VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Building Your Email List - Opt-In vs. Opt-Out, Which Way Should You Go?

Many businesses have had the opt-in vs. opt-out discussion at one time or another. The question asked: do you get visitors to take an action to sign up for your newsletter or offers? This is considered opt-in. Or should you email people that never signed up nor have done business with you and tell them they can unsubscribe if they don't want to hear from you? This is known as opt-out.

At VerticalResponse we have always recommended that you get people to opt-in to your list or only email those who have done business with you. You usually wind up with higher open and click rates, and lower bounce and unsubscribe rates, which gives you a better return on your email marketing campaigns. Generally if you use an opt-out method, it means that you've obtained a list or someone has sold you a list, and many times these lists have been built in an unethical way.

Here is a perfectly great example of an opt-out email campaign I recently received from a company called OptInteractive, totally unsolicited.

Dear Janine,

Welcome to our email program!

You are now among a select group of professionals who receive emails packed with product news, information and offers.

Our hope is that you will enjoy this email program and take advantage of its offerings. If, however, you do not wish to receive emails from us, please click on the unsubscribe link below. Keep in mind that you can unsubscribe at any time in the future as well.

Thanks,

Your Friends at Dunhill Interactive

Please click Unsubscribe  from receiving future emails.

Lesson: The "from label" reads "Opinteractive", but they signed the email "Dunhill Interactive" so I'm not sure which company (neither of whom I have an affiliation with), is sending me the email.  And "OptIn-teractive" sounds more like "OptOut-teractive". They probably scraped my email address from the blog or a website somewhere and added me to this list.

Again, we don't recommend you start to build an e-relationship by force-feeding recipients your messaging and telling them they can opt out or unsubscribe. By doing it the right way, you're brand will be protected.

Motivate Employees to Get Email Addresses - Just Not This Way

I just read an article about a restaurant owner who wrote a nasty email (careful, this contains SEVERE  language, folks) to his employees for not collecting email addresses. In fact, if they don't collect at least 20 emails a week, he's planning on fining them $100, and if they don't collect at least 20 emails in 2 weeks they're fired. This was reported by an anonymous tipster, but the owner does admit sending it.

Now I applaud that he sees the value in email marketing, however he's crossing the line by his actions and demeanor (in my opinion).

Why not do it in a positive fashion, after all, email marketing will get customers in the door and stressing to your staff that the people who will benefit will be them, might just work in your favor. Here are a few more constructive ideas:

• For every valid email address your staff gets give them $2.
• If they get 20 valid email addresses they get a kicker of $50.
• Have a contest with your staff, whoever gets a certain number of emails wins a prize like cash or a nice bottle of bubbly.
• Motivate your customers to give you their email addresses by having "email only" offers in the bill holder. Test different offers to see what works like a free birthday dinner up to $xx, or free appetizers on their next visit. This gives your employees a reason to ask the customers for their addresses. Giving up something of value to get it in return can go a long way.
• At the host stand or checkout, display a business card bowl or a sign up book, then have the host stop people on the way out the door and tell them about "email only" offers.
• Give an automatic 5% VIP discount for any customer who is on the email address list.

These are just a few positive ways to get your staff excited about collecting email addresses instead of forcing it down their throats. If you've got any ideas of your own, please comment!

29 Ways to Collect Email Addresses for Your Business

There are a ton of ways to get people to sign up for your email marketing offers. I've put together a list for you to read, so you know all of the ways you can be growing your list.

1. Put an offer on the back of your business cards to get people to sign up for your newsletter.
2. Tradeshows - Bring a clipboard or sign-up book with you to tradeshows and ask for permission to send email to those who sign up.
3. Include a newsletter sign-up link in your signature of all of your emails.
4. Send an opt-in email to your address book asking them to join your list.
5. Join your local chamber of commerce, email the member list (if it's opt-in) about your services with a link to sign up to your newsletter.
6. Host your own event - Art galleries, software companies (one here has a party every quarter and invites the neighboring businesses), retail shops, consultants (lunch & learn) can all host an event and request attendees to sign up.
7. Offer a birthday club where you give something special to people who sign up.
8. Incentivize your employees - Give them $ for collecting VALID email addresses.
9. Giving something for free like a PDF? Make visitors sign up to your opt-in form before you let them download it.
10. Referrals - Ask you customers to refer you, and in exchange you'll give them a discount.
11. Bouncebacks – Get them back! - Send a postcard or call them asking for their updated email address.
12. Trade newsletter space with a neighboring business, include a link for their opt-in form and ask them to include yours in their newsletter.
13. SEO - Make sure you optimize your site for your keywords. You need to be at the top of the natural search when people are looking for your products or services.
14. Giveaways - Send people something physical and ask for their email address as well as their postal address.
15. Do you have a postal list without emails? Send them a direct mail offer they can only get if they sign up to your email list.
16. Include opt-in forms on every page on your site.
17. Popup windows - When someone attempts to leave your site, pop up a window and ask for the email address.
18. Include a forward-to-a-friend link in your emails just in case your recipient wants to forward your content to someone they think will find it interesting.
19. Include a forward-to-a-friend on every page of your site.
20. Offer a community - Use Ning as your easy-to-set-up community and have your visitors interact and sign up for your newsletter.
21. Offer "Email only" discounts and don't use those offers anywhere but email.
22. Telemarketing - If you've got people on the phone, don't hang up until you ask if you can add them to your newsletter.
23. Put a fishbowl on your counter and do a weekly prize giveaway of your product - then announce it to your newsletter. Add everyone who put their card in on to your newsletter list.
24. Include an opt-in form inside your emails for those people who get your email forwarded to them.
25. Tradeshows - Collect business cards and scan them into a spreadsheet. Make sure you ask permission to send email to them, then mark the card.
26. Use Facebook - Host your own group and invite people to it, then post new links often. From time to time, post a link to sign up for your newsletter.
27. Use Facebook - Post the hosted link from your newsletter into Linked Items to spread the word.
28. Use Facebook - Include an opt-in form on your Facebook Fan page.
29. Use Twitter - Twitter the hosted link of your email campaign every time you launch.

If you've got any additional ideas, let's hear them!

Grab an Email Address With a Popup Window

If you're using best practices like Branders, you've got an email marketing newsletter sign-up form on every page of your website. You collect email addresses at your counter before someone leaves and you ask for their email address over the phone before you hang up. You even ask for a business card with an email address on it when you meet someone. 

So why let someone leave your website without asking just one last time for their email address? Consider the amount of time and effort you spend on getting visitors to your website. Don't let them leave without one more request.

Popup windows can be seen at as annoying because of the flood of advertising we've been getting from them over the years. Frankly there are a lot of people who have blocking software to prevent them from getting popups so you won't get those people to sign up. However, think about it this way; your visitor came to your site for a reason, they were interested in something you have to sell, manufacture or offer. It's not necessarily out of place for them to see a request for them to join your list.

Branders does a great job at exit popups by giving their visitors an incentive of $50 off the first order and free samples.

At VerticalResponse we get 5-10 people signing up for our email marketing newsletter per day by this method. 

Talk to your web designer today. If you use VerticalResponse for email marketing, we have free opt-in forms they can display in a popup window. Then watch your list grow!

Do You Have a Customer List in QuickBooks You Might Not Be Emailing? Use It!

We surveyed most of our customers and found out that over half of them use QuickBooks as their contact management/customer data storage. If either you run your own business or are in charge of marketing at your business, there might be some great customer information in your company's QuickBooks that you're not even aware of.

Why not ask the bookkeeper to give you a list of all customers in QuickBooks and see if in fact there are customers in there that you don't have access to, but would love to send email marketing campaigns to. If there are, then you should set this data dump up with your bookkeeper on a regular basis. You don't want to miss a great opportunity to contact your customers, all of them.

If you don't want to bug your bookkeeper, and you use VerticalResponse, we've got a nifty widget on the Intuit Workplace that you can use to port your customer list over. Once you've installed the VerticalResponse for Intuit Workplace app and setup the Workplace Sync application, you'll find an Import Tool widget on your VerticalResponse for Intuit Workplace Homepage. Use the widget to import your Customer records into your VerticalResponse for Intuit Workplace account. It's a snap.

Add a VerticalResponse Opt-In Form to Your Facebook Pages

I’ve posted before that you should put an email opt-in form on each page of your website. In today’s world your social media profiles like your Facebook fan page are becoming extensions of your websites. Well, thanks to Return on Subscriber, I have found a way to add that opt-in form to your Facebook fan page.

We just created a video for how to do this if written words bore you!

I did this in just under 10 minutes and I promise it isn’t hard at all. But before you start, it is good to know that FBML, the application that allows you to do this, requires you to have a personal profile. So if you don't have one of those find someone who does, or join us on Facebook!

Step 1: Create a FREE VerticalResponse opt-in form

• Go to the ‘List’ section in your VerticalResponse account.
• Click to create a new opt-in form
• Name it
• Design your form, don’t worry we make the design part very simple
• Choose a pop-up thank you page, Facebook will not let you redirect to another site.
• Choose if you want new registrants to be added to an existing list or if you would like a new list created
• Set up any alerts 
• And publish. Need a tutorial?

Step 2: Add the Static FBML application to your Fan Page

• Search "Static FBML" in the Facebook search bar or click here
• Click Add to my Page
• In the window that pops up select your page

Step 3: Customize for your Facebook fan page

• Click to edit your fan page
• Click to edit the FBML application within your page 
• Paste the VerticalResponse opt-in form code into the empty box
• Change the title of the box, maybe "Newsletter Sign Up Form" or "Email Sign Up"
• Save these changes
• Go back to your fan page
• Click on the ‘+’ icon on your navigation bar
• Move your newsletter sign up form around on your navigation bar so it is in an appropriate place

We have added this application on to our fan page so check it out if you would like to see what it looks like before you begin.  We also have a short video tutorial that walks through Steps 2 and 3.  You can watch that tutorial here. 

B2B Marketers - Build Your List Using White Papers

If you are marketing to a business, you're always looking for creative ways to build your prospect list. You need to constantly keep feeding the funnel with prospects so you can convert them to your best customers. If you are selling technical products, one way to do this is to develop white papers. When you think of a white paper you might think that big corporations are the only businesses that write them. To the contrary, small businesses can grow enormously using white papers and they're not that difficult to put together.

From Wikipedia: A white paper is an authoritative report. White papers are used to educate customers, collect leads for a company or help people make decisions. 

White papers can be one of the most cost-effective marketing vehicles you have in your arsenal.

So where do you start?

You first need to come up with the subject you want to write about. Is there something hot going on in your industry right now? Become an authority on it. Just remember, you want to temper any sales messages here. You want to be considered an expert on the subject you're writing about not shoving your product down your prospect's throat.

Now it's time to begin writing. There are many templates I found online but this template seemed to be the most pervasive.

Introduction - Here you'd want to briefly write about your subject of choice.

Problem - Here get to the heart of the matter. If it's a technical issue for your prospects that your company solves, write about the problems you know they face.

Solution - Start writing about the overall solution to your prospect's problem. How does your product or service (or your competitor's) address the problem? If you do mention your product or service again, don't be salesy, it won't lend to your credibility and it might even take some away.

Benefits - Once your prospect's problem has been addressed, now write about how easy their day will be or how much more money they'll make. Whatever the benefit, you need to scream it from the hilltops.

Summary - Sum it up for them and end with a bang.

On every page of your white paper you need to have your company name or logo, your web site address and your phone number at the very least. If you can fit your physical location somewhere on it, even better.

Just like when you create your email marketing campaigns you should make sure not to heavy up on too much text or too many graphics. Your prospects want your white paper for information, so make sure you use a healthy mix of both. You'll also want to avoid those long paragraphs, so make sure you consolidate your thoughts in smaller, easy to read paragraphs. Then you'll have a better shot at keeping your prospect's attention.

Promote it!

Now it's time to get the word out. Remember, since this is a prospecting tool you'll want to make sure you put a form on a page of your site to capture your prospect's information along with a snippet or some bullet points about the great information your white paper will give them. You can use a VerticalResponse opt-in form for this if you'd like, then after they've filled out their information you can direct them to the page where they can download the white paper. Here is a checklist of where you might want to promote it:

1. Send an email campaign to your prospects
2. Announce it in your newsletter
3. Put it on your homepage and on every page of your site
4. Set up a Google Adwords campaign
5. Put it as a link to download in all of your employee's email signatures
6. Blog about it
7. Put it on your Facebook Group and Fan pages
8. Tweet about it
9. Put it on a CD or a thumb drive and give it out at tradeshows

Now it's time to follow up on those leads that will be flying in the door! Now it's time to read 5 Ideas for Cultivating Leads.

2 Great Restaurant Marketing Ideas

Idea #1: This list building idea comes from Jessica Greene-Pierson, a Marketing Programs Manager here at VerticalResponse.

She went out to dinner with her husband at a local Indian restaurant and in the bill holder there was a survey. Nothing new there, we've posted about this idea before. But what got her attention was the fact that they offered a free buffet on your next visit if you coughed up your email address. Clever! Thanks Jess!

Idea #2: Here's another one I ran across recently. At the end of a great meal, the bartender gave us our bill. On the bill he noted that there were two other restaurants we should visit. I'm not sure if the restaurants were owned by the same owner or if they were swapping offers, either way it's a great idea to pump up the foot traffic.

There was a 7 day expiration date and an offer for 20% off our entire bill if we spent more than $25. The catch was that we had to save this receipt and show them. Check to see if your point of sale system allows you to customize your message on the receipt. If it does it's great because you'll capture the date when the clock starts the expiration ticker. Otherwise you can just use your own printer and give them a monthly expiration.

Any other great restaurant ideas? We'd love to hear them!

Is Your Data All Over The Place? Take Control!

With the economy in the dumpster, it's more important than ever to take control of all of your lists. It could be the thing that gets your business through any tough times. Plus, you might miss out on sending email campaigns to certain recipients just because you forgot about them, which means less revenue to you in the long run.

Do you have your lists in more than one of these places?

• VerticalResponse
• ACT, FileMaker, Salesforce or any other contact manager
• QuickBooks or your accounting system
• POS Systems
• Shoeboxes and fishbowls of business cards
• Spreadsheets
• Sign Up Book

If your business requires you to keep separate lists, that's ok, keep them there. It's not optimal, but if it works for your business fine. BUT, once a week, or more often if you choose, make a copy of all of your lists and choose the place that's easiest to access, upload and download your data. If it's ACT or Salesforce, make sure you don't add duplicate records, it could get messy. If it happens to be a spreadsheet, you might consider having customers in one sheet and non customers in another. And if you want to use VerticalResponse, you can do that too. We will de-duplicate on email address so make sure you include those. Any way you choose, make sure you consolidate your lists so you always have one data source to market to.

One more thing, if you've got your lists offline, spend an hour or so a week getting those lists in digital format. Then welcome these new list members with an email. You'll be surprised at how important managing your lists can be to your bottom line.

Opt-In Forms - What Data Should You Collect?

The question about the "right amount of questions" to ask of people signing up to your opt-in form is a tough one to answer, we get it all the time. Then we have to give the lame answer "that depends." But it's true, it does depend. It depends on what you really need for your business. There are varying degrees of data collection methods, here I've attempted to outline a few.

Quantity

If your business relies on sheer quantity and "just ok" quality of email addresses then you might only ask for email address and maybe first name if you want to ever personalize your email marketing campaigns. For our own newsletter this is what we do here at VerticalResponse.

VR customer BetterWall asks for only the email address because they're going for quantity. They probably will try to convert their subscribers to purchasers at a later date.

Quality

If you need your email addresses to be quality and be "real" verified email address, than a double opt-in verification or a CAPTCHA can be used.

Postal Address - Some businesses need a full address because they'll be sending postal mail to them. If you do need this make sure to make it required so your visitor can't leave the form without filling it out. What's also great about getting a postal address is if your recipients email bounces you can send them a direct mail piece asking them to call you and update it.

If you're not going to be sending your recipients anything by mail but want to know their location, you might want to just ask for postal code. Then you can do free zip code lookups with tools like the ones Melissa Data provides.

Phone Number - Phone numbers can be especially important if you need to call your customers at any given point to confirm something. And just like gathering postal information, you can call them if their email bounces to get an update. Expect to get a percentage of people giving bogus information as well, but many won't especially if you give them the reason why you're asking for it.

Product Interest - We have many customers who want to market to their recipients by the product or service they have an interest in.

Duckhorn Vineyards does a great job at telling their visitors why certain fields are required and asks what varietals they'd like to receive information about.

Age - Asking for age, again depending on the business might be a bit tricky. One way around this is by having a birthday club where you give something to your registrant as a gift. It can be in the form of a discount or something free.

Danger Zone Data - Credit Card information, household income & gender can all be a bit personal and turn off your registrant especially if they're required. Expect a lot of bogus information here if you're asking for it, there are just too many scams going on online and people are generally afraid.

Testing

If you can set up two different opt in forms. For one month show the opt in form with less data required and count how many email addresses you collect. Then in the following month show the opt in form where you ask for more information. At the end of the two months compare the two for what your business needs are and see if you got more email addresses from one month to another and if asking for more information deterred visitors from signing up.

Got any ideas for collecting information that you've learned? Share!