I’ve been getting a lot of email this past week. Actually, it seems to be snowballing, because the volume of emails is growing and it’s taking longer to answer. My apologies if it takes me a few days to answer; I haven’t gotten the nerve yet to outsource my email like Tim Ferris.
Part of the Social Print Experiment’s goals are to build business by marketing through social media. Examples of that would be using Twitter, Facebook, MaiLChimp, LinkedIn and other applications that allow more interaction between you and your customers, and hopefully more sales. In future postings, I’ll be discussing our strategies with these programs.
One of my favorite applications for email marketing is MailChimp. I’ve been a customer for about two years now, and every quarter they have a new release with even better features than before. They recently added a feature called TimeWarp that schedules your email at a specific time in each time zone, so that everyone on your list gets your message at say 9:00am in the morning in each timezone they’re in. (Prior to this, I would set 11am as my release time for the east coast, and the west coast subscribers would get their message at 11am EST as well which was 8am PST – about the time many people come in to work and just start mass-deleting the emails that came in during the night.)
Recently, MailChimp started offering their service for free for up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails a month. Not as an intro package price, or trial, but as the full service on a startup marketer’s budget. For a list of everything they offer with the free plan, you can click here to download their brochure.
Starting from scratch, how do you build a list to email to? Here are a few tips to get started:
- Don’t buy a list of email addresses, ever. Most people ditch, lose or change their email addresses each year, just to combat the spam they get. If you send an email out and get a high number of bounces, you’re likely to get your email marketing account shut down.
- Use a double opt-in process that requires the person who signed up to your list to confirm they subscribed. This usually records their IP address so that a year later, when they report you for abuse, you have the proof they signed up of their own accord.
- Never scrape names from websites; that’s just asking for trouble. Some sites have email spam traps which then are set off when you mail to them, and your email account gets blacklisted (and your email provider shuts you down).
- Don’t bother adding email address to your list that are generic, like sales@, or webmaster@ or info@. It only takes one or two complaints on your list to get your account shut down. Instead, insist on an email address that goes direct to the decision maker; not to the general email box.
- Educate your sales team on proper email etiquette. Having them give you a list of prospects for the last 10 years for you to blast could land you in jail or get substantial fines for sending unsolicited emails.
For us, every email confirmation for a job contains a link asking our customer if they would like to receive an infrequent newsletter from us. It’s a link that goes to a landing page, where they can sign up (and confirm through our double opt-in process). We also have a link to sign up to get our newsletter on our site. If we get a business card at a tradeshow, we send a personal email to them within a few hours thanking them for visiting us, and asking them if they would like to receive our newsletter. In that email, we include a link to our landing page where they again have to double opt-in.
The list building is slow, but I know we’re building a good list with genuinely interested people who want to receive our emails.
Toolbox:
Email Marketing – MailChimp - FREE for up to 500 subscribers, 3,000 emails a month
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