Here are few tips to help to build your email list this fall/winter.

Every web page should have a sign up form. – People who visit your site are interested in what you have to say.  Make sure you are offering an email sign-up form on every page and make it simple for them to respond.

Trade Shows.  The attendees at your booth are your most engaged prospects.  Leverage your face-to-face opportunity to ask the prospect if they would opt-in to your mailing list.  Just because they gave you a business card doesn’t mean they are giving you permission to contact them.

Referrals via Social Network.  Ask your subscribers if they find the content valuable to publish the content to their social network such as Facebook and Linkedin.

Remember to treat every customer/prospect interaction as an opportunity to promote your company and to build your list.

Social Marketing is HOT,  yet many people have yet to find a way to monetize this exciting new communication arena. Many of us are using Facebook, or one of the many other social networks on the web. Can social networks like Facebook help you with your email marketing? Yes. If a large portion of your subscriber list is already on Facebook, you can provide tools in your email campaigns to allow your readers to help share your content. This will give you the power to leverage your growing audience and gain much more visibility for your content or message.  It is a great way to build your list too.

When looking for an ESP, delivery of your emails should be your #1 criteria.  If is not, then you are probably missing out on revenues.  Take a look at this scenario, XYZ company is using a low-end ESP and is getting an “inbox” delivery rate of 80% . Their average conversion rate is 3%. They have 500,000 names on their in-house email list. With a delivery rate of 80%, only 400,000 subscribers get the emails. That means 100,000 people do not get promotional emails from XYZ. At a conversion rate of 3%, that’s 3,000 people not having the chance to make the purchase. If an average sale is $60, that’s $180,000 in revenue XYZ misses out on due to poor email deliverability due to the wrong ESP.  Consider your ESP wisely.

The world of online marketing is very competitive and your customers can cast their votes this holiday season with their pocket-books.  By taking care of your customers today, ensures that they will be your customers tomorrow.  Sam Walton couldn’t have said it better:  “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”  Please keep this in mind when you are engaging with your customers and prospects.  If the customer doesn’t see value in your product or service, they will look elsewhere.

If you haven’t thought about it already, you should be planning for your holiday email markeiting deployments. The peak season for retailers is between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Plan your deployment now so that when mid-November arrives, you are not scrambling to get those Thanksgiving offers out the door.  If you need help, there are dozens of email marketing agencies who have partnered with the leading ESP’s that can help.

Your Client Experience Determines Pricing – How Much are Your Bananas?

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The Technology Issue | September 2009

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With the economy sputtering, most marketers today need to take a closer look at the return on their marketing decisions. Email leads the way when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your marketing budget. It offers the marketer a highly engaging, customizable and targeted medium to strengthen your customer customer relations, drive sales and increase the brand experience.

List growth is the number one question I hear from our customers and prospects.   Here are a few quick tips I give them to help to build their subscriber lists.

• Leverage Social Media to get your current subscribers to post your email content on their social networks.
• Make sure you promote your ’subscription box’ on more than just the home page. 
• Keep the subscription questions to a minimum.  Email and first name is enough to start.  As you build subscriber “trust” you can ask for more information.
• Provide offer to attract more subscription. 
• Provide an example of past newsletters on your website for your prospective subscribers to review.  
• Make sure your content is timely and relevant.   This helps to promote word of mouth and social networking referrals.                  

If you  do these things, you can not help but grow your subscriber list.  Remember, there is no easy way.  It takes work.

Leveraging Video in Email. Video embedded within email is a logical extension of Web 2.0. Today smart marketers are leveraging the power of video by using simple screen captures to drive the consumer to the video content on a web page. New technologies from Goodmail offer other deployment methods where video can be viewed from within the actual email. LiveClicker uses animated GIFs to give the illusion of a video playing in email, whereas Goodmail actually streams live video into email at AOL inboxes. Check it out.