Of the many ways to obtain an email list, by far the best and most productive e-list you will ever use is your house list.
A house list consists of customers and inquirers who have volunteered to receive emails from your business. Since they know you and intentionally opted in, they are most likely to look forward to, open, read, and act on correspondence from you.
Tips for building a productive house list
First, please memorize Rule 1: Never, ever add anyone to your e-list without permission. It alienates people, and can even lead an email server to block you. You can obtain permission with language like, “To receive valuable emails from XYZ Company with exciting news and special offers, click here.”
For added safety, send a confirmation with a link that subscribers can click to confirm, and one they can click to decline.
That said, here are some ways to build your house list:
Need more help? Many reputable third-party vendors provide free or low-cost web-based tools that make it a breeze.
Warning: lists go out of date fast. The best way to keep your house list fresh is to use it often, and to track what happens in terms of opens and actions taken.
If a contact joined your list over 90 days ago and has not opened an email message from you since, chances are you’re being ignored, marked as spam, or going to an address that is no longer current.
You can also keep a list fresh by sending only useful, relevant information. Contests, surveys, free offers and exclusive product offerings can make it worth your customer’s while to remain on your list, and alert you of address changes.
Finally, always include a link for opting out. I admit that this may seem a bit counter-intuitive, but it’s considered a best practice. Moreover, giving customers control over their own information is smart customer relations.
Mar 11
31
Thanks to the Internet, many tools once exclusive to professionals are now widely available at low or no cost.
Nowadays, just about anyone with a computer can design a page, retouch a photo, or even compose music. But if you’ve ever had to hide crossed fingers behind your back while muttering something nice about a friend’s would-be masterpiece, you know that tools don’t ensure competence.
This is particularly true when it comes to conducting online research. An array of affordable web-based tools makes it a cinch to build and distribute an interactive survey. But there remains an art, even a science, to designing the questions. The results of an unwittingly but poorly framed question can be costly. Besides wasted time and expense, there is a danger of basing important strategic decisions on “facts” which later turn out to be fiction.
Even the seasoned research pro must exercise ongoing vigilance to avoid ending up with abundant-but-useless feedback. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind:
1. Some pitfalls are less obvious than others. For instance, even the order in which questions are listed has been documented to influence answers. So has a survey’s background color. To ferret out hidden problems, try randomly mixing things up. Perhaps each respondent can receive the questions in a different order, in different colors, on different days, etc.
2. Word choice matters. Spotting and pruning potentially biasing words is trickier than it seems. Though technically the same, people may have a different reaction to a question about a “rule” than about a “regulation.” For that matter, more people would rather “not lose” than “save” or even “gain.”
3. Never ask respondents to predict or even report their behavior. They can’t do it. At least, not with any degree of reliability. Yet if you ask, they will try to answer, and they will be sincere in what they tell you. The problem is that people perform poorly when it comes to correctly identifying what they do today, much less predicting what they’ll do tomorrow.
4. Caveat to the prior question: Unless, that is, you want to reveal something else. Asking people to predict their behavior won’t tell you anything about what they will or won’t do, but it can tell you a lot about how they see themselves.
5. An online survey may not be representative of your market. For one thing, only customers who are online can participate. Responses will only come from those who care to and have the time to participate. Thus your data may be weighted toward people with complaints, people with time on their hands, people who are bored, or people who enjoy completing forms.
6. Provide a “does not apply” option. This keeps people from checking a box, any box, just to keep you happy.
7. Don’t overlap. Say if you want to know how many employees a company has. Do not offer choices like “up to 100” and “100 or more.” Make the categories distinct: “Under 100” and “100 or more.”
8. Keep it simple, but not too simple. Too many questions, too many steps between “strongly agree” and “strongly disagree,” too-long pull-down menus, and too many essay-type questions can lead respondents to rush or simply quit. On the other hand, too few options won’t get to the nub. Seek for a balance.
9. The more respondents, the more reliable the data. I have seen companies that should know better than to base big decisions on opinions from 10 or 20 people. While no response is 100 percent reliable, try for at least 5,000 respondents. And do your best to ensure that they represent a good cross-section of your market.
10. Research is not invincible. Take care as to how you use survey results. Treat them as suggestive, not conclusive. If they lead you to a hunch, test the hunch before betting the farm. A little caution now can spare you a lot of trouble and expense later on.
Mar 11
8
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if a particular fishing lure works, you should keep using it. Or that if a particular shortcut consistently saves you time, you should keep taking it.
Yet surprisingly few companies apply the same sort of logic to enhance online marketing effectiveness.
Dropping a lure in the water or taking a shortcut provides instant feedback, in the form of more fish or saved time. The web provides instant feedback too, in the form of web analytics.
If you really want to, you can spend big money creating a detailed, custom analytics program. But if resources are scarce, there are plenty of free or low-cost, reliable easy-to-use options out there.
A number of web browsers like Yahoo, Google and Bing also offer robust analytics tool. These tools are more or less ready to plug in and use, apply to both personal and commercial use, and integrate neatly with most websites.
Once you choose an analytics resource, you’re ready to start counting. Here are some basics as to which numbers matters most (and least).
1. Total traffic (that is, the number of hits a website receives).
2. Which individual pages of your website receive the most traffic? This tells you something about what interests your visitors, and offers you an opportunity to capitalize on that knowledge.
3. On average, how long does each user spend on each page? Are some pages better at holding attention than others? Why? How can you use this information to strengthen other pages?
4. What websites refer visitors to yours? This can reveal much about your users’ interests, and about the kinds of sites you want linking to yours.
5. What words do people search to find you? Be sure to work the most searched-for words into your content as often as possible in order to make your site more “searchable.”
6. Notice trends. Perhaps users consistently visit at a certain time or on a certain day. Perhaps you attract one customer demographic or psychographic more than another. Challenging yourself and your website with questions like these should be an ongoing process. Put a web analytics review on your weekly or monthly schedule, or add it to the job description of key staff.
As you follow the numbers, be sure to consider what they reveal about your customers, how you might use that information to better serve them and, hopefully, to sell more. This process can inspire valuable insights, creative solutions and new tactics. All of which will lead to incremental — and sometimes significant — gains in online marketing effectiveness.
I have had the opportunity to speak at some great conferences over the past few years and 2011 will be no exception. I just presented at the American Bankers Association Insurance Risk Management Forum (blog post on conference highlights forthcoming) and I’m gearing up to present at the following conferences over the next few months:
If you plan to be in attendance at any of these, please shoot me an email or comment.