Archive for January, 2009

7 ways to build your email marketing list offline

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

Most of the time when we want to grow our list we always think about the online options like adding subscribe forms in every page on your website and landing pages, usually forgetting the real world. However there are a lot of ways of growing your list outside the web world. Here you have 7 ways to grow your list offline:

Networking

Networking is a always a great way to build new relationships and generate new sales. When we get new business cards is a great idea to send a quick follow up email to these contacts recapping the meeting and asking permission to be added to your list.

Trade Shows

The different sector trade shows are a great place to generate new sales leads and also a place to find a lot of high quality contacts to add to your list.

Semminars

Offering seminar to your clients is a great way to strengthen your relationship with them at the same time you are giving them an added value. It is also a great time to ask permission to sign them up for your company newsletter.

Points of sale

Being a retailer has a big advantage because it gives you the opportunity to interact much more directly with your clients. You can easily add a subscription form on your purchase point offering the value people will get signing up for your newsletter, such us special offers or discount coupons.

Events

Events, concerts, parties, and any occasion where people gather is a big opportunity to keep building your email contacts list. If you are hosting any of these events is a great idea to ask for the sign up offering some kind of incentive that you could deliver by email, such as an e-book, a free subscription for your service, etc.

Postcards

For those contacts and clients that have given you their mailing information but not their email address, sending a post card with your website address and the value of being part of the mailing list, is a great way to make them sign up for your newsletter.

Catalogs

If you are using catalogs with your products as a marketing tool don’t forget to add all the details about the value of been part of the email list and encourage people to sign up for your newsletter.

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Vision, Purpose and Goals

Monday, January 26th, 2009

Starting the new development of Pixelnews, the first thing we’ve done is establishing the vision, purpose and goals we want to achieve with the company and with this product, in order to have a framework that allow us to make consistently good decisions.

The general goals of the project are:

Create a simple product that solves a real problem

Most of the times software creates new problems instead of solving a simple one. We want Pixelnews to be a simple application, with just the features that help us to solve our problem the easy way but efficiently.

Save time and money to our users

Not having the budget to hire a designer for our email marketing campaigns, we were frustrated spending hours customizing awful and inflexible templates and never been happy with the result. Pixelnews will be the first email marketing application with a real email creator that will manage to have your professionally-designed campaigns in just minutes, saving time and money to our users.

Provide a great resource center

We also want to provide a complete set of articles, best practices, cases of study and much more, to help our users to improve their relationship with their customers and increase sales using email marketing.

Once we’ve established these general goals, we use them to focus on the real product. This has helped us to decide that the most important aspects of the application are: contacts management, campaigns creation and Reports. This means that only features that support these aspects will make it into the product and that the design will make emphasis in those elements.

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