Express Marketing Memo

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Marketing messages bombard our eyes and ears at least 245 times per day, according to The Advertising Media Internet Center Website. It’s exposure overload and many of us just tune out. If you want to reach me with a TV ad, that ad had better stand out and grab my attention amidst all of its noisy competitors. Even then, for those relatively few remarkable ads, don’t ask me who it represented until I’ve seen it several more times. Simply put, I don’t appreciate the constant interruption. Who does?

Of course, it’s not just TV, but also radio, print ads, billboards, web sites, pop-up Internet ads … the list goes on and on. Seth Godin calls it “interruption marketing.” Big business buys sufficient media time/space to break through the noise from time-to-time. But can the smaller business afford it? Is interruption marketing even effective for small business?

What’s the alternative?

The alternative is permission-based marketing, which begins with building a list of people interested in learning more about your products and services. In his landmark book, Permission Marketing, Seth Godin explains: “Instead of annoying potential customers by interrupting their most coveted commodity - time - Permission Marketing offers customers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily.”

Whether you sell physical products from a brick and mortar storefront or any type of product or service online, it all starts with building your list.

List Building Basics

Online, you need nothing more than a way to collect the first name and e-mail address of your engaged web site visitor. If you don’t have a web site, that’s another topic entirely. (Your customers are looking for you online. Shouldn’t they be able to find you?) That said, it is possible to build a list using nothing more than e-mail, an online newsletter/autoresponder service, and subscribers who initially sign up off-line.

So how do we get permission to build our permission-based list? By offering content that subscribers are willing to register for. This can be a newsletter, free report, white paper, case study, an e-book, or an online demo.

To gain subscribers at your store, advertise your subscriber only content on everything you print. Ask for email addresses when your customers check out. Offer a percent off coupon in exchange for e-mail contact information. Promote it on your phone’s hold message and voicemail.

To gain subscribers on your web site, make your offer compelling and provide a sign-up form.

AWeber (affiliate link) makes the process simple. With an AWeber account, you log-in, easily create your sign-up form with their web form generator, then copy and paste the resulting block of code into your web site. To create an email blast to your subscribers, you merely select a template, add your content and a publication date. That’s really all there is to it. In-depth information about AWeber, including features, pricing, video tutorials, and a comprehensive knowledge-base is available on their web site at www.AWeber.com.

Caroline Middlebrook is about to put this project in action. In September 2007, Caroline quit her day job in order to follow her dreams of becoming an Internet entrepreneur. Her blog is my record of that journey, and she’s been very clear from the beginning that her aim is to learn how to make a living online and transfer that knowledge to others through her blog. She’s already produced an information packed free e-book, How to Build Money Making Niche Sites with WordPress, which she gave away to draw traffic to her blog.

Now she’s at it again, and will be offering a valuable, but free multi-part e-mail course (about one of my favorite topics, StumbleUpon) in exchange for the email addresses of her readers. As with each of her other endeavors, she’ll share her success with her list building efforts on her blog. If you want to learn about Internet Marketing from the eyes of one actively learning the ropes, make sure you visit and subscribe to her Caroline Middlebrook blog.

Photo Credit: Shiny Things

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 7:35 am and is filed under E-mail Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.