Should my business collect email addresses?

This is a question many small business owners ask themselves. The answer is a resounding YES! If you have not started collecting email addresses of your customers, you need to start…..TODAY. Not tomorrow or next week…TODAY!

Why? You ask.

When a customer buys from you they have just shown a willingness to transact business with your company. They like your product offering, they like your prices, they like YOU. The time of the sale is a perfect time to capture their email address.

I would suggest offering a discount for giving you their email address or an additional free product that has perceived value to the customer, but doesn’t really cost you anything in hard dollars…maybe a report explaining the health benefits of using your product or a booklet of recipes that can be made using the product they purchased from you.

An important facet of collecting their email address is to get permission (Permission Marketing) to send them future promotional emails, newsletters, communications, etc. You need to be specific and tell them what kind of information they can expect from your company and the frequency with which they will get emails from you.

Find a service that you can use to manage your email lists and allow you to easily design marketing campaigns or newsletters. You also need a way to measure who opens your emails, what links they may have clicked that you set up. By measuring, you gain important knowledge about your customers needs, wants and desires.

With this knowledge, you can continually segment your database and send out totally relevant email campaigns and keep increasing your opening % rates, ultimately growing your business.

Which is what we all want, right?