The Constant Contact Guide to Email Marketing

6

Making Your Email List More Valuable

Imagine two music stores for sale on the same street. Both music stores have losts of guitars, keyboards, drum sets, and other instruments. They both offer lessons, repairs, and a friendly staff. They both have convenient parking, good signage, and lots of drive-by traffic. Both stores have the same square footage and both are listed for sale at the same price.

The value of these two music stores might seem the same when you examine their physical assets, but one store is actually worth much more than the asking price while the other represents a significant risk to the buyer. Here’s why.

The store that represents a risk to the buyer relies on drive-by traffic, time-consuming phone calls, and expensive print adversing to attract new and existing customers to its in-store promotions and its web site.

The more valuable store gains new customers the same way as the risky store, but the staff has also worked hard to collect email addresses and permission from the thousands of musicians, parents, and music teachers who have visited the store over the years. As a result, this store has been able to continually attract customers to the store and the web site at a very low cost by emailing promotions, event invitations, and holiday sale announcements. It also continually adds more personalized information to its email list in order to remember birthday, follow up on recent purchases, and send promotions that are targeted to the exact instruments ...