Last week, in an e-mail marketing training I taught, I was talking about permission e-mail marketing and what it implies, that's grow your own home list. One of the main concerns people had is that going this way it's going to take ages to grow a good list. And that's true: it is a hard and long-time task that deserves all your attention and care.

The first temptation everyone experiments is to google a little bit in order to find a way to buy a list from someone else. That's a very bad idea.

There are a lot of reasons for not doing that, but the main is that - ethics and law apart- for the same reason you can buy it, anyone else can buy it too. So, there is no control over who can send mail to the list and how many times. Does it sound familiar to you? Yes, that's plain spam.

One typical list has an obsolescence rate that ranges from 15 to 30% in a year. That means that if the list you buy is one year old and it has 100.000 e-mails in it, you will probably get some 20.000 or more bounced mails when you use it. And probably it will be older and unusable.

Besides, these lists are normally made by e-mail spiders. These are special applications that sniff web pages in search of e-mail addresses. A lot of web pages have "honey pot" addresses. They are in the HTML code of the page, but they're not visible for the visitors, only to the e-mail spiders. When someone sends an e-mail to this "honey pots" the sender is added to a black list and is considered a spammer, because the only way that you may know this address is by using an illegal e-mail collector. So, if you use a list that, no doubt, will have several of this "honey pot" addresses you'll end up in a lot of black lists out there, damaging forever your reputation and your deliverability.

So the moral is: Grow your own permission list. It's hard and it takes time, but is a guarantee of quality, legitimacy and good practices. In this case less is more. Never ever buy or download an e-mail list. And if you do, please don't use MAILCast for your e-mailings :-(

While operators in Europe and the US are struggling to get customers to switch over to 3G devices to make better use of the infrastructure, Japan comes out and says that for the first time in history they've sold absolutely 0 second generation devices (read this article at AFP).

This is very interesting to me. I'm always telling everyone that the use of mobile phones that we do here in Europe and the States is already very simple, and we are not taking this devices to their real potential. I envision that in a few years from now mobile phones will be in fact much more: your own small Personal Computer, in the sense that they will be our main and only computer. They will be contstantly connected to the Internet through high speed networks and Wimax, we will have our files on the cloud, small folding flexible screens for using on the go, and we can just enter our office or home (or anywhere), plug the device on some kind of docking station and start working the usual way.

In a world like that (which is nearer than you may think) SMS will have no sense as a marketing mean. In fact in Korea and Japan SMS have dissapear several years ago and they use only e-mail (check this at iSchool Research, and this at Huawei.com).

E-mail marketing use only can increase :-)

I've always stressed the importance of a home grown list, done with care and tenacity.

The growing of this kind of list, as harder as it can get, must be done in the right way: one that complies with Law and that make our would-be subscribers confident about us and our brand.

One simple way used by many marketers for quickly growing a list is what is called opt-out subscription. With this method they simply gather e-mail addresses from anywhere (commercial trade shows, the Internet, every kind of contact they make...) and add them to their list. If the recipient it's not willing to receive more e-mail from you they have the option to unsubscribe anytime. Although this is a method accepted by many companies, it's not very advisable. Many people, angry or simply not recognizing your brand, will mark the e-mail as spam causing harm to your brand (and your send reputation). In fact this is a kind of unsolicited e-mail and you could be fairly considered a spammer, and in some countries (in Spain, for example) if you send more than three e-mails in one year to a recipient without consented permission you could face important fines. 

Another way to get someone subscribed to your list is single opt-in subscription. In this case the recipients go to your webpage and use a sing-up form to enter their e-mail address. Automatically they're added to your list and start sending your messages. This is a better approach but has a lot of potential problems:

· You're not ensuring that the e-mail address entered is correct. One single character mistyping is enough.

· You have no way to check that the person who is subscribing is the owner of the address. This can lead to very bad situations such as you contributing to "mail bombing" operations (someone get subscribed to many e-mail lists by other person).

· Your list can be poisoned by malicious competency or by a cracker just for fun. This consists on adding to your list several spam-trap e-mail addresses. When you send e-mail to them you could end up in several black-lists without even noticing. Very bad situation :-(
· False subscriptions of people who only want to get to your content but are not willing to give you a real address in exchange.

A variant of this method is called notified single opt-in. This is simply the same as the previous case but sending a notification e-mail to the new subscriber. If she doesn't want to receive your e-mail she can automatically unsubscribe by clicking on a link. This don't avoid many of the problems I've just spotted, so I don't recommend it either.

The best way to grow your list is by using double opt-in or confirmed opt-in. With this method your new subscribers don't get added to the list until they confirm their subscription clicking in a link in an immediate e-mail they receive. In this way you are sure that the address is correct and that the new subscriber is willing to receive your e-mails. This is the best way to go, although it is not without problems if you don't have the right tool to automate the process.

Fortunately MAILCast has built in capacities in order to customize your subscription process, letting you chose the exact way you want to go.

In a future post I'll show you how to automatically handle and customize the subscription and un-subscription process with MAILCast.

If you’re interested in e-mail marketing, probably you’re also interested in web analytics. Remember that high quality traffic in your site is the first step to build a great database for your newsletter.

Google analytics, one of the best  free web analytics systems, has recently added a new optional feature (currently in beta): benchmarking. Now you can share your analytics (remaining anonymous) and benchmark your site with the rest of your competitors:

From Analytics Blog:

Industry benchmarking is a commonly requested new service that enables customers to see how their site data compares to sites in any available industry vertical. We believe this data will provide actionable insights by providing context for users to understand how their site is doing. For example, if you have a travel website and you get a spike in traffic on Mondays, you may want to know whether other travel sites get that same spike on Mondays.

How to activate it: Click on “Benchmarking”  in the section “Visitors” and go!.

One barrier that many small companies have to confront when they consider starting a newsletter -or any other e-mail based strategy- is the lack of a good recipients' list.  "We have few customers" or "We don't have the e-mail addresses of our customers" are the main concerns they usually have.

Well, the fact that you don't have any e-mails is a problem. In fact it is a catch 22 problem: you don't start a mail strategy because you don't have a good list, and you don't maintain a good list because you are not using e-mail at all.

However, e-mail customer relationship, marketing, or customer retention need long-term strategies. So, the fact is that, if you don't start building your list right now you'll never have a list at all.

There are a lot of ways to proactively start growing a good e-mail list, and buying a database is not among them (they are very inaccurate and, in most cases, even illegal).

Ways to grow your list

Try to maintain a good (I mean: with a lot of added value) newsletter and promote it as hard as you can: in envelopes, business cards, brochures... and ask people to sign in or send you their e-mail in order for you to subscribe them.

Slowly but surely, make e-mail your main and natural way to communicate with customers. Just not use it for marketing or newsletters. Start sending your invoices by e-mail. Notify your customers by e-mail about product availability, order confirmations, product deliveries, and so on. This way they'll get used to receive e-mail from you, and will be more receptive to your information through this means.

Get as many e-mails as you can from your current customers. You can ask for their e-mails when you talk to them on the phone or in commercial visits. Ask for it in your paper-based communications too (ex.: invoices).

Ask for their e-mail to the visits that get into your facilities. For example, if you have a shop, inform the visitors about the existence of your newsletter or the value-added services you can offer them by e-mail (ex: product availability notifications, catalog updates...).

Of course, put a subscription box to your newsletter on your website. Make it easy to subscribe (but comply with law offering double opt-in, more on this on next posts). If you make it even easier to unsubscribe in case they don't want to keep receiving your mail, the will be less wary about subscribing in the first place.

Another fantastic way of getting a lot of e-mails at once is by arranging a contest or competition. A good place to start is in business events or conventions. If you have a stand there, collect names and e-mails from visitors and offer several prizes. They not have to be very costly, and can be your own products. Notify the visitors that they e-mails are going to be used only to send them your newsletter and that is very easy to unsubscribe if they're not interested later. You can arrange this kind of competitions in your shop or in your website. They are an effective way to grow your list of people interested in your products or services.

Once you start your strategy in a sustainable way your list will grow fast.

Today I've just stepped into a real cool banner ad in a geek-page that I think it deserves a post.

Peter Blum, according to his web page, is a web control programmer that, after many years building UIs for commercial Windows and Macintosh applications, started to develop and sell commercial products on his own. Its company is a one-person one. Peter creates the documentation and provides the tech support. And he has no complex about it.

In fact, he does his own marketing too.

He has setup a real effective banner campaign based on "sincerity". Take a look at his banner:

It's real cool. I especially like the frame that puts an arrow pointing to the "Corny call to action" :-D

And I bet he's getting good results. Guerrilla marketing once again!

Visit Peter Blum's webpage. I think he's got to enhance the landing page, but I like the real cool and funny banner.