Collecting email addresses, and more importantly segmenting email addresses, should in all likelihood be one of your primary goals as a business operator. But “Why?” you ask, “Why must I spend all this time sorting email addresses when, as a human, I am naturally lazy?”
1. They’re already your customers
You could have thousands of customers, sitting there twiddling their thumbs effectively waiting for you to sell them things. If you’ve got their email you can keep in front of their eyes and in the front of their mind, offering them products or services they’re interested in until they buy again…and again…
2. Segment and sell
Do you know which of your customers are interested in that new product you’ve just sourced? No? Well if you’ve collected emails and effectively segmented them according to purchasing history, demographics and content consumption then you have a pretty good idea who will love the product and encourage them to buy it. Segment and you can sell people what they want, when they want it.
3. It’s easy to set up and go
No, you don’t have to phone up everybody and ask them to give you their email address. Simply set up email collection prompts across the content you’re producing (email collection is likely to be a primary KPI of your content production) that pump emails directly into your email provider, and use marketing automation tools to automatically ask for and segment emails. Once it’s setup you just let in run and see your email list bulge!
4. You can target them on Facebook and other sites!
Did you know you can connect your email provider and lists (Mailchimp, ConstantContact etc.) directly to Facebook and some other social and content platforms and serve ads or promoted content to them? Using their email details you can connect to their social profile and promote yourself and your services while they’re browsing their newsfeed. Using email-based remarketing you can gain visibility far outside of just emails!
5. Sweet mother of Mary you can target people like them on Facebook!
It doesn’t stop at just remarketing to the people in your email lists; the amazing demographic targeting that Facebook have been steadily working on means you can target ads or promoted content to ‘lookalike’ audience who are similar to your existing customers or subscribers. Facebook is basically doing a huge chunk of the marketing work for you and is letting your advertise directly to the closest demographics to your known existing customers. Feel the power!
