Back To The Future...Create A Digital Mailing List
Traditional marketing uses
direct mail strategies and a
mailing list. New marketing blends traditional with digital and web based marketing and the comparable strategy is
email marketing and a
digital mailing list.
As more business owners and marketers switch on to the internet to
grow their businesses, they often forget about the some of the Marketing 101 basics.
They attract new leads from people stumbling across their websites at one
end of the scale while at the other end, they adopt more advanced strategies like email marketing, SEO, paid visitors through banner ads
and pay per click ads (PPC), Social Media, online events, JV's,
affiliate marketing among others. Much of this is mumbo-jumbo
to many, but the intent is all the same; to drive traffic to your website.
A good
website will then have various Calls To Action in place to try and
convert some of this traffic or visitors into clients.
This can
be a great strategy, but on the surface, it fails in one of the most
basic of marketing realities. People do business with people. People
they trust and have built a relationship with.
So if you rely
solely on your website for your new leads you are going to be burning a
huge number of visitors to find the ones who will act
spontaneously...even though they do exist.
But you go to all this effort
and lose out on the opportunity to convert the
majority who are not spontaneous.
Build A Magnetic
Customer Contact Strategy
Did you know it can take 7-9
contacts with someone to build what marketers like to call "top of mind
awareness?" Up until then, the contact doesn't know you, much less trust
you. So how are you going to do business with them if they never get to know you?
Traditional marketing
involves advertising, but smart marketers and business owners learned that if you built a list and crafted sales letters with offers in
them to mail to the people on this list, that they could generate more
sales and repeat sales.
They could create a customer for life.
And this had a big impact on creating long term sustainable, profitable
and valuable businesses.
Well why not take this thinking into the
digital or internet world also?
Email Marketing...It Requires A Digital Mailing List
Make
an interesting and valuable offer for visitors to your website in exchange
for their email address (letting them know that you intend emailing them
from time to time) and start building your Digital Mailing List.
Do
exactly the same stuff that traditional marketers have done forever,
just in a digital environment.
This may seem obvious to you, but the vast majority of websites don't have any mechanism to allow a visitor to showing interest. In effect those websites are just billboards that
people are driving past without slowing down to have a look. Or in another way, it is like window shopping when the shops are shut...very frustrating!
This Blog Article is an example of what I am talking about.
I originally wrote this article to send to the SMI Digital mailing list. It was sent with a view to providing readers with some valuable tips to help you
grow your business or perform better in your job. And also to build a
relationship so that one day, when the timing is right for you, you
will think of
SMI Digital, put your hand
up and say "hey, you guys seem to know what your talking about, I am
interested...".
So think about your web strategy, are you
building a list of prospects; of future clients?
What if the
traffic to your website stopped tomorrow?
If you have a prospect list...so
what! You can still market to them and make new sales.
Its
insurance for your business, let alone a damn good business growth
strategy. So what are you waiting for?
SMI Digital can assist with both strategies and email marketing systems. Have a closer look...
Email Marketing.