How To Build An List Of Customers

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1 How To Build An List Of Customers by Derrick Markotter Thank you for making the excellent decision to start up your own mailing list. I guarantee you that this will be one of the best business decisions you have ever made. marketing is one of the most effective ways to build a relationship with prospective customers and stay in touch with existing customers. It's said that acquiring a new customer is 5 to 7 times more expensive than retaining an existing customers, yet many small businesses do little or nothing to nurture their relationships with their valuable and loyal existing customers. One of the easiest ways to approach marketing is by creating a simple newsletter which is sent to your customers and prospects once a month or once every two or three months. Depending on your business, you may even be able to create the newsletters for a whole year in advance. If you have more than a few subscribers, you should not even consider doing this from your desktop computer. Internet Service Providers are very concerned about spam, and can easily see that you are sending bulk mail from your desktop. This may result in your domain being blacklisted, which could affect the deliverability of your everyday business s as well. One way to avoid this is by using a third party service, which will send your s via their trusted servers. In this manual, I will show you how to set up an account with a third party service, how to add contacts to your subscriber list and then how to send mail to these contacts. Not only will you be able to reach customers but you will be able to do it at a greatly reduced price compared to mailing them via the post. It would cost thousands of Rands to have an advertisement distributed to thousands of customers via the post. With an subscriber list, you will be able to contact all of these people as many times as you like for a tiny fraction of the cost! If you have any problems at all following this manual, I will be here to support you. You can contact me directly at: address: derrick@idealmedia.co.za Phone number: +27 (0)

2 I'll give you step by step instructions that should be easy to follow. At the end, I'll also give you some ideas and tips on how to make the most out of your list and how to keep customers coming back for more! Step 1 - Create your account. To start off with, you will need an account with an marketing service. I recommend a company called GetResponse as they are one of the best available and offer a highly competitive price. Please click here to go to the GetResponse website: GetResponse On the page, you can read a bit about the service and then click on the 'Try GetResponse FREE For 30 Days' button, or click here: GetResponse Free Trial. Fill in the information ( Address/First Name/Password), and click on 'Create Account' to get started. Make sure you remember your username and password as you will need it to log in to your account to add contacts and send mail. This will set you up with a free trial account for GetResponse. You can use this trial account for up to 30 days before upgrading to a paid account. A trial account will allow you to have a small number of subscribers (250) on your mailing list. Apart from that restriction, it offers all the features of a regular account, including unlimited mailings. It's a good way to test the system before you upgrade to a full account.

3 You can change your subscriber package whenever you like and you are not locked in to any contracts. Step 2 Create A Campaign Before you can start adding your customers to your subscriber list, you'll need to create your first campaign. A campaign is a set of messages which you will send to a specific group of contacts. For example, you might create a campaign for Valentine's Day, and send it to all your customers. Log in to your GetResponse account and find the field labelled Your current campaign in the upper right corner of your account Dashboard. Click the down arrow to display the drop-down list then click Create campaign. Enter the new campaign name. Campaign names must be unique, which means that they cannot exist in any other account in the GetResponse system. Campaign name must be between 3-64 characters (only lowercase a-z, numbers and _ ). To make sure your campaign name is unique, you could start each campaign with an abbreviation for your company name. For example, if your company is called 'International Business Machines', you might start each campaign with 'ibm_'. Use underscores instead of spaces. For now, you could call your campaign 'ibm_customers'. You can create different campaigns for different categories of contacts prospects, customers, VIP customer and so on.

4 Click the 'Create Campaign' button when you're finished. Step 3 - Add contacts (customers) to your account. Click on the 'Contacts' tab in the dashboard menu at the top of the page. Underneath the heading 'Contacts' click on 'Add Contacts' This will allow you to type in the addresses of people who you want to add to your list of customers. Choose the campaign you created in Step 2, and simply add in addresses one after another in to the text box and then click on the 'Add Contacts' button. You can do this as many times as you like. I suggest that at the end of each day, you take a minute to add in all of the new contacts that you collected during the day. If you already have a list of customer names and addresses, you can upload the file (in.csv format) directly to GetResponse. Step 4 Creating an and sending it to your customers This is the most important step as it will show you how to actually send mail to these customers that you have on your list. Click on the 'Messages' tab in the Dashboard menu. Under the heading 'Messages' click on 'Create Newsletter.' You will be taken to a new page. Click on the first option, 'New Creator.' Enter a name for your message. The message name is for your eyes only, so that you can easily identify the message in the list of messages you'll be building. For now, you could use something like 'Welcome Message'. Enter the subject line for your message. The subject line is the first thing the subscriber sees in their inbox, so it needs to give them a compelling reason to open the message. You can use something like 'Welcome to the XYZ Company Newsletter.'

5 You'll need to enter a 'From' address. Use a name and address that your customers are likely to recognize. If possible, use an address branded with your own domain name. For now, leave the Twitter and Facebook sections alone. Click on 'Next Step' to continue. Select a pre-designed template to use to make your look nice (you can also scroll down and choose 'Plain Text' in the left-hand column if you want to keep things simple). Hover over the template you want to use for your , and click on 'Use Template'. Now that you have selected a template, you can edit or delete any of the text boxes and add in what you want to write in your to your customers. If you have a company logo then you can add that in, which makes your look very professional! Once you're happy with your and remember, you don't have to send it immediately; you can come back and edit it at any time click 'Next Step.' You'll be taken to the 'Recipients' screen. This where you'll add the to a campaign remember that each campaign is assigned to a group of subscribers. Choose the campaign for this . You'll probably only have the 'ibm_customers' campaign (hopefully with your own abbreviation!) You can ignore most of the other options on this page, so just click on 'Next Step'. You'll be taken to the Message Summary page. This page shows you a summary of the message, including the Subject, Template, Spam score and Recipients. You can choose to send the message immediately ('Send Now') or to Schedule it. If you schedule it for some time in the future, you'll be able to come back and exit it at any time before it's sent. You can also change the schedule date and time. If you choose 'Send Now', it will take a few minutes for your to be approved by GetResponse and then sent to your subscribers. You can track your message statistics by logging in to your GetResponse account and choosing 'Statistics' from the dashboard.

6 Some Ideas and Tips: Have a piece of paper and a pen at your checkout so that customers can leave their address while they wait at the till. Have your checkout assistant ask the customer if they would like to join your mailing list once they have made a sale. If you have a spare laptop or tablet computer, you could place it at the checkout and have it set up to allow customers to sign up to your mailing list themselves. You'll need to create a sign-up form within GetResponse; once that's done, you'll get a website address which will let you display your form on any computer. special offers to your customer list like a coupon or special discount code that is not available anywhere else. This will keep your customers happy which means they will be coming back to your store more often! Make sure you them often with your latest promotions and special offers so they don't miss out on anything. You can also use the s to get customer feedback. Maybe ask them how their experience was shopping in your store. Let them know that they can reply to your to get an answer to their questions. Again, please don't hesitate to ask me for any assistance. Thanks, Derrick Markotter Tel: derrick@idealmedia.co.za IdealMedia.co.za Find Out How To Grow Your Business in 2015