Imagine a prospect walks into your place of business and offers you a card. “I’m not ready to buy, but I’d be happy to receive more information about special offers, new products, or other news. Here’s my contact information,” the prospect says.

Would you refuse to take the card? It’s not a trick question.

Every day, prospects visit your virtual place of business when they go to your web site. They’re interested in what you sell, and they’re willing to share their contact information. If your site does not offer them an easy way to join your email list, you are “refusing the card.”

Creating the virtual fish bowl to collect contact cards is easy. Here are four steps to make your web site a list-building machine:

1) Select a reputable software service that enables you to create, deliver, and track commercial emails. These services include built-in sign-up forms that you can drop into your web site.

2) Place the form in a prominent spot on the front page of your web site. Don’t bury it where visitors have to scroll to find it.

3) Give prospects a reason to subscribe. Explain what’s in it for them. Describe the great content you will send them.

4) Assure prospects that you’ll protect their privacy. Promise that you won’t share or sell their information and keep that promise.

When a prospect joins your mailing list, you can share your message with them when you choose. If you “refuse the card,” you can only hope that the prospect will remember you later.

This article first appeared in St. Louis Small Business Monthly for which Tom Ruwitch writes a monthly marketing column.

If you want to sell your business, one of the questions your suitor will undoubtedly ask is:

What is the size and quality of your “list?”

The buyer is not asking about your grocery list here, they want to know if you have a “house list” of existing customers and prospects that you are actively marketing to.

They want to know this because having an engaged, active list is equivalent to cash in the bank.  You might call them “Permission Assets.”

As a business owner, your definition of a list should be expanded to go beyond a list of customer addresses and phone numbers.

Today, we can build lists of “Permission Assets” in many low cost channels.

What Permission Means

When someone raises their hand and knowingly opts-in to a marketing channel that you control, they have become a Permission Asset.

Examples of the low-cost channels where permission assets can be built are:

• Email (using a system like MarketVolt)
• Social Media (using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc)
• Physical Meetings (using a system like MeetUp or Eventbrite)

When someone willingly opts-in to your email campaign, Facebook page or joins your meet up, they have become an asset to your company.  An asset that, if cultivated properly, is equivalent to money in the bank.

You are now able to easily and inexpensively reach them through these channels.

How To Grow Permission Assets

The consumer has wrested control over the messages that they receive via the Internet over the past decade.  Now, more than ever, the consumer is exercising the WIIFM rule.

What’s in it for me?

Sure, we can send spammy or “hard sell” messages via email, Twitter or Facebook.  We can disguise in-person meetings as informational and then hit the attendees with a pitch.

But these tactics don’t work twice.

To build a growing, sustainable set of permission assets that produce sales, we must provide an answer to the WIIFM question.

We must provide value.

Your market is asking for value in many forms including:

• Entertain Me
• Inform Me
• Inspire Me
• Protect Me (or things I love)
• Educate Me

Pop quiz:  Which email topic sent by a CPA gets opened and which gets deleted?

1. Check Out My New Tax Preparation Services
2. 10 Ways To Legally Avoid A Painfully High Tax Bill

If you answered #1, you haven’t been paying attention.

The Hub

As seen in the image above, the center of a “permission asset” strategy is usually a business blog.

The valuable content that you are creating should be “housed” on the hub and then distributed via email and social media.

A good website or blogging platform, like WordPress, will make the content that you are creating:

• Discoverable – Search engines (like Google) can easily find your content and send traffic to your site
• Interactive – Your market wants to comment, vote, rate or otherwise interact with your message.
• Shareable – Your market wants to easily share your content via email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. with their social networks
• Automated - Your content can be automatically “pushed” out and shared with your social networks

Growing a list of permission assets is as simple as building valuable content on your website and distributing that content through various channels.  Then, providing the methods for the consumers of that content to opt-in to further messages and share those messages with their network.

Finding The Right Mix

I know what you are thinking.  My mortgage company doesn’t take “permission assets” — just cash.

Forming lists of permission assets leads to growing the bottom line.  The next time you are launching a new product or service, doing a membership drive or rounding up sponsors for an event — leverage your lists.

Assuming you have been cultivating these lists through a series of valuable messages, they will respond to an offer.

Understand that the response to your offer will be directly proportionate to the amount of value that you have been providing through these channels in the days, weeks and months past.

My likelihood to make an offer to my “list” is similar to my likelihood to withdraw money from my bank account.  In this analogy:

Communicating Valuable Content = Deposit

Communicating an Offer = Withdrawal

As you manage your permission assets and the messages you are sending the data will tell you, much like your bank statement, whether you can make a withdrawal or not.

Your open and click rates will rise and fall based on the number of deposits and withdrawals you are making via your email list.  As will the number of “likes” and “retweets” you are getting on Facebook and Twitter respectively.

If you are paying attention, you will know when your balance is in the red or black.

Guest Blogger Russ Henneberry provides marketing training for businesses that don’t have Chief Marketing Officers.  You can join Russ’s community by clicking here.

In a previous post, I applauded online coupon vendors that deliver a flood of new customers to you. But after the first-time customer redeems the coupon, then what?

Your challenge is to maximize the lifetime value of customer relationships. These goals apply whether you acquire the customer through couponing or some other tactic. Turn first-time customers into repeat customers. Turn small-ticket buyers into big-ticket buyers. Turn them all into referral agents who send others to you with a hearty endorsement.

How do you do this? Establish a relationship with your customers and communicate with them regularly. Here are some tips to help you accomplish this:

1) Engage them in conversation at the point of purchase. Express gratitude (not just a mechanical “Thanks. Have a nice day…”). Ask whether they plan to return.

2) Ask for contact information, especially email addresses, explaining that you plan to deliver more great offers.

3) Send an email thank-you note as soon as possible (within days) that includes a feedback survey. Were you happy with your purchase? Would you recommend us to others? Do you plan to return?

4) Send regular emails to your list. Provide great value in the emails: useful news, information and great offers.

5) Ask for referrals. Satisfied customers are happy to send business to you – if you ask them to do so.

(This article first appeared in St. Louis Small Business Monthly which publishes a monthly column, High-Voltage Marketing, by MarketVolt’s Tom Ruwitch.)

Here's what happens when you DON'T separate prospects from suspects!

My 18-year-old cousin received an email from a non-profit last month, promoting the organization’s new planned giving web site and inviting him to register for a free webinar about the topic. After opting-out from the non-profit’s mailing list, my cousin emailed me and asked, “Why would they send me this junk?” My reply, “Because you joined their list, and they probably send everything to everybody every time.”

This non-profit (which shall remain nameless) had a budding relationship with my cousin, who chose to join the email list a few months ago. He appreciated the organization’s mission, and he was probably going to make a donation this month. But he’s not a planned giving prospect. And when this teen received an email about end-of-life planning, he found it creepy, and he didn’t want anything to do with this organization again. “I don’t even have a girlfriend,” he wrote. “Why would I want to talk to these guys about my will?!”

Don’t make the same mistake. Do not send everything to everybody every time. Email marketing is a great tool, in part because it’s relatively inexpensive and easy to use. Press send and – voila – several thousand constituents receive your message. Plus, we all understand that follow-up sells, that it usually takes more than one touch to close the deal with a prospective donor or volunteer. Combine such ease-of-use and affordability with the prerogative to follow-up and you naturally want to press send, over and over and over.

But if recipients do not consider the content pertinent to their interests – or, worse yet, if they find it creepy or counter to their interests – they will press delete, opt-out, click the “this is spam” button, or all of the above. Then, as happened with my cousin, you lose a prospect forever.

So what’s a fundraising professional with a tight marketing budget to do? You have to separate prospects from suspects. You have to segment your lists so that you can deliver targeted follow-ups only to true prospects.

To promote planned giving, the non-profit can include an item about the program among many other items in its email newsletter. The newsletter should include a little bit of everything so that all readers will find something worth reading.

For the planned giving item, include a link to “read more” that points additional information on your web site. Create and send the email with a system that can track who clicks the link. A few days after sending the newsletter, pull the list of people who clicked that link and save that list as “planned giving prospects.” Create a follow-up email about the planned giving web site and webinar and send it only to your planned giving prospects.

You can use the same approach for virtually any business goal you have – raising volunteers, identifying and cultivating major donor prospects, connecting with prospective donors for a specific program.

Use link-tracking in your general interest newsletter to segment your list, and then deliver targeted follow-ups to the prospects you’ve identified. If the non-profit had taken this approach, it would have developed its planned giving program and still had an active relationship with (and a donation from) my cousin.

- Tom Ruwitch

In addition to co-founding MarketVolt, Tom Ruwitch runs MarketVolt, an interactive marketing firm that helps businesses gain and retain followers using email marketing and other technologies. This post originally ran on MarketVolt’s interactive marketing blog. 
 

Our friend Russ Henneberry has a great blog called Tiny Business, Mighty Profits. I was honored to have Russ invite me to be intereviewed on his internet radio show that he includes on the blog.

In the 40-minute discussion, archived on the site, we discussed:

Learn:

• The 3 reasons you shouldn’t be using Outlook, Gmail, etc to run your email campaign
• How and why to track the behavior of your email readers (and how to respond)
• The 3 most effective ways to build your list
• The one instance when it is OK to buy an email list

Russ and I had a great conversation! I want to thank him for inviting me and give him a big shout out for the great work he’s doing with his blog!

Imagine you’re single, looking for a new long-term relationship. You enter a room full of strangers and see someone whom you find attractive. You walk over, introduce yourself, and converse. You deliver some of your best material—funny anecdotes about yourself, details about your high-powered career, evidence of your passionate, yet sensitive side. The stranger is smiling at you, laughing at your jokes, making eye contact, enjoying your company.

And then you deliver the call to action: “Please marry me!”

Whoa, now, Romeo! Not so fast. Juliet dashes out the door.

Seems crazy, huh? Then why do so many fundraisers follow the same playbook when courting donors?

Imagine a fundraiser. A stranger visits the web site. It includes some great information about the cause and one call-to-action: Donate now.

Whoa, now, Fundraiser! Not so fast.

Let’s give Romeo a do-over:  The stranger is smiling at you, laughing at your jokes, making eye contact, enjoying your company. And then the call to action: “May I have your email. I’ll send you some pictures of my mountain climbing expedition I told you about…” Juliet is happy to oblige. Will she marry him? Maybe; maybe not. But he’s in the game.

Let’s give the fundraiser a do-over: The stranger visits the site, which has a “donate now” button, plus an offer for something of interest and value – a free report, a special gift, a subscription to a newsletter. Many who don’t want to donate now may raise their hands for the lower-risk offer. Will they donate eventually? Maybe; maybe not. But the fundraiser is in the game.

Courting is a process, not an event.  Every marketing message you create has three possible responses – yes, no, and maybe.

As Romeo demonstrated in his do-over, you have to give the maybes a reason to raise their hands, a reason to say, “Yes, I’ll take another step with you.” Otherwise, they have walked away and you have no chance to continue the courting process.

SmileTrain, a non-profit that provides surgery to repair cleft lips and palates, markets to the maybes on its web site (www.smiletrain.org). The web site has a “Donate Now” button near the top of the page, but the page also offers a free copy of SmileTrain’s award-winning documentary called Smile Pinki. Without that offer, the maybes who are not ready to donate will visit the site and leave. SmileTrain fundraisers would have no relationship with them.

You don’t need an award-winning film to market to the maybes.  What can you offer maybes that will entice them to raise their hands? Such offers should be in all of your marketing messages, not just your web site. Offering an email newsletter is a good start. But you must tout the benefits of subscribing (don’t just plop a signup box on your site with the heading “join our mailing list.”), and you must place the signup request in a prominent spot on your site.

Yogi Berra once said, “If people don’t want to come to the ballpark, how are you gonna stop them?”

I love that quote, and I think about it often as I work with clients on their marketing campaigns. In his charming, convoluted way, Yogi presented a very basic but essential marketing principle: It’s far easier to tap someone’s desire than to create desire in someone who doesn’t have it. If you want to fill the ballpark, identify and market to the baseball fans rather than trying to “stop” nonfans from choosing another option.

Email marketers often forget this principle. Email is inexpensive, easy to create and quick to deliver. That’s the problem. Because email is so easy, e-marketers often send everything to everybody. In other words, they send baseball promotions to people who don’t want to come to the ballpark.

The following case study – also from the sports world – demonstrates the point.

A small, Midwestern university wanted to promote its women’s basketball program. The women had a breakthrough season the year before, winning the conference championship, but the arena was nearly empty on most nights.

The athletic department had a list of 8,000 people, collected from booster club rosters, ticket order forms, website registrations, alumni lists and other sources. These people had opted in to receive information from the university, but the athletic department had no idea who they were.

The university sent several emails to the list, all covering multiple topics. Each email included sales promotions for women’s basketball. The emails weren’t working. In fact, they backfired. With each subsequent email, the open rate dropped and the opt-out rate grew.

The athletic department’s marketing director asked me to help. “How can I use this list to promote women’s hoops?” he asked.

Yogi’s quote echoed in my head.

“You have 8,000 people on that list, and I bet more than 7,000 have no interest in women’s hoops,” I said. “You can send them 100 emails, and it won’t help. If people don’t want to watch women’s basketball, you can’t force them.”

Worse still, if you continue to send mailing after mailing to people who don’t care about women’s basketball, those people will stop opening your emails and opt out from your list. Then you’ve lost the chance to promote other sports to them.

At first the marketing director heard only one thing: More than 7,000 people on your list won’t respond to your offer.

“I guess we shouldn’t use email then,” he said.

He was missing the point. He was like a gold rush pioneer looking at a river full of gold and thinking, “More than 90% of that riverbed is just worthless pebbles.”

But about 10% of that riverbed held gold. He just needed to find it.

“We need to find the people in your email list who like women’s basketball,” I said. “Then we can market aggressively to them without wasting time and effort selling to the others.”

We devised a plan. The university would send emails twice monthly to the entire list. Those emails would include short summaries about multiple sports: men’s basketball, women’s basketball, wrestling and others.

Each summary would not be a direct sales pitch, but each would include a link allowing the recipient to read more. For example, the women’s basketball summary might be a brief summary of upcoming games (or a recap of past games) with a link to the rest of the schedule (or to more news).

“But why don’t we just promote ticket sales directly in this email?” he asked.
“Because the goal of this email is not to sell tickets. The goal of this email is to find the prospects we’ll target,” I said.

If you ask people to “buy now” or “click to purchase,” they need to be in buying mode to act. You’re not offering them anything other than the transaction. If they’re not ready to buy, they won’t click. That’s fine if you’ve already identified your targets and plan to send promotions to them regularly.

But at this point you simply want people to raise their hands, to show you they’re interested in women’s basketball. You’re separating prospects from suspects. The sales will follow.

If you ask them to “read more” or “learn more,” you’re offering them something that has immediate value and involves little risk. Far more people will click these links than the “buy now” link.

We also planned to include a brief survey with the email. Among other questions, the survey asked which sports the readers followed. The list of checkboxes included, of course, women’s basketball.

The university began to send the general interest newsletter (with a survey included) to the list. Using the email software’s tools that automatically track who clicks which links and who checks which survey boxes, the marketing director identified roughly 900 people who were interested in women’s basketball. Those people either clicked the women’s basketball link in one of the emails or checked the box in the survey.

Over the next four months, the university sent weekly emails to the 900 people on the women’s basketball list. The emails included detailed game summaries (the local newspaper didn’t even include box scores for the games), player profiles and prominent ticket offers.

The results were great. On average, more than 60% of recipients opened each email (a great open rate for a weekly email). Over the four months of the campaign, only one person opted out of the list. (Meanwhile, the thousands who showed no interest in women’s hoops were not bombarded with weekly emails and consequently remained on the master list.)

Most important, ticket sales spiked. The university didn’t fill the arena, but attendance increased noticeably. Because it identified the 900 people out of 8,000 to target, the university was also able to create a print promotion. It would have been too expensive and inefficient to send that mailing to 8,000 people. But because it used email – and a low-risk call to action – to identify prospects, the university had a great list to help it focus the postal mail program.

So, in the end, the university heeded Yogi’s advice. Rather than “stopping” nonfans from ignoring women’s basketball, it found the real fans and marketed aggressively to them.

You can apply this lesson to any business, any industry. The music store that wants to clear its classical inventory can identify those who like classical music before selling to them. The nonprofit that wants to promote a planned giving program can find the people interested in planned giving before sending them more detailed information on this delicate topic. The pet store can separate dog lovers from cat lovers. And so forth.

To do this well, you must remember that each email serves a different purpose. Some emails are designed only to identify prospects. Others are designed to sell.

The following article appeared in the July 2009 issue of St. Louis Small Business Monthly

A friend of mine recently was on the verge of selling his small business, but the deal collapsed. The business was profitable and growing, and the prospective buyer liked the numbers. But the deal tanked when the prospect asked to see the customer list. When my friend replied that he had not been collecting emails and other contact information from most of his customers and prospects, the prospective buyer bolted.

The prospect knew that a business is only as good as its list. Sure, your business may be making money and even growing. But you limit your potential to grow your business if you do not have a good, clean, homegrown list of prospects, customers, and former customers.

Your most valuable asset is not your inventory, employees, or intellectual property; it’s your list—the herd of people with whom you can communicate regularly to sell your products and services.

Before you roll your eyes and say, “D’uh,” read the list-building checklist below. If you answer, “no” to any of the questions, you’re missing list-building opportunities that could drive your business forward.

* Do you collect contact information, including email, from every customer when they complete a transaction?
* Do you actively work to get additional information from people in your database for whom you have incomplete data? For example, if you have a customer’s postal address, but not email, are you doing anything to get that email?
* Does your website include a prominent form (or link to the form) on every page to collect visitors’ contact information?
* Does your advertising include direct calls-to-action that invite people to submit contact information to you? For example, all of our print advertisements direct readers to a page on our web site where they can sign up for marketing tips.
* When you send postal mail to customers and prospects, does it include a contact form they can return with updated contact information? Does it include direct calls-to-action that invite them to submit contact information online?
* Do you actively and perpetually ask existing clients for referrals?
* When you field phone calls from prospects or customers, do you collect their contact information?
* When you meet people directly—at networking events, parties, on airplanes, or through any other encounter—do you collect contact information?
* When you ask someone for contact information, do you explain what you will and won’t do with it?

Offer Value and Protect Privacy

The last question is key because it addresses how you ask for contact information. People are happy to share contact information with you if you offer them something of value and if they believe you won’t violate their privacy. When you ask someone for contact information, you should clearly state what they’ll get in return and how you’ll honor their privacy. That applies to existing customers, active prospects, and people you’ve just met.

I attended a networking event this morning, and this is what I said every time I asked for someone’s card:

“May I have your card? From time to time I’ll send you information to help you understand what we do, and I’ll also send you occasional marketing tips that will help your business. Even if you’re not actively shopping for the services we provide, I think you’ll find the emails valuable. And you can easily forward them to others who may need our services or might benefit from the information. You can opt-out of our email list at any time, and we will never share our list with others. We honor your privacy.”

Before the end of the day, I will send a personalized, trackable email to everyone whose card I collected. It will deliver what I promised—information about MarketVolt, interactive marketing tips, and a request for recipients to forward the email to others who might be interested. The email system will track who opens and clicks so I’ll be able to determine who has interest in particular products and services I mention in the message.

After we complete a sale and again following training sessions for new clients, we confirm their contact information and notify them that we will be contacting them regularly with how-to information, marketing tips, and other information that will enhance their experience.

What About Purchased Lists?

You may have read the list-building checklist above and thought, “That’s a lot of work. It’s much easier to just purchase a list.” Sure, it’s easy to purchase or rent a list of email addresses, but that doesn’t mean you should do it.

You may consider list purchase as a way to find leads, but you shouldn’t do it in lieu of building and working your list of existing clients, former clients, and known prospects.

If you add email list purchase to your lead acquisition strategy, tread carefully. People on many of the so-called “opt-in email lists” have no idea they’re on those lists. Such lists violate most anti-spam policies for internet service providers, spam filters, and email service providers so the computer that sends to such lists runs the risk of having future deliveries blocked.

If you want to use a third-party email list for lead acquisition, look for a vendor who will keep the list (you won’t see the addresses) and send the email for you—rather than one who will give you a file with the email addresses. Vendors who send the email for you usually have cleaner lists that have been built more ethically.