I often run free online marketing strategy sessions with other small business owners. During these sessions we focus on a particular issue they have in their business and I help them work out the best approach to tackle the problem. Following a conversation within one such session, it presented these questions:
Building a list on an email/newsletter programme, what strategy can you use to best handle various access points and their ensuing lists?
What can be done to ensure that lists do not produce cross-over where clients may receive information that is no longer relevant to them as they move on in the marketing chain?
My advice is, and it would also be relevant to any business owner who creates a lot of access points into their marketing: e-books, webinars, seminars, downloads, events, newsletters, special offers and product purchases, to use a tried and tested email/newsletter programme to look after the lists and use to cater to the demands of a multiple access point market.
The great feature of email/newsletter programmes are their list management functionality. You won't annoy members on your lists, if you are sending a newsletter to more than one list at a time, they will ensure that each person received the newsletter only once, even if they are members of multiple lists, provided they signed up for all lists with the same email address. So for example, you could be a member of e-book list and tele-summit list but you will receive the newsletter only once if you send it at the same time to both lists.
Indeed it's better to have lists separated for all different products, seminars, offers, events you will run. The key is to keep a separate log of why you created that list, what members signed up for, when, how this list is linked to and related to all other lists. After 6 or more months it won't be easy to remember without this log when you've got 10 lists on the system with abbreviated names!
The benefit of having lists separated is that you could then create very targeted campaigns and follow ups based on what subscribers were initially interested in: e-book, webinar, strategy session. If you bought a webinar recording, you could then promote a follow-up webinar, an e-course on the same subject and strategically up-sell on other services and products you have. If you have all your subscribers in one list you won't be able to segment and target them in the same manner.
For each new list you can have separate auto-responders' series and you can send newsletters to go out to each list individually using separate templates. What's even better, you can set up different business details for each list.
Email/newsletter programmes show you your list totals on the dashboard so you will see how many people in total you have across all lists, as well as how many active/inactive subscribers per each list. Finally, you can set up list automation,signing up for a free e-book (free-ebook list) will also get automatically added to other lists (free-teleclass, newsletter, promotions). However, if you buy a coaching session (you become a member of coaching-clients list), you'll be automatically removed from promotions list as you are now a client, rather than a prospect. This keeps your lists targeted to most relevant prospects and ensures that clients won't get bombarded with promotional messages for products or services they've already bought.
My name is Tamara Baranova. I run TJConsulting and I help small business owners grow their business by delivering effective online marketing mentoring, support and training.
It allows my clients to stop wasting valuable time and start seeing real results. Business owners I work with are serious about raising their business profile and attracting more opportunities. They want their business to succeed, to grow fast, and to generate healthy profits through online marketing strategy that works.
Want to know more? Go to my website http://www.tjconsulting.co.uk/ to grab my free eCourse 7 Steps to Online Marketing Mastery and learn how to plan your unique social media strategy. Use our step-by-step jargon-free guides to master all popular online marketing tools: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, blogging, and more! Sign up today to get immediate access!
Post a Comment