news.

This provides you with a database of email addresses from current customers as well as potential customers who have a genuine interest in your products and services and who are interested in learning more about these products and services.

Once you have a list of interested customers or potential customers you can send emails or create e-newsletter for distribution to the members of your email list. These documents should contain a wealth of valuable information as well as a soft sell pitch for your products and services. This information will be valued by the readers and may help to persuade them to try your products and services.

You might also want to include useful links to either your website as well as other websites which may be of interest to your readers. Your content should also contain a portion which urges the reader to take a specific action such as making a purchase or at least investigating a product further.

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