Better Sales through a Customer Email Lead List

If time has taught salespeople anything, it’s that communicating directly with your customer is the most effective and efficient way to generate a sale. Granted, casting a wide net with particular marketing strategies, such as a TV ad, can be a good way to get the word out, but when it comes to closing the deal, nothing beats focused communication appropriate for the customer at hand.

While not as powerful as a face-to-face conversation, email is a great way to leverage this direct contact marketing tactic. Because there are no geographical barriers online, thousands of addresses from all over the world can be gathered and, over time, each one can be contacted with a sales offering. In addition, because the recipient must volunteer this information, you know they’re interested in your ideas. As a result, email addresses are excellent customer leads.

So how does one go about generating a customer email lead list? Here’s a few ideas you might want to consider.

Prizes. Offer a free gift orservice upon sign up (or randomly draw a name from the list for something really neat, like an ipod). Providing an incentive can get some of the most skeptical to volunteer their real information (because, of course, you’ll need to contact them to send the gift). However, you’ll have less confidence that they’re actually interested in your offerings.
Co-registration. Find a partner company in a similar or related industry and trade registration forms. When someone signs up on your partner’s site, your sign-up form can appear next to theirs (and vice versa). In this way, you can capture contact information from people with an expressed interest in your industry (or closely related industry) in virtual locations you wouldn’t normally have access to.
Knowledge. Write a newsletter or series of articles and make it available over email. People that find what you write valuable will enroll in your email subscription. If you use a blog to share your writing, the Feedburner service Feedflare can take care of all of the heavy lifting for you (and you can even brand it with a SiphsMail account).
SiphsMail. If someone is sharing your site, the odds are good that they’re really interested in your offerings. Specifically, when someone uses SiphsMail to share your site, they are given the option to provide you with their email address. To our knowledge, we’re the first service providers to generate these kinds of leads for our clintele.

Just ask for it. A lot of people are willing to volunteer the information if you make it easy to do so. You might be surprised by the number of curious people that want to hear more from you in the future. Besides, it certainly doesn’t hurt to try.

Of course, there may be more creative ways you’ve come up with. If so, share away and let us know what we’ve missed.

June 21, 2008 |

Better Sales through a Customer Email Lead List

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