Susan Wilson Solovic: Hello and welcome to SBTV.com. I’m Susan Wilson Solovic and you’re joining us for this second program in our series, The Power of Building Relationships with our expert, Eric Groves who is the Senior Vice President of Constant Contact. And for those of you who don’t know, Constant Contact is the leading e-mail marketing and online survey company and providing all kinds of assistance to small businesses and organizations and welcome Eric.
Eric Groves: Thanks. It’s great to be back.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Well, great. Now last time you were here, we talked in general about building or the power of relationships which is about our series and that’s all well and good and e-mail marketing is wonderful but how do you build that lift? I mean you got to start somewhere?
Eric Groves: Exactly and when you to small business owners, one of the first things that you typically hear is, “But I don’t have a list.” And the important thing to think about is, well, there’s never been a better that day than today to start building that list. And you really have to think about each place that you interact with a perspective customer or an existing customer and ask yourself, “What is it that I can do today to start capturing that information?” It’s been a number of surveys out there are proven it for a retail store, if you were to ask your customers whether they’re be willing to give you their e-mail address to communicate with them or for sixty percent would say yes.
So it could be a simple as putting out a little sign out book at your check out point and just saying, “Hey, would you like to join our preferred customer mailing list?” or you’re driving a lot of traffic at your website, having a sign up tag on your website that says. “Join my mailing list” now, potentially, a link there where they can go and see an archive of your past campaigns, so they can see exactly what they’re signing up for. And those are a couple of compliments that you get right inside Constant Contact so it’s not like you do a heavy lifting to get started.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Well, but you’re saying that I’ve got to build this list from scratch? What if I for example, I map a lot, I get a lot of business cards, I get a lot of e-mails and have a lot e-mail addresses on there, can I just take those e-mail addresses and build the list and start?
Eric Groves: That’s initial question we get frequently because people immediately, when they see the success of e-mail marketing for generating sales, they immediately say, “How do I get a much bigger list?” And we have to coach them that it’s really about quality over quantity when you think about building your list. Whether you’re going to a trade show or networking event, you really emits reason why you have two pockets in your slacks, right.
When you meet, somebody and they’re really interested in what you do and that’s a potential for a relationship there, put them in one pocket. If the person is just coming up to get the little touchy at the trade show, put them in your other pocket and don’t bother adding them to your list. Remember, you want to build that quality list over quantity.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And you know, actually I do that. What I do is I put my one cards that I get from someone, I put it in one pocket and I put the one in another one so I don’t give somebody, somebody else’s card.
Eric Groves: They can come in handy.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And I’ve done that before. But let’s go back to the business cards and the list ‘cause we sure a lot about 3:13 in for an e-mail database. So, will get in trouble if I just started pulling all of these lists and putting them together myself?
Eric Groves: Well, you are really comes down to asking yourself two questions, “Do they know you and do they care?” and you know, when you’re building an after list, there’s typically two different types of permission that you think about. Explicit permission which means that person came to your store and actually feel about that and says, “Yup, add me to your list” there’s a people that explicitly said, “Yeah, I want to receive your newsletter” Then there’s Implicit permission.
These folks you had a relationship with for five years, you’ve been interacting with for a number of different reasons and you now are just going to start sending out an e-mail communication to your customers. It’s perfectly fine to send it to the people you have implicit permission from, however it’s real important to realize that you should include what we call a permission reminder at the top of that communication that says the reason that you were receiving this is you’ve been a customer of ours for over five years. And we just started a new monthly newsletter and we thought it might be something you’ve been interested in. click here if you don’t want to receive it. So, you move the ability to unsubscribe right to the top of the communication and by doing so, you really treat those people that you have an implicit permission with without respect to say hey, this is how I know you.
Susan Wilson Solovic: That’s a good suggestion because I do get a lot of e-mails that you really have to haunt around to find the unsubscribe tab. And that’s aggravating.
Eric Groves: It is Aggravating. And one of the things we do is we bake it in to the footer of every campaign that we send out so that someone can immediately unsubscribe and accordance with the US scan spam laws. Basically you have ten days to remove someone from your list once the asked to be removed. And we take care of that immediately so you don’t have to worry about it. But it’s one of those things you have to make sure on every e-mail newsletter you send out that you’ve got ability for someone to remove themselves.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Now, once you do have this database bills and you want to start your campaign, how do you continue to manage that database because people change their e-mail addresses, they move to other organizations, ho do you manage all of that?
Eric Groves: It’s a great question. A lot of the people that come to us come because they’ve been using outlook as just trying to get their feet wet doing communications. And one of the downfalls in doing that is when mail can’t get delivered or people want to change their e-mail addresses, they bounce it back you and you have to take action on that. One of the benefits of u sing the service like Constant Contact is that within our unsubscribe for this a little blink where they can update their profile so they can change their e-mail address on their own if they want to as you don’t have to deal with any of those issue.
Susan Wilson Solovic: All right, guest two, if someone does want to unsubscribe and they’ve let you know that and then you forget about it, I mean we are also busy and the last thing you have time to worry about is your e-mail database.
Eric Groves: Right and using the service really takes that all out of your court and puts it on our hands to help you manage that process and it works very well.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Now, once you do have permission from someone to go ahead and add them in to your e-mail database, is that permission on going or how do I know if it’s been too long?
Eric Groves: Well, it’s a great point because a lot of people think that they would build up our list and doesn’t really matter when we start. Well, in fact permission is kind of perishable in the sense that you want to make sure that you’re communicating at least quarterly, if not, monthly with your customers so they remember. “Oh yeah, I remember, Eric” and that’s why I gave my e-mail address was because he was sending me this information. If you don’t communicate with someone for a half a year likely that is that they’ll forget that they gave you that permission. So it’s important to communicate right yearly and send really good quality information and you won’t have to worry about it and always have that subscribe link at the bottom so if they don’t want to receive it anymore, there’s an easy way for them to just unsubscribe from the list.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Well, we’ve talked about a lot of things in this interview in this series. But, what is the one best piece of advice that you would leave our audience with today if they wanted to get started with an e-mail strategy?
Eric Groves: Well, for just today’s topic, on the customer and building your list, I think the most important thing to remember is your customers are your biggest asset in many ways for your business. It’s an asset that you can turn to when you need to generate revenue and it’s an asset that you can leverage from now, well into the future if you just take the time to build it correctly and always think about quality over quantity.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Great advice, Eric. Thank you so much for joining us again and be sure to join us next time because Eric’s going to be here. And the third part of our series of building the power of relationship. So we’re going to be talking about how to make sure your email campaign actually gets red so we’re looking forward to that.
Thanks for joining us here on SBTV.com and remember you van always go to Constant Contacts website for more information. That’s just costantcontact.com. And remember also that here at SBTV.com, small business is our only business.
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