Email marketing is a great way to connect to potential customers.  The question is, how do you get all those email addresses?

One of the best ways you can build up an email subscriber list is by providing people with a reason to want to be on your list.  Initially, get people to sign up for your newsletter by having them enter to win a prize or service. Do you sell cosmetics? Offer a free goody bag to the first 25 people to sign up for your newsletter. Are you an architect? Offer a free consultation to one lucky newsletter subscriber. Keep your newsletter subscribers by offering discounts on products or services to newsletter subscribers with special code.

You can also accumulate email subscribers by asking current customers to sign up for your newsletter when they use your services.  If you’re a dentist, ask your customers for their email addresses when they sign in. If you’re an author, have people provide an email address when they buy your book.  It is important to notify people that by supplying their email address, they are signing up for your newsletter or promotional emails.

You can also add a form field on your website that allows people to sign up for your newsletter.

That being said, there are a couple of things you should not do to get email addresses on a subscriber list.  The first is, don’t buy a list.  They are often expensive and do not provide you with a good set of addresses. You don’t want a list of random email addresses, you want a list of potential clients.  It is highly unlikely that a list you buy could give you anywhere near the quality of potential customers that a personalized list could give you.

You also do not want to add every email address in your contacts list to a subscriber list.  Not everyone you’re ever communicated with through email wants to receive regular email newsletter communication from you. That guy you met at a chamber meeting once may not really be a potential client and inundating him with emails may leave him with an unfavorable impression of you, that he might share with others who could be potential clients.  Your Aunt Sue may love pictures of your kids but probably doesn’t want to get a newsletter about your business every week.

Not sure where to begin? Alphabetix can help you write content for newsletters.

Tags: email marketing, email subscriber list, marketing, small business, Web 2.0

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 12:39 pm and is filed under email marketing, small business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.