Whether you have an online or offline business, one thing you should have is a mailing list. In fact, if you have been online for any length of time at all you would most definitely heard the phrase that the money is in the list. Mailing lists can take quite a while to grow and they are your most precious and valuable asset in business. You can lose your site or your bricks and mortar, but they can be replaced. Mailing lists just cannot be. You have to start from scratch.
Given that you accept the value of your list, then one must ask the question as to why some marketers seem keen to rape theirs. What do I mean by this? Well, let us go back to the basics of business relationships.
In business, as in life, any relationship is one that is two way. From a business perspective it is between you and your customer or prospects. This relationship is up to you to grow, nurture and preserve. It is not up to the customer to foster the relationship with you. From your point of view, this means giving more than you take or get. This giving does not necessarily have to cost you anything more than your time.
In an online marketing situation, it costs nothing to provide some valuable tips or advice in your newsletter. It never hurts to refer your customers to a site providing a useful tool they might be able to use or a site that has a useful article. Naturally, you do not refer people to competitive sites but there is plenty of opportunity to find something of value if you do a little bit of research. If you are not sure what to write about or what your customers want to know about, then ask them. You may just be surprised and get twenty emails which will provide you with plenty of article topics for the next twenty weeks.
What do you think the result of this will be? Exactly. Your mailing list will look forward to your newsletter and will open them and read them because they know from experience that you are offering them help and assistance. In the meantime you are establishing trust, credibility and respect for your business.
But the purpose of the mailing list is to sell isn't it? Well, of course it is and you would naturally add a link to a page or mention something to your customers every now and then. Customers expect that and they certainly won't mind given all the free advice and information you have provided them.
But back to the rapist! This is the person whose list you subsribe to who has no interest in you as a person. Every single email they send out is a hard sell. They never give you any information or help and the vast majority of the time there is not even a reply address on the email itself. This person doesn't care about you in the slightest. They are only interested in your money.
So what happens to these people? Well, they either end up with you unsubscribing from their list or they get flagged to go straight into the junk folder. Sure, they may brag they have a list of 20,000 people, but the reality is that maybe only ten percent of their emails get opened.
The bottom line is that you need to treat your email list like gold. It is without doubt the most important asset in your business. Look after your customers and they will look after you and above all, do not treat them like cattle and bombard them with hard sell sales offers every other day. |
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