The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing E-Book

Eric Groves

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 284

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

The leading email marketing firm shows you how to create high-impact, low-cost campaigns Email marketing is an incredibly cost-effective way to establish and build relationships that drive business success. But, it can also be a challenge because the inbox is a hostile environment. Whether your email is noteworthy--or an annoying waste of your customer's time--depends on your ability to stick to stick the fundamentals of good marketing and authentic relationship building. The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing presents best practices and relationship-building principles from America's leading email marketing firm. With over 280,000 small business and non-profit clients, Constant Contact is constantly testing and learning what works and what doesn't, and it's all here. There's no other email guide on the market that provides this level of comprehensive, practical guidance. Whether you're starting your own small business or need to grow on a shoestring budget, this book will get you up to speed fast. Learn about: * Ten email pitfalls that will get your business into trouble * Ten things your customers expect you to do * The "soft" benefits of email marketing * Using email in combination with other marketing efforts * How four types of permissions can make or break your strategy * Building an email list that is valuable and effective * Creating valuable content * Choosing an effective, professional email format * Ensuring your emails are delivered, opened, and read With The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing, you'll learn to avoid the common mistakes of email marketing, give your customers content they love, and combine an effective email marketing strategy with your traditional marketing efforts--giving you way more bang for your marketing buck.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 - The 40 “Know It or Blow It” Rules of Email Marketing

Ten Keys to Your Overall Email Marketing Success

Ten Things Your Customers Expect You to Do

Ten Ways to Get Your Business in Trouble with Email

Ten Reasons to Use an Email Marketing Service Provider

Chapter 2 - The Power of Email Relationships

Building Customer Relationships with the Constant Contact Cycle

Four Examples and Rewards of Running a Relationship Business

Chapter 3 - Making Money: The Economics of Email

How to Maximize the Return on Your Email Marketing Dollars

Reaping the Soft Benefits of Email Marketing

Chapter 4 - The Benefits of Permission-Based Email Marketing

Is Your Email Glamorous or Spam-orous?

Adhering to the CAN-SPAM Act

How Four Types of Permission Can Make or Break Your Strategy

Chapter 5 - Building a Quality Email List

Finding Places to Make Valuable Connections

Mapping Out Your Connection Points

Tips for Maximizing Email Address Collection

Chapter 6 - Making Your Email List More Valuable

Strike While the Iron Is Hot

Increasing the Value of a List over Time

Chapter 7 - The Three Rules of Valuable Email Content

Rule 1: Work Off a Plan

Rule 2: It’s Not About You

Rule 3: Choose a Variety of Sources for Your Content

Chapter 8 - Creating Email Content That Leads to Action

Tying Email Content to Your Objectives

Writing Great Email Content

Calling for Action with Your Email Content

Inserting Action Links in Your Emails

Chapter 9 - Looking Professional: Choosing an Effective Email Format

Determining Content-Appropriate Formats

Branding Emails Consistently

Ten Email Formats Every Business Should Know About

Chapter 10 - Making Introductions: Subject Lines, From Lines, and Frequency

Email From Lines: Do I Know You?

Subject Lines: Do I Care?

Email Frequency and Length: Do I Have Time?

Chapter 11 - Email Filters and Other Delivery Challenges

Email Filtering, Bouncing, and Blocking

Maximizing Delivery: Nontechnical Issues

Maximizing Delivery: Technical Issues

Chapter 12 - Tracking and Improving Email Campaigns

Why Tracking Is Important for Building Relationships

How Tracking Works

What to Do About Tracking Data

Chapter 13 - Collecting More Feedback with Surveys

The Benefits of Ongoing Feedback

How to Ask the Right Questions

Four Key Places to Collect Feedback

Chapter 14 - Getting Beyond the Inbox

Creating and Managing an Email Archive

The Benefits of an Email Archive

About the Author

About Constant Contact

Index

Copyright ©2009 by Constant Contact, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at [phone], outside the United States at [phone] or fax [phone].

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

The Constant Contact guide to email marketing/Constant Contact, Inc.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-0-470-61528-7

1. Internet marketing. 2. Electronic mail systems. I. Constant Contact, Inc.

II. Title: Guide to email marketing.

HF5415.1265.C658 2009

658.8’72-dc22

2009021637

Acknowledgements

At Constant Contact it always starts and finishes with our customers, without whom I would have very little to write about. To all of those customers who have shared with me and my colleagues at Constant Contact their knowledge and experiences, I extend my most grateful thanks.

A special thank you to John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Senior Editor Richard Narramore, who quickly caught onto Constant Contact’s passion to educate small businesses and organizations on the power of email marketing and supported us endlessly in our pursuit to bring this book to market. Thanks to the other members of our team at Wiley: Ann Kenny and Kate Lindsay. They helped me navigate the steps as a first-time author.

To Matt Wagner of Fresh Books Literary Agency for guiding us through this great opportunity and working tirelessly to bring this book to fruition.

To the people of Constant Contact, who strive every day to revolutionize the success formula for small businesses and organizations, a piece of what I have learned from all of you is embedded within every page of this book. To Gail Goodman, Bob Nault, Tom Howd, Ellen Brezniak, Bob Nicoson, John Walsh, Steve Wasserman, Dan Richards, and Nancie Freitas, thanks for your leadership. And to the entire Constant Contact Global Market Development Team, a special thanks for the inspiration you provide me on a daily basis.

A special word of thanks to John Arnold for coaching me through the process, expanding my words, assembling the pieces, and driving this project to completion.

Thanks also to Constant Contact’s partners, including SCORE, SBDCs, and Chambers of Commerce, that support us in our mission to educate every small business or organization that wants to understand the Power of Relationships.

And last, to my wife Tracy and my children Madeline and Mitchell for all of their support and encouragement as I toiled away in the office writing this book.

1

The 40 “Know It or Blow It” Rules of Email Marketing

Email marketing is an amazingly cost-effective way to build relationships that drive business success. In today’s challenging economic times, this cost advantage makes email marketing arguably the most powerful tool for building any business.

But the main advantage of email marketing is not cost. Email is simply the most effective way to stay in touch with most of your customers. If you’re like many businesses, the 2009 recession forced you to hunker down and focus on driving business and sales from those most likely to buy—people you already have a relationship with—and that’s what email marketing is all about.

Email marketing is powerful, but it’s also a challenge because the inbox is a hostile environment. Whether your email is noteworthy or not-worthy depends on your ability to stick to the fundamentals of authentic relationship building with your customers. That’s what this book is about—how to use email to build long-lasting customer relationships.

Over the years, we at Constant Contact have made it our mission to collect, create, refine, and share email marketing best practices with our customers. We’re proud to now share these with you in this book—strategies that have contributed to the success of hundreds of thousands of businesses around the globe. On a daily basis we interact with thousands of business owners and non-profits just like you on the phone, online via webinars, and in person at live seminars held throughout the United States. These interactions provide us with regular feedback and fascinating lessons on the rapidly evolving world of email marketing.

Here are some examples of small businesses and non-profits who have discovered a broad range of benefits of email marketing:

“We track all of our participants and have found that more than 53% of them found out about us through the Internet or our email newsletter. Email marketing is only a fraction of the cost of print ads and it brings in a phenomenal ROI.”

—Girls Learn to Ride

“I can’t believe the number of people who walk into our restaurants and redeem coupons. Before I tried email marketing, I would put a coupon in the local newspaper—but fewer than 10 people would redeem it. I then put the same coupon in an email and sent it to 400 people. I saw 100 email coupons redeemed that month!”

—Fajita Grill

“For our 35th anniversary, we sent a ‘save the date’ email to 3,000 people. At 42 cents a stamp, that would be over $1,000 worth of postage we’ve saved from just one mailing.”

—Women Employed

“Most of all, email marketing has helped us stay connected, build community, and inspire people.”

—Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta

“Our revenue from return customers has increased about 30% since we began sending out our ‘New Arrivals’ email campaign. We’ve found that a number of customers who have never purchased from us before will buy after we send out an email campaign.”

—Bijoux Mart International

I know the email strategies in this book work because I have personally taught them to thousands of small business owners and watched the results. Constant Contact’s success is directly attributable to the fact that we have helped so many of them grow their organizations. In addition, I used these same email strategies to help build Constant Contact from an unknown technology startup into an industry-leading public company. When I arrived in 2001, we had 10 customers and roughly $100 a month in revenue. Now, we are the largest provider of email marketing services for small- to medium-sized businesses, with 300,000 customers in 120 countries and 500+ employees. I hope you’ll find a path to greater business success in the pages that follow.

Since this book is for busy leaders who don’t have a lot of time, I’ve decided to use Chapter 1 to summarize all the email marketing success fundamentals contained in this book, so you can quickly decide which of your own email practices need immediate attention.

The rest of the book will help you build a comprehensive email marketing strategy for your business.

Ten Keys to Your Overall Email Marketing Success

If you learn nothing else from this book, I recommend you master the following ten principles. Most of the statistics that suggest high returns on email marketing investment depend on how closely you adhere to these basics.

1. Only send email to people who know you. People open email from people they know, and they delete email from people they don’t recognize or mark it as spam. It doesn’t even matter what’s legal or ethical. If your business makes a habit of emailing total strangers, then your reputation, your budget, and your growth will suffer for it. You can read about building a good email list in Chapter 5.

2. Don’t treat email addresses like email addresses; treat them like relationships. An email address is one of the most personal things someone can share with your business because it’s an invitation to send your messages to a place where he or she sends and receives personal communications as well as business ones. Email doesn’t work if it feels like a computer-generated HTML document. It has to come across as being part of a meaningful relationship. You can read about building relationships in Chapter 2.

3. Send relevant content that has value to your recipient. You probably weren’t going to send irrelevant, valueless content on purpose, but content with good intentions isn’t the same thing as value and relevance. In order to ensure that your emails are valuable and relevant, you have to know exactly what your audience wants. You have to be a good listener to be a good communicator. You can find more about creating relevance and value in your content in Chapter 7.

4. Engage your audience in the content you write. This requires attention-grabbing subject lines, clear headlines, and thoughtful content. You can read about what makes email content engaging in Chapter 7.

5. Maximize your delivery rate. Getting email delivered is harder than you might think. Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) such as Yahoo!, AOL, and Hotmail work diligently to block emails from unwanted senders. If your email isn’t up to professional standards in reputation, technology, or permission, you might as well be sending your email directly to the junk folder. You can read about maximizing delivery in Chapter 11.

6. Don’t share email lists with anyone. Your email list is a valuable asset. It will lose value if you loan it to someone else because the people on your list won’t recognize a foreign sender. You should never borrow an email list from someone else. That list is full of people who aren’t familiar with your business, and you

Figure 1.1 Avoiding the junk folder is one of the keys to successful email marketing.

are likely to attract more enemies than friends. You can read about protecting your email list in Chapter 6.

7. Set expectations with your recipients. When someone signs up to receive your email communications, they do so with the expectation of receiving something of value. If you don’t communicate clearly what that value is, your audience will draw their own conclusions. Tell your audience what you’ll be sending and how often you’ll be sending it. That way, you’ll defeat any value, relevance, and frequency objections before your audience even signs up. You can read more about setting expectations in Chapter 4.

8. Look professional whenever you communicate. If you’re a salesperson, you know how to dress for success. Similarly, if you’re an email, you need to look familiar, inviting, and consistent. You can read more about creating an email with a friendly professional identity in Chapter 9.

9. Be ready to respond. Email communications can be highly automated, in an off-putting way that distances you from your customers. Don’t set an email auto reply in your in-box and take a mental vacation. Keep an eye on your communications and your responses so you can take action, make changes, and repeat positive results. You can read more about responding to your emails in Chapter 12.

10. Regularly review your campaign results. The longer you practice marketing the more you realize how unpredictable your results will be if you don’t analyze your past and make adjustments based on your data. Use email tracking reports to help you improve, progress, and grow. You can read about email tracking reports in Chapter 12.

Ten Things Your Customers Expect You to Do

Figure 1.2 Professional looking emails reinforce your brand and identity.

Most marketing failures happen because the business worries more about what to expect from its customers than what its customers expect from the company. The problem is, it’s not easy to know exactly what your customers expect. You have to ask them constantly, and you have to believe them, which is even harder than asking. Here’s what Constant Contact has learned about meeting customer expectations when it comes to email marketing. Your customers expect you to:

1. Protect them. Storing data in a secure environment is critical, but that’s not all there is to privacy. You need a privacy policy, and you need to be sensitive to the amount of intrusion you cause your customers. You can read more about privacy in Chapter 4.

2. Know them. Your customers don’t lack information, they lack personalized relevant information. You don’t need to know every detail about your customers, but you have to make them feel like you know them so you can target your communications to their interests. You can find out how to determine what your customers want you to know about them in Chapter 5.

Figure 1.3 Give your subscribers a link to your privacy policy.

3. Help them. Email is noise when it doesn’t solve a problem or leave the recipient better off than she was before reading the email. To be successful at email marketing, your emails have to help save time, money, and angst. You can read more about helpful email content in Chapter 7.

4. Promise them. Your business makes promises, regardless of whether you intend to. When you send out a message that describes your products or services, someone has to believe it in order to buy it. When someone believes you, it’s a promise you need to keep if you want to keep that customer. When someone subscribes to your email list, you have also made a promise to send only what the subscriber believes he will receive. You can read more about making promises and sending only what you promised in Chapter 4.

5. Respond to them. Email is a two-way form of communication. Your audience wants you to respond when they interact with your emails. They can reply, click, block, unsubscribe, and forward your emails, and every form of response deserves an appropriate follow up from you. You can read more about responding to email interaction in Chapter 12.

6. Teach them. People make more educated decisions than they used to because there is so much information available. Consumers want to justify their purchase decisions with good information, and emails are perfect for delivering quality information in a concise format. You can read about creating good email content that makes your audience smarter in Chapter 7.

7. Grab them. Email inboxes are crowded with messages because of spam and because people subscribe to a lot of email lists. Most people don’t have time to read all the emails they receive, and they want someone to help them prioritize the information in their inbox. Your emails have to grab attention and deliver your message clearly. You can read more about grabbing your audience’s attention in Chapter 7.

Figure 1.4 Ask your email subscribers to share their interests.

8. Ask them. It’s just as classy to ask for your customer’s permission to start periodic emailing as it is to ask your girlfriend’s parents to start dating. It’s old-fashioned, effective, and will probably make you look better than your competition. You can read more about asking for permission in Chapter 4.

9. Give them options. Your audience isn’t likely to simply respond to an offer to “Join Our Email Blast.” You need to give people choices so they can choose the information they want to receive and make changes when their interests shift. You can read more about providing list options in Chapter 5.

10. Free them. It’s easy to think that your email list is too valuable to let anyone easily remove herself. Think again. You need to make it easy for someone to unsubscribe or move from one email list to another. Put an unsubscribe link in every email and let your audience remove themselves from your list permanently with one click. You can read more about allowing and minimizing unsubscribe requests in Chapter 4.

Ten Ways to Get Your Business in Trouble with Email

How could something so easy, so cost-effective, and so powerful get you in trouble? It usually happens the moment you think that easy, cost-effective, and powerful tools can’t possibly be abused.

1. Get spam complaints. Spam is in the eye of the receiver. If your audience thinks your email is spam, all they have to do in most cases is click one button in their email program, and your email address is flagged as possible spam forever. Spam complaints destroy your deliverability and reputation. To avoid spam complaints, you have to avoid looking like spam. You can read more about spam complaints in Chapter 4.

2. Use deceptive ways to collect contact information. You can find email addresses everywhere you look, but not everything shiny is gold. Collecting email addresses from web sites, directories, and web-crawling computer programs will give your email list more spam complaints than sales. You can read more about proper email address collection in Chapter 4.

3. Violate the CAN-SPAM Act. Consumers hate spam, so Congress decided to take action on spammers by creating the CAN-SPAM Act. You can be fined if you violate the CAN-SPAM Act, but the laws also shed light on the email marketing practices that consumers dislike the most. You can read about the CAN-SPAM Act in Chapter 4.

4. Send too much email. Your business has to survive, and regular communications are the key to staying top of mind with customers. Sending the right amount of content at the proper frequency is a balance that will reward you if you practice keeping your finger off the “send” button when your customers aren’t ready to hear from you. You can read more about over-communication in Chapter 12.

5. Buy an email list. Email list purchases or rentals fail not because of the quality of the list, but rather because consumers dislike receiving unfamiliar emails. You can read more about email list building in Chapter 5.

6. Share your email list unintentionally. Sharing your email doesn’t necessarily have to involve handing a disk to a friend or colleague. When you send an email with hundreds of email addresses copied into the cc field, you are sharing your entire list with everyone you’re sending to. You can read more about the proper ways to send email in Chapter 4.

7. Share your business with a spammer. If you send email from an email server that also hosts other businesses, that server is only as good as the reputation of the other people who send email from that server. If your shared hosting partners are spamming people, your emails can be flagged as spam by email programs. Using an email service with a good reputation is critical to your deliverability. Read more about sender reputation in Chapter 4.

8. Go it alone. Effective email marketing is nearly impossible without partners to help you with formatting, delivery, and strategy. Just like a good CEO surrounds herself with key people to grow a business, a good email marketer is surrounded by partners who are invested in the success of the business. You can read more about key partners in Chapter 11.

9. Hide your identity. Even if your audience knows you, they still have to recognize you. Your email’s “from” line has to be familiar, your brand has to be prominent, and your email address has to look friendly to the companies that decide which emails to deliver and which to send to the junk folder. You can read more about creating familiar emails in Chapter 9.

10. Fail to plan. If you’re going to invest time, energy, effort, and money in an email marketing program, take the time to plan the steps necessary to be successful. You can read more about planning for success in Chapters 2 and 3.

Ten Reasons to Use an Email Marketing Service Provider

Many small businesses use Microsoft Outlook or a similar email program when they start doing email marketing. The problem is that these applications were designed for one-to-one communications. They can work fine for sending email to a few dozen people. But using Outlook to help you send hundreds or thousands of emails to your customers is like using a speaker phone to deliver a speech in an auditorium. Email marketing can have a powerful impact on your business, and you need tools that are designed for the task. If you are serious enough about email marketing to pick up this book, you should consider using an email service like Constant Contact. (We’re the largest by far, and the best [we believe!], but there are other ones out there.) Email services help you perfect your strategy, manage your data, design your emails, and track your results.

1. Look professional. Unless you’re an HTML programmer who knows how every email program used by your customers will render your code differently, you should consider using an Email Service Provider (ESP) to help you with elements such as colors, fonts, images, and page designs.

2. Easily conform to CAN-SPAM regulations. All reputable email service providers build legal requirements into their platforms so you don’t have to worry about compliance.

3. Learn best practices. Email service companies send a lot of emails. The best ones listen to their customers, study their customers’ results, and share the best practices with others so everyone can grow. Go with an email service that embraces the philosophy that when customers are successful, the company is successful.

4. Give customers and easy way to unsubscribe. Keeping track of the people who no longer want your emails is not only professional, it’s a legal requirement. Email services include easy and safe unsubscribe links in every email that automatically remove anyone who clicks on them and keeps track of your unsubscribed customers so you can’t inadvertently add them back.

5. List management. Sending email to a list professionally isn’t as simple as cutting and pasting email addresses into a program. Email services allow you to manage your customers’ personal information and preferences so your emails are customized and your subscribers are segmented into categories and interests.

6. Track results. If you want to see who’s opening, forwarding, and clicking on your emails, you need an email service that gives you tracking reports. Email services can also tell you which

Figure 1.5 Email services share the best practices with their customers.

emails bounced, why they bounced, and which subscribers opted out of your communications.

7. Maximize delivery to the inbox. Your customers’ Internet Service Providers want to deliver wanted email while blocking unwanted email, so they pay close attention to the reputation of the sender when they decide whether to deliver or block emails to their customers. If you use an email service that is friendly to ISPs and blocks uninvited spammers from using their services, you’ll have a higher delivery rate. If you use your own email server to deliver your mail, you’ll start with no reputation at all, and you’ll probably experience average delivery rates.

8. Automate where appropriate. Email services are constantly developing new tools that help you to automate your strategy so you can spend more time with your customers. Automated features include signup forms that feed customer information into your database, auto responders that send selected emails after a specified event, and email templates that automatically lay out your content and brand elements into eye catching arrangements.

9. Cost a fraction of a penny per communication. Perhaps the best email marketing benefit involves the low cost of sending lots of emails to lots of people. Good email services pass these low costs on to their customers in the form of fixed monthly fees for unlimited emails or price breaks for large list holders.

10. Provide tools that impact your profits. Where do you turn when you need a library of stock photography, a way to archive your emails to your web site, or online surveys to help you understand your customers better? Any good Email Service Provider will offer these tools and will be constantly finding ways to make your emails come to life and give you the greatest return on your investment in their products and services.

At this point your mind is either spinning with ideas on how to put these rules into practice for your business or you are wondering how to get started. The great news is that in both cases the answers lie in reading on! You may think that sending an email marketing campaign is fairly simple and you would be right. However, email marketing is not about sending email, it’s about getting people to read it! So let’s get started.

2

The Power of Email Relationships

Have you ever entered a store by opening a door and heard a bell ring? That bell tells store owners that it’s time to drop what they’re doing and focus on you, the customer.

If the store owner recognizes that the bell represents an opportunity to begin building a relationship, he can begin the process of turning a stranger walking through a door into a familiar customer who makes repeat purchases, refers friends, and stays loyal for a long time. If the store owner ignores the bell or fails to make a connection with the person entering the store, the results are likely to be poor. The potential customer is going to remain a stranger who must be convinced again—at great expense—to walk through the same door at a later date.

In email marketing, the bell rings when someone is added to your list. Understanding how to talk to a customer from that point forward using email communications will enable you to tap into the power of relationships and build your business.

Building Customer Relationships with the Constant Contact Cycle

Every once in a while, someone visits your web site or walks through your door and instantly falls in love with your products or services. Unfortunately, a lot of small business owners I talk to are trying to survive solely on the small numbers of these “love at first sight” customers. They don’t understand how to attract customers from the largest pool of prospective customers—namely the aware but not yet convinced, the skeptics, the comparison shoppers, the indecisive, and the forgetful.

Figure 2.1 The Constant Contact Cycle

Building a business requires you to convert all kinds of people with all kinds of attitudes into customers and keep them for the long term. That happens when you learn how to build solid customer relationships.

Relationships don’t happen overnight; they are built over time. In fact, they typically go through four stages of development. We call these stages the Constant Contact Cycle, shown in Figure 2.1. Maximizing each stage in the cycle is critical to your email marketing.

STAGE ONE—ACQUIRE: THE BEGINNINGS OF A NEW CUSTOMER

Married couples (at least happily married couples) and other people in great relationships like to be asked, “Where did you two meet?” Similarly, you should ask every new prospective customer: “How did you find out about us?”

Before you can start building a high number of lasting relationships, lots of people have to “find out” about you. You have to acquire those relationships in the first place by gaining someone’s attention in an initial communication or meeting.

Acquiring new relationships through email is challenging. You can’t use email to send your marketing messages to total strangers because people think unfamiliar emails are spam. If your prospects think you’re a spammer, that’s not going to result in positive or profitable responses to your emails (to read more about spam, flip ahead to Chapter 4). So, you have to acquire new relationships without using email, or by using email to gain referrals at more developed stages of your customer relationships.

Good ways to get people’s attention and acquire new relationships include online advertising, search engine marketing, and traditional advertising. After you have earned a potential customer’s attention, you can move to stage two of the Constant Contact Cycle and make a connection that’s strong enough that they will be willing to give you their contact information.

STEP TWO—CONNECT: FINDING COMMON INTERESTS AND DEMONSTRATING THE VALUE OF YOUR BUSINESS

The second stage in the Constant Contact Cycle is to establish a connection. After you have acquired someone’s attention, the connection point happens when you effectively demonstrate the value of your business to your newly acquired prospect. At Constant Contact we call this the “click” point.

What does it mean to click? It means your newly acquired prospect has found something in common with you and is interested in either learning more or continuing to stay in touch after an initial purchase. You’ll know when you’ve “clicked” or “made a connection” when your prospect is willing to share his or her email address by signing up for your email list.

Once you have someone’s email address, you can move from higher-cost and less personal “acquisition” advertising and communications to lower-cost and more personal email marketing messages to build customer relationships.

Since demonstrating your value is crucial to making the connections that result in a growing email list, it’s important to communicate the value of joining your email list at the first sign of attention. For example, I personally enjoy shopping at small businesses because I like to walk in the door and know that the person I am buying from is truly passionate and knowledgeable about what he is selling. Recently, I walked into a wine store called Vintages in West Concord,

Massachusetts (www.vintagesonline.com). I happened to meet the owner, whose name is Eric, and I told him that I was looking for a special wine for a friend’s 50th birthday.

I quickly found out that Eric understands the value of making connections because he jumped up from behind the counter and gave me a quick tour of the wine section of the store. He engaged me in a dialogue to determine my level of interest and knowledge. Then he demonstrated his expertise by discussing the wines that would be worthy of a 50th birthday gift. We settled on a Spanish red and, since I’m an email marketer, I asked Eric if I could sign up for his email list. This took him by surprise, but I suspect he would have asked me if I had not asked first. He told me he would be glad to sign me up and told me that his wife (the co-owner) used Constant Contact to send the emails for the store. He actually had a copy of their most recent email newsletter out on the counter. Now I receive Eric’s wine recommendations regularly and I’ve become a loyal customer.