To build any marketing campaign, prospective leads/ contacts are very important. It is an important practice for businesses, especially for start-ups to reach their potential customers, send out the information or invite them to visit the website or page. Just like any other strategy, you can pick either easy-and-risky or hard-and-valid ways to acquire your contacts.
There are 3 major ways used by the marketing companies to obtain email contacts.
Statistically, they are neither your customers, nor the prospects that conveyed interest in your products/ service. It’s just a bunch of contacts what you are using to shoot in dark. The odds of finding the recipients that would show interest is very less, almost none. Here are some possible consequences of using bought or rented data for marketing.
Relevance & Quality Level: Questionable.
Most of the times, the email list providers just gather data from different sources, merge them and make huge lists of contacts and sell them as batches. Filtering them by active users, incomplete data, geographical location, interests, etc. is almost impossible. For a lot of them, your email is just an invitation from an unknown person. You know for such invitations, response cannot be guaranteed.
Possibility Of Being Marked Spam.
When the receiver never opted-in for the subscription of your emails or doesn’t find the information relevant/ required, the email will definitely be pushed in to trash or marked spam or least cases ignored and left alone. Either of them is of no use for you. Plus, once being marked spam, the certainty of your domain will be questionable. It is even illegal in a few countries to send unsolicited emails to unsubscribed recipients. Finding yourself on the wrong side of such legal regulations can have serious financial consequences as well as a negative impact on your IP reputation and eventually on your business.
Your Competitors Might Be Using Same List.
If there is a huge contact list available for sale, don’t you think your competitors would want to give it a shot too? Say you have a few prospects in the bought data, there is a fair chance that they are looking at similar emails from other contenders too. You are not the only one in the game though! If it’s too many emails from different companies about a product/ service they are not interested in, they can filter the category and abandon all the emails and mark them spam.
Not Approved By Many Marketing Service Providers.
If too many of the emails sent by you are marked spam, the Email Marketing Service providers might close your account and some will have rights to take legal actions for practicing Spam using their platform. So, while being desperate to run an affordable email marketing, you might end up paying more. It’s best suggested to discuss your strategies of acquiring data with your marketing experts before buying the contacts.
Growing an opt in Email list: How-to?
According to recent surveys of comparing ROIs from different channels, it is summarized that Email Marketing is still the most effective way to reach potential customers that social media (Though that depends up on many parameters such as your business type and prospect customers). It is always best to organically grow your own data by asking the customers to opt in for subscription. Here are a few ways to do so.
Subscription Box.
Don’t just fit the subscription box in some corner to save space your info and products display. Collecting data is important too. Place it distinctly in every page at a visible place on your website. Design it well to grab attention at least till you get some decent number of leads.
Lead Magnet.
Lead magnet is a something that you offer your target audience that is worth their time. It could be journals, informational videos, guides, e-books, worksheets or widget. NOT sales material. The audience will be interested to get subscribed for such goods and that makes your job to collect data, easy. Once your lead magnet is in their inbox, it’ll be easy to track their interest in your product, behaviour on website and many other to plan your further campaigns.
Pop-up Prompts.
If you have no such lead magnets to offer, you can design tools such as prompt dialogue box asking the visitors to put in their email ID and respective details. You can plan and make sure the prompt appears each time someone opens your website. It could be just a subscription box or a login/ signup option.
Attractive & Engaging Content.
Irrespective of business model, content designing helps you gain the attention and trust of customers for a long time. Design your site with user engaging content and quick responsive interface to inspire the visitors to subscribe themselves.
Reputable Email Service Provider.
Do a little R&D and sign up to the Email Service Provider that is best for you. From segregating contacts to, designing email templates to tracking recipients’ behaviour, ESP plays a huge role in acquiring relevant and sustaining list of contacts. So rather than choosing the easy way to buy/ rent the email list and hitting the rock bottom later, start building your own contact list and obtain viable business. Happy Marketing!
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