It’s where the value of your business is!
A lot goes on behind the scenes besides simply building an email. Maintaining your database is incredibly important. Having communicated consistently with your customers will add an extra multiplier or five when you come to sell your business.
The old marketing adage that it’s easier to keep and sell to an existing customer is true. However, it’s so often the case that businesses just don’t appear to believe it and in the rush to get new customers neglect their existing ones.
Regularly sending emails to your customer list helps keep the database fresh and customers engaged with your content.
We suggest sending emails at least monthly [UPDATE 2020: weekly might work better for you] and sticking to a schedule. This consistency will help create user habits so they’ll come to expect your email at the time you said you would send it.
Keep in mind they might not always read your email. But being there in the inbox still registers with people and when they need you, there you will be!
For infrequent sends to less active lists there is a risk of people marking you as spam, simply because they forgot they even signed up. That happens more often than you might think and in some cases we’ve had to start from scratch to keep within the Anti-Spam Act.
Growing Your Database
Collecting emails has to become part of the culture of your business and at every touchpoint, you should be saying, “We send an awesome newsletter, have you got an email address we can send it too?”
You could collect contacts in-store with a simple form or note pad that people can write on and give you permission to email them. Collecting email addresses online through the sign up forms or popups makes things easier for you as they are added to your list automatically. You can welcome them and give them an incentive to purchase from you.
Run competitions where entry is via email if you have an event take a signup form. Signup forms work best if you have something to offer as an incentive for signing up, this way it’s a trade between you and customer.
Here’s a link to a great example where we helped grow and email list by 3,000% over a weekend.
Pro tip: If people aren’t opening your emails, target these people with a re-engagement campaign to get them back onboard.
Action
Think of a plan to increase database size. This could be running a competition that requires an email address to enter, a link to share an offer or social ads with a clear single-minded purpose.
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