Problems with buying email lists

1. High bounce rates. Bounce rates are emails that never reached the intended recipient, which could mean  the email address is invalid, the email account has been closed or the mail box is full. The bounce rate generally speaks to the quality of the list purchased; those with high bounce rates are very low quality.

2. Negative association of your brand. Most people sort through a lot of emails in their in box on a daily basis and the last thing they want are generic, unrelated, spam emails that they never signed up for. If they see your email spam their mail box than they are most likely going to associate your brand with being junk as well.

3. Black listed email addresses. Today, spam filters have gotten fairly sophisticated and if they detect spam emails coming from a certain domain they will block all email coming from that domain. For example, my email address is mark@markitoverdinner.com. If I sent out spam from that address and it gets blacklisted than any email, whether spam or not could get blocked.

Generating email lists without buying one

Obviously generating your own list takes time, however all of the problems listed above will be avoided. Also, there will be a higher probability of a sale as you will be talking to potential customers who have some level of interest in your product.

1. Have a form on your Web site to start collecting email addresses from visitors. People don’t part with their email address easily because they don’t want spam, so you must give them an incentive.  Give away something, anything in exchange for an email address. Depending on your product this could be a white paper, free trial, daily relevant information updates, etc.

2. Beef up site Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You want to get found organically, or in laymen terms, on the first page or two when someone does a google/bing search for certain keywords. Focus on driving traffic to your Web site, than harvest email addresses.

3. Institute a Pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. This is another way to drive traffic to your web site. If done correctly the traffic that comes to the site from a PPC campaign will be very targeted; meaning they will be looking for what you are selling.

4. Ask current customers for a referral.  Gather email addresses from current customers and provide them an incentive to pass the word on to their friends.

These are just a few ways to start driving traffic to your site and build your own opt in email list. Focus your time and resources on piecing together a list instead of spending it on buying one. It will be money well spent.

Therefore, in order to help correct this fallacy, I am going to share the top reasons why social media initiatives fail for small businesses and a few tips on how to go about picking the right social media tools for success.

First the Failures:

1. Jumping on the Bandwagon.

You saw it on the news and thought, “everyone else is doing it” so, while multi-tasking with your laptop while in front of the TV, you decided to create a profile for your small business.  However, little did you know, this is the WORST thing to do. Do you even know if your customers are on Facebook or Twitter? If they aren’t, you are just going to waste your time and resources on an activity that will yield little results. If they are, you will probably get side tracked, lose interest and then stop updating your profile because you don’t have a plan. This in fact is even worse that not having a profile at all, because potential customers will stumble upon the profile and get turned off due to the fact the profile hasn’t been updated in months. This brings us to the second reason social media initiatives fail.

2. Loss of interest due to lack of results

Once you created that profile on XYZ Social Media life got in the way and the novelty wore off, causing you to forget the profile was even created in the first place. Social media takes a little work and to really keep doing it for the long haul, it has to produce results.  Lets face it, people don’t do something just because; they have a reason and businesses don’t keep doing something unless it brings in new sales or achieves some goal.  So before embarking on a Social Media sign-up frenzy, think about the type of results you want to get.

3. Lack of Integration and Promotion

Just because you create a Facebook page doesn’t mean it will spread virally like the Numa Numa video, which has been viewed over 35 Million times. Your profile or other social media tools should be integrated into your entire marketing plan. It should be linked from your home page, placed in every email that goes out, posted in the store AND there should be a reason for people to join. Such as stimulating conversation, coupons, notices of upcoming events or specials, etc. Even Coca-Cola’s facebook page didn’t spread virally; they took out ads to specifically promote the page and get people to sign up.
There are obviously other ones, but these are the biggies. Now on to how Vermont small businesses can utilize social media.

1. Find out where your target market is

Look back at my 4 keys to marketing and you will notice that the first one says “Market”. Yes, even old school marketing speak still applies to social media. Here you determine where your target market is located, and part of that is getting some kind of indication they using whatever social media tool you are trying to evaluate. The also will help prevent “jumping on the bandwagon” syndrome mentioned above.

2. Create a plan

Decide who is going to update the social media tool. Figure out how often and when. If you don’t have time, than maybe another marketing initiative needs to go because it is deemed that this new social media tool will achieve greater results.

3. Create an editorial calendar

This is one of the most important aspects to success. If you sit down and map out some topics to write on your blog or put into your twitter feed ahead of time, than the work is half done. An editorial calendar is just mapping out the next 3-6 months with ideas and writing them down. Think about holidays that might be coming up or yearly sales or local events, these are great starters for topic ideas.

Well this is just scratching the surface on getting started with social media. But if you want to know more drop me a line and I will be happy to answer your questions.

Depending on your particular business specific tactics can vary widely, however we will go through a couple popular ones below.

Capture Email Addresses- One of the easiest ways to stay in contact with your customers is to capture their email address. With email addresses you can send out monthly specials, offer relevant information or use it to get customer feedback. Most small Vermont businesses could benefit from greatly from starting to gather customer email addresses. An example of this is, I was just in Val’s Wild Tomato the other day in Winooski, Vermont where they asked for my email address to be able to send out their daily specials. All they did was place a clipboard by the cash register that said “sign up for our daily specials.” This helps to keep them top-of-mind when I am trying to decide what to pick up for lunch.

Loyalty Cards- Another easy way to keep customers coming back are loyalty cards. These can take many different forms. Grocery stores generally have an electronic card that offer discounts on certain purchases, local coffee shops such as New Moon Cafe in Burlington have punch cards where the 12th coffee is free, or Men’s Warehouse offers a discount when you spend to a certain level. While there are many more benefits to these cards that we won’t get into here, they are a great tool to incentivise customers you have already worked hard to get to keep coming back.

When trying to decide what tactics might work best for your small business, look at stores you visit frequently and notice what they do well to keep you coming back.

The goal of an advertisement is to intercept a potential customer’s intent to buy with your product or service. For example, someone redoing a kitchen will have a need for new paint. The challenge for Sherwin-Williams is to intercept the homeowner with messages about their brand of paint during this buying process. While newspaper or TV ads could help build general awareness of Sherwin-Williams another approach could be to get interior designers to specify specific Sherwin-Williams paint. Additionally, Sherwin-Williams to place ads on “how to”blogs that cater to learning how to paint.

One very effective way to get someone to buy your product is Word of Mouth. This can be evident when a friend recommends a new restaurant they just discovered and rave about their gourmet burgers. Not only are you more likely to visit the restaurant, but you will probably try one of the burgers on the menu. While word of mouth might be effective, it isn’t necessarily easy to create, but there are ways to spur on the process. Programs such as loyalty cards, refer a friend incentive or email campaigns with original content that customers would want to share with friends are all possibilities.

The final step in ensuring the chosen advertising medium is successful is to establish a few metrics to track the success of the campaign. One of the most rudimentary is to track changes in sales volume over the length of the campaign, while not very accurate, it is at least a start. Other simple ways could be to track traffic to your Web site or simple ask your customers how they heard about your company. Tracking campaigns is a huge area of study in and of itself and there will be more on this topic in later posts. However, the important take away is to design a campaign in such a way that the success of it can be tracked and thus comparied to future campaigns.