Are You Building Your List?
Are you building a list online for your business? Capturing the email addresses of your visitors is the first step for lead generation online. It will allow you to build a list of potential customers, those who are prepared to trust you and your brand, and to market your products and services to them over time.
Building a list is vital because people who come across your business for the first time may not be ready to buy at that particular moment. They may be looking for information or simply browsing. Or, you may not have the exact product they are looking for at that particular time. However, some of those visitors can become your future customers (should you take the right steps!). You may need to build trust first with those potential customers, or you may just need to catch them at the right time in the future.
Email Marketing and Autoresponders
Email marketing is an effective way to build trust with the people who subscribe to your list. All you need to do is capture the email address of people visiting your website or even your physical store (many stores now have a simple paper pad near their register, or a field in their computer systems, to collect email addresses of their customers).
To capture email addresses on your website, many autoresponder services offer a user-friendly functionality to design your own lead capture forms, which can then be installed on your website. We recommend aweber, however there are many other services to choose from. Those automated services will let you organise your subscribers into lists, as well as create and deliver your entire email marketing campaigns.
It’s important to build a strong email campaign, preferably automated, that regularly delivers valuable messages. Your emails must always add value (useful information, interesting articles, great offers, etc.) and they must be regular (minimum once a month, however can be weekly or daily depending on the nature of your business).
Having a list of potential customers is a major asset to your business, because it allow you to:
- promote your special offers
- keep your visitors coming back to your website
- build trust and loyalty from your customers
- be perceived as an expert in your field (through the content in your emails)
- be in front of your customers at the right time, when they are ready to buy
The Ethical Bribe
Before you can capture the details of your visitors, you must tell them exactly what they are getting for their sign-up. Even if the sole purpose is to collect their email so that you can notify them of new products or offers in the future, they still need to know, so that they can decide whether they wish to sign up.
However, in an era of instant gratification, most people don’t want things in the future… they want something NOW! So it always helps to offer something in return for their email address. Offer them a special discount or a free gift in exchange for their email address. This can be as simple as an online voucher, a discount code, free training, a video or a special report.
Over time, you can build a list of hundreds or thousands of people to market to directly. These potential customers opted-in to your list, telling you that they were willing to trust your brand and consider your products and services. Because your emails were solicited, the people on your list will be more receptive to your emails, information and promotions!
The key, is to continue to provide value over time and build trust until they become first-time customers, and then continue the process to build a list of loyal customers for the long-term.
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