Use Your Friends & Neighbors to Build Your List

Want a great way to build your email marketing list? Use your friends and neighbors to advertise your newsletter and they’ll use you to advertise theirs! What am I talking about?

Here are a few examples:

1. You’re in retail and in a neighborhood where there are other retailers, service businesses or restaurants where people visit.
2. The product that you sell has complementary products offered by other businesses.

Everyone wants a bigger list right?

First - ask the other businesses if they’d like to grow their email list.

Lists - Find out how many each company that wants to be included has on their email lists. You’ll want them to be close to the same because if one is 10x bigger than the others everyone else will benefit from the big guy but they might not benefit in the same way.

If everyone is using their own VerticalResponse account, great! But if you’re going to be doing the email marketing on behalf of these other businesses you should create separate accounts for each business so each business has their own unsubscribe list.

From Label - Make sure the email comes FROM the list owner. If you are doing the mailing to your list it should come FROM your business, if your neighbor is doing the mailing to her list it should come FROM her business.

Creating Your Message - Include a paragraph as to why you’re doing this. For example:

“The merchants of South Beach all got together and decided that you need to know about everything that’s going on here. So opt-in to all of these lists and be the first to know!”

And if each business can give the new people who signed up an incentive, even more fuel to form new lists.

Links - Get links to yours and all participating business’s email opt-in form pages and include these links in the email with a note as to what the new registrant can expect. If it’s specials and discounts make sure you include that along with a logo or image for your neighbor’s site. If you can send your clickers directly to an opt-in form page it’s better than sending them to a home page, they may get lost and forget why they’re there.

Make sure that all of the other business have the correct links then send your email campaigns out and watch all of your lists grow!

 

Comments

[Bukola Odedeyi]

A business without a mailing list is like a soldier with no weapon of war - 'dead man walking'. I highly agree with and recomment this system of list building. Cheers

[Pam McLennan]

Thank you so much for such informative information. We have an organic baby website whereby we sell worldwide and all this information really helps us who is seeking exposure.

[David Bush]

Great idea Janine! We do lots of cross promotions with partners but I got a couple more ideas of what's possible from you today.