In my last post I told you the importance of giving value as a key factor to implement a successful email marketing program. The other key factor is building a list of qualified subscribers who give us their permission to send them the campaigns. This is always a difficult and slow process that a lot of people want to skip. These people want to take the shortcut, and buy a third party email list or directly go to the Yellow pages to gather emails and send them promotional campaigns with no value at all. Obviously that is not a good idea, for different reasons:
- Unqualified leads
- Devalues your brand
- Disingenuous relationship with customer (what would the email say? “Hello! You don’t know me, but I bought your email…”)
Buying a contacts list wont get us anywhere. Someone with a high quality list will take care of it and tightly control that it is not abused with a lot of promotional emails. For that reason, when someone is selling you an email list (remember that he is selling it to everybody who is paying for it) 99 times out of 100 you are getting a spam list. That’s a list of addresses of people who have not agreed to receive messages like yours, or who are on a list that’s been blasted to uselessness by other mailers.
So when you see offers like 1 million addresses for 100$ you better ignore it if you don’t want to lose your money and harm the image of your company.
We want to make getting their already built contacts lists into Pixelnews really easy to our users. Most of the small companies manage their lists with excel files, so we will be keeping the basic functionality to import excel, .csv and text files. However, the number of small companies managing their contacts with CRM applications grows fast every day. In order to make it as easy as possible for them, Pixelnews will be prepared to import and synchronize contacts from the most important CRM applications in the market. This way, the users wont have to manage two different lists in two different applications.
We think it is very useful for the user a feature that makes easy to create a subscription form and embed it into a web, blog or social network profiles. This way every new sign up will be directly added to the user´s Pixelnews lists.
Finally, we are adding a feature that also exports the contacts to excel, .csv and text files.
One of the best ways to get better results with your email marketing campaigns is the segmentation of the lists. Because each user follows different criteria to create the segments, Pixelnews makes easy to customize the fields for each list.
We want the user to know how the lists perform over time. Pixelnews will provide reports where the user will see the evolution of sign ups, unsubscribed and bounces.
