Building a email list for your business should be a top priority. It is the most important marketing tool where you can build a mailing list and segment them according to your geographic, demographics, psychographics and Product benefits for your target market.

No email list is ever going to pull as effectively as your own email list created from thousands of prospects that your business will have the opportunity to market to, as well as the hundreds of customers who have tasted or selected or used one or more of your products or services.

Just names and addresses aren’t enough. You need to segment your prospective client email list like the big mailing houses do.

The way you do this is ask your clients and prospects their preferences. Why they purchased? Their reading habits? Their spending habits? You could ask them where they heard about you? TV? News? Interent? Radio? Paper? Other?

As soon as they become a customer, you record their purchase whether it was this particular product or that product, this service or that service. Track every purchase, every phone call you make to them, and everything else you’ve ever talked to them about on your computer.

You need to know how long they’ve been a customer. Whether they’re current on their payments. Whether they respond to an advertisement. What other subsequent purchases they’ve made? What caused them to make those purchases? Was it a letter you sent, a followup? The list goes on and on.

You want to be able to improve and offer them more things based on the pieces of information you know about them. You can segment your customer file as:

- Calculate the value of your customers. This is the value of every lost name that you don’t capture.

- Capture names through registrations, drawings, coupons, free subscriptions, consultations, charge card verifications, and photocopy their checks.

- Design surveys, registrations, etc. to solicit personal information from your customers regarding those variable, important pieces of information for your business.

Abe Cherian
CEO, Multiple Stream Media, LLC

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