Use iCon­tact to Man­age your Mar­ket­ing Email Lists and Stay in Com­pli­ance with CANN SPAM

I am often asked if email lists are even an effec­tive mar­ket­ing tool any­more and the answer is yes, absolutely yes. You do have to exer­cise care with your list how­ever, the old men­tal­ity of get­ting as many email addresses as you can and then just start blast­ing ads to them doesn’t work. You have to care­fully build your list with qual­ity addresses that are inter­ested in what you have to offer.  Send­ing mar­ket­ing emails to addresses that are not tar­geted are less likely to be con­verted into a sale and are more likely to report you as SPAM. Why go through the effort of build­ing a list if you aren’t going to make the effort to make it a qual­ity list?

Peo­ple still read email, even from peo­ple that they don’t know but in this post-SPAM age peo­ple are more aware of SPAM email and how to iden­tify SPAM email either on their own or with soft­ware. How­ever, if peo­ple are aware of cer­tain adver­tise­ment emails that they have elected to receive then they gen­er­ally won’t mind them and are even inclined to read them.  That is your goal, you want to be they guy who has email that peo­ple have elected to receive.  This is called, ‘opt-in’. The per­son has ‘opted’ to receive adver­tise­ment email from you. Why would they do that? Sim­ple really, you offered to pro­vide them with some­thing in return for their email address and their per­mis­sion for you to send adver­tise­ments to that address and they placed a higher value on what you offered over the sanc­tity of their email address.

Sounds easy enough right?

Well, it actu­ally is. It’s basic mar­ket­ing, find some­one or a group of peo­ple that have a need and then either cre­ate or offer some­thing to them that addresses their need and tell them that the cost of ful­fill­ing their need is and email address and the per­mis­sion to send adver­tise­ment email to that address. That sounds a lit­tle cal­lous and cold when you read it like that but it is the most basic expla­na­tion. Let me warm it up a bit with a real-life example.

Lets use the lawn and gar­den indus­try (since it’s bright and sunny out today); we’ll pre­tend that I am a land­scap­ing busi­ness owner. I have all these won­der­ful prod­ucts that I use in my busi­ness that are man­u­fac­tured by another com­pany (weed killers, plant food … etc). The com­pany that I buy these won­der­ful prod­ucts from has an affil­i­ate sales pro­gram that I could be apart of which would give me a per­cent­age of the sale of each prod­uct of theirs that I sell to one of my cus­tomers. I don’t want to risk los­ing any of my cus­tomers so I decide to only sell to my cus­tomers, the prod­ucts that I use and trust from this manufacturer.

Now I am faced with dis­tri­b­u­tion; I could be con­tent with just in-store sales but what if I could sell these won­der­ful prod­ucts nation­ally or even glob­ally, can you imag­ine the sales!? So how do I get the word out about these prod­ucts I am sell­ing with­out spend­ing thou­sands of dol­lars on tele­vi­sion, radio and news­pa­per ads? The Inter­net per­haps … yes the Inter­net! So, what is the eas­i­est way to con­tact every Inter­net user? Send them an email! How do I get their email address and how do I make sure they would at least be inter­ested in land­scap­ing prod­ucts? After all, if I go to all this effort I want to make sure my mes­sage reaches as many peo­ple that are actu­ally inter­ested in land­scap­ing prod­ucts as possible.

Remem­ber how I said you need to offer some­thing that your audi­ence needs and then tell them that the cost for ful­fill­ing that need with your offer­ing is their email address and per­mis­sion to send to that address? So using the lawn and gar­den exam­ple; let’s say I cre­ate a ‘how-to’ guide for mak­ing your own back­yard pond and I offer that guide to any­one at the cost of their email address and their per­mis­sion to send to that email address. Now my only chal­lenge is to let peo­ple know about the guide that I am offer­ing.  I have the guide in my store for cus­tomers to pick up but I need to reach a big­ger Internet-scale audi­ence and let them know about my guide. I cre­ate what the online mar­ket­ing indus­try calls a, ‘squeeze page’ that I can use to dis­trib­ute my guide to Inter­net users via down­load (because the real pur­pose of the squeeze page is to squeeze them for their email address and per­mis­sion not dis­trib­ut­ing the guide).

My real inter­est isn’t in to how-to guide, I am really just after your email address and the per­mis­sion to send to it. I still have to take time and care in cre­at­ing the guide; the guide has to be com­pelling enough for peo­ple to want it and I don’t want to dam­age my name/brand/credibility with junk but the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the guide isn’t the goal in this case. The goal is to offer some­thing that some­one wants and would place a higher value on than the sanc­tity of their email address.

SIDE BAR: As you progress in your mar­ket­ing adven­tures you will find oppor­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate addi­tional streams of rev­enue every­where with every­thing you do; in the lawn and gar­den case one such oppor­tu­nity exists with the guide (albeit in my exam­ple the guide was just the means to an end).  I could sim­ply place a few affil­i­ate hyper­links of related prod­ucts that I am sell­ing inside the guide that peo­ple who read the guide may be inter­ested in. If I lose them in the sense that they don’t give me their real email address (or don’t respond to my mar­ket­ing emails) they may still buy a prod­uct from one of my affil­i­ate links in the guide (so you still get to mon­e­tize that indi­vid­ual). You always want mul­ti­ple oppor­tu­ni­ties to mon­e­tize every Inter­net trav­eler that comes in con­tact with you or your brand.

The lawn and gar­den exam­ple use a clas­sic tool for list build­ing, the squeeze page but there are as many ways to get a per­son to give you their email address and the per­mis­sion to send to it as there are stars in the night sky. Some peo­ple stum­ble with this area of mar­ket­ing because they feel that is less than eth­i­cal.  My offi­cial state­ment is this; As long as you clearly state what the per­son will be receiv­ing in their email from you and that you pro­vided them with a good or ser­vice of some sort in exchange for their email address and their per­mis­sion then there is no room to debate ethics because that is an eth­i­cal transaction.

The last area you need to be con­cerned with when deal­ing with email lists is ‘opt-out’.  SPAM reg­u­la­tions dic­tate that an email recip­i­ent of reg­u­larly dis­trib­uted email must be given the oppor­tu­nity to ‘opt out’ or elect to stop receiv­ing email from you.  Com­monly this is done through a, ‘Unsub­scribe’ hyper­link located at the bot­tom of the email you receive.  Please do not be igno­rant to SPAM reg­u­la­tions, it is becom­ing seri­ous busi­ness and lots of peo­ple are pay­ing atten­tion to it.

Per­son­ally, I would make sure that all of your email lists stay in com­pli­ance by using a third-party list man­age­ment ser­vice like iCon­tact

Here are a few other ideas for email list building:

• Place an ‘opt-in’ link on every page of your web site
• Offer dis­counts and incen­tives through a newslet­ter that you have to signup for
• Opti­mize your web site for search engines, make the con­tent rel­e­vant and related to an over all theme
• Invest time into mak­ing a name for your­self with pop­u­lar social net­work­ing sites

Writ­ten By:

Ryan Huff
ryan@rthconsultants.com

http://rthconsultants.com

Ryan Huff is a free­lance web devel­oper, tech­nol­ogy coach, mar­tial artist, busi­ness devel­oper and an avid inter­net mar­keter. You can con­nect with Ryan here at The Code­Tree or at RTH Con­sul­tants, fol­low @rthconsultants on Twit­ter or at Face­book