Email Marketing Databases
Email marketing is a very good way of making money online, but it can only work if one knows just how to optimize their operations. If you have or intend to start an electronic commerce site on which you do email marketing, one thing that you have to be very proficient at is the art of maintenance of email marketing databases. Though this may seem like a technical endeavor, it's very easy to do this and all it takes is a little organization and foresight.
What is an email marketing database?
Email marketing databases are basically records of people with whom you have a potential for doing business. Electronic commerce is usually done via email, so the email marketing databases contain primarily email addresses of prospective customers, together with other details such as names. By keeping such a database, you have a record of the people who have previously demonstrated an interest in your product in the past, and therefore who make prime targets for email marketing. The problem, however, is building this kind of database. Just like with everything else in life, one normally has very humble beginnings when starting email marketing databases, so you shouldn’t expect miracles to happen overnight. You will have to work to build your database.
How do you obtain records for a database you start?
When you start email marketing, you initially start with a database that contains no records. However, with time such email marketing databases should grow gradually. There are several ways in which you can do this. The most common of these are:
- Buying databases from online vendors. Some online companies specialize in selling email information for prospective clients. Though this is a very easy way to build your database (as you get a large number of records at once), the problem with it is that many times, the addresses that you get may not be very valuable as most of them won’t be interested in your product. Unless you ask the vendor to sell you records of people who are interested in your products only, you might end up buying generic information that is not very valuable.
- Ask users to sign up as an incentive to get something from your site. If for example you are selling books, you could provide a free book for users. However, the caveat to this would be that they would have to sign up with their email to get the book. In this way, you get the details of a person who is interested in books, and you can make a sales pitch for books to him later
- Collecting email addresses from people in areas such as business fairs and conventions.