Provide Value In Every Email, Just As You Would In Every Sales Call

How do you attract and keep new email subscribers? It’s a challenge for every distribution marketing executive. And it’s a challenge fraught with paradox. One strategy marketing executives use for list growth is to purchase and upload third-party lists. This is something that is easy to do with SMP MarketPro; however, the quality of those third-party lists is often suspect. Even when a trusted vendor shares their list with you, how do you know if they have done the necessary list maintenance to keep a clean data file? What if uploading a third-party list lowers the deliver-ability of your entire list and puts you in jeopardy with the spam blockers? Even if the third-party list has quality addresses, you run the risk of offending the contacts on that list who feel they are getting email from you without getting to know you first.

When it comes to keeping hold of the contacts on your email lists, some distributors will actually cut down on the number of emails they send each month. This is understandable as many marketers feel that fewer emails means they are not abusing their lists. In reality, if your list is permission-based, you’re actually better off sending more emails, not less. Of course, that is only true if your emails are delivering real value to your contacts. Frequency does not necessarily reduce your retention rates for your email lists and sometimes frequency actually improves retention as your contacts have more interactions with you.

We think there are two better strategies for growing and maintaining your lists, integrating them with your sales activity and providing the same value you would provide in your sales calls.

When you run SMP you will have ways to automatically integrate your ERP, sales and marketing activities and data. At the most basic level, this means that your sales reps can be the most immediate arm of your list profiling activities. As they make their sales calls, they can help improve your data and grow your lists. This requires no extra effort than they would already make in their sales processes. When they add a new contact in your CRM data, your marketing team can automatically pick that contact up in a dynamically created list. The same holds true for product purchases and other profiling information. Your sales reps in the field will often ask important questions that will help your marketing team deliver more effective email campaigns. Your system will keep track of each sales interaction so that your emails will add value and be an extension of your sales communications.

In turn, this data helps you provide the same value of information in your emails that your sales reps deliver in their calls. SMP helps you maintain the corporate knowledge you need about buying habits, needs, product information and more so that you can deliver specifically targeted and valuable messages in each campaign. This specific targeting will make your customers feel like they are the most important customer in your business.

SMP provides you with online signup forms, surveys and auto-responders that make it easy for you to grow your lists. Think about the types of content that will add value to your customers’ businesses, not just promoting products. You could offer tips for running an HVAC contractor’s business, offer special incentives and events and help connect your customers to each other. There are many ways you can provide value to the contacts on your emails list that will help grow your list.