Do you know what the most valuable asset in your business will be in the next five years?
Your email marketing list. Yes, I know it may be difficult to believe right now, but imagine if you were a baker who acquired tons of clients throughout the years and, all of a sudden, something called the Atkins anti-carbohydrate craze comes along? Sure you could come up with an alternative carb-free product, but how could you quickly get in contact with all the people you sold to throughout the years to let them know before they bought into the hype and took their business elsewhere?
Aside from any trends that may be happening now and are timely in nature, think of long-term reasons as well as accomplishments where your email subscriber list could come in handy. What if your company merged with another company and the name changed? How would you be able to notify your customers that you are still around, but with just another name? Maybe you were presented with an award for something or you won a major contract, or perhaps your company doubled in size and is moving to a bigger space in a nearby community. What if you were discontinuing a product and wanted to offer a half-price special for a limited time? In each one of these examples, certainly email would be a faster (and less expensive way) to get the message out to a big group of people as opposed to trying to design, print, label and mail postcards. There are tons of reasons, from timeless ones to timely ones, why building your email is critical for both the short and long-term success of your business.
So now that you can see the importance of having an email sign up list, let me share with you 5 ways to help you improve your ways to capture more email sign ups.
Many of these ideas will greatly improve your chances of getting a customer to share their email address with you and approve you to share your information with them. Remember even if you know a person’s email address and it is in your contact list, if you send them unsolicited email, whether promotional or informational, it is considered SPAM and you could get in very big trouble. Therefore be sure to get the recipients permission from them before sending them any material. This is commonly known as ‘opting-in’.
(1) Put an email sign up box on your website and offer a special report, discount, free tips or a white paper. Use a permission based email marketing company such as AWeber to easily create the email sign-up box and manage your subscriber sign ups.
AWeber is one of the most reccomended email marketing campaign management tools in business today. Just follow a few step-by-step instructions and you’ll have you’re first sign-up box ready to place on your website and gather details. AWeber also has numerous other features such as auto-responders, analytics, an affiliate program and even the option to link to social media sites such as Facebook.
(2) Use an audio generator on the home page of your website with a recorded message to bring attention to your ezine or special reports email sign-up box for your roaming web visitor. You can use any number of services such as Audio Generator or something equivalent. There is a one-time nominal fee to download the player and no monthly subscription fee.
(3) Print your special report and ezine offer on the back of your business card or go to a company who offers printing services such as vistaprint.com, and order some premium business cards. Make a special card to give out at networking events that encourages the person you meet to go to your website or blog to obtain their free special report or tips.
(4) Include an email sign-up box in your newsletters. So when your newsletter gets forwarded to a non-subscribed recipient, they can sign up to receive their own copy.
(5) Include your newsletter or special report web address link in the thank you section at the bottom of your printed invoices. Instead of a special report or in addition to, you can offer a coupon or a discount off a future purchase.
In addition to these ideas, understand that a bit of personalisation, great sales copy and professional presentation is also very critical. Because what good is it to make a lot of effort to capture email subscribers’ names if you can’t keep them intrigued and engaged?
So how are you going to get me to sign up for your email list?
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