Many online businesses prefer to buy a generic list of email addresses to use for their email marketing campaign. True, there are advantages in opting for this purchase instead of creating a squeeze page and persuading people to sign up to your newsletter in your website.
The most obvious benefit is that you will be able to save a lot of time; you don’t have to wait for people to go to your website and sign up. You’ll also be able to save some money and effort in promotions. With a large list of email addresses, you can begin to start advertising directly to potential consumers, which is the main reason for its attractiveness to business owners who want to market their products and services online immediately.
However, buying a generic list of email addresses has some heavy disadvantages as well. The main disadvantage is that this list of addresses is, as mentioned already, generic. This list does not specifically contain the addresses of people who are part of your target market. One person might be very interested in teeth whitening, but the next one on your list could not care less.
Thus, purchasing a list of email addresses builds false hope about an increase in sales and customer response. It will only be a waste of your resources and, in many instances, may even cause your emails to be marked as dreadful spam.
This is why you are better off building your own mailing list. The best thing about doing this is that you are assured that your list, while small and takes a lot of time to build from scratch, contains the addresses of people who are already curious about the product or service that you’re selling. It is also cost efficient for what you set out to achieve.
Helpful tips on how to build your own email list
- Create a squeeze page asking for relevant information from your subscriber. You may even offer a free thank you gift to motivate people to sign up to your newsletter.
- You can give subscribers the option to choose which products or services that they want to be updated on in their newsletter. This saves them the bother of plodding through your email looking for information on the product that they’re actually interested in.
- For special sales or discounts, you can ask people to register at your website with their email addresses so they can access it. Even if there’s no special promo at the moment, you can reserve a VIP part in your website exclusive only to subscribers.
- You can also gather email addresses at offline events hosted by your company. You can ask visitors to register their name and email address on a sign-up sheet. For extra motivation, you can give away freebies or hold a raffle during the event.
- Implementing a survey can hit two birds with one stone: you get valuable information on what people want to see or change in your products, as well as get their email addresses.
