Email marketing is one of the most popular mechanisms used by marketers worldwide. For the strategy to be successful, you need relevant email ids of the right contact persons in the companies that you are targeting. What can you do to get organized with your lists.
Most companies face challenges in getting this right and resort to buying new lists, which usually are not highly accurate. This also leads to other problems like higher bounce rates or blacklisting by your IP service provider.
How do you get organized with your lists ?
1) Validate archive lists
Each organization has several sales people who join in, with experience from several past employers. They typically have archive lists which they have used in the past. One of the first steps you can do is to gather these lists together and then get into detailed research to validate the contacts and their contact information in these archive lists. Typically contacts change, but companies will still form a part of your target market, so identifying new contacts will help you make these archive lists usable. Getting started with successful email marketing campaigns
2) Append Event lists
A lot of organizations attend trade events with the sole purpose of collecting additional target market lists. Most trade event organizers though do not give out lists with email Ids. To add to problems, several trade event organizers also give out printed attendee lists, which makes it difficult to use them. One of the approaches is to use secondary research and get these lists appended with the right contact information including email addresses, so that these lists are usable in your marketing programs.
3) Fresh List building
As you define demographics for your target market, it is usually easy to get to company names that will meet your criteria. The difficult part is to get the right contacts and their contact information. Using secondary research and commonly available social and web tools, it is possible to generate these contact lists for your marketing programs.
4) Setting Up Your Email Opt-in Box across your digital channels
As you promote content, make it simple for people to fetch content using data forms. Also maintain email opt-ins across your digital channels so that you can build a relevant list.
If you want to get organized with your lists, several times, it involves intense manual activity, but across our client engagements, we have seen that it can easily result in expanding your reach by over 5 times very quickly.