The From Line

Incentives are a great way to motivate new signups - and they often work. However, using incentives for the sole purpose of growing your email list can lead to problems. The quality of these addresses will likely suffer since many use fake addresses just to get their hands on the incentive.

Those fake addresses (whether made up or belonging to someone else), will lead to high bounce rates, complaint rates and have a negative impact on your sender reputation. Before you know it, you have a major deliverability problem on your hands.

Is your brand in desperate need of a strategy to engage its customers, cultivate a stronger brand-to-customer relationship, create a more talked about social buzz, and drive repeat sales and returning customers?

Acquisition marketing can help significantly in each of these areas, and can improve upon your overall online marketing efforts.

But if you're like the majority of sales-based companies trying to navigate their way through the sometimes intimidating waters of digital marketing, you've probably missed valuable opportunities to acquire new email and mobile subscribers. It's important to keep in mind that each one of these missed opportunities leads to one less conversation, and one less purchase.

To determine how effective your brands acquisition marketing is, ask yourself the following:

• Are you asking for the customers email address at the exact point of sale, as soon as they land on your website, or not at all?
• Does your website have an email opt-in form that is easy to locate and simple to fill out?
• Most importantly, what are you doing with the analytical data you're collecting? 

Knowing exactly what you are doing with the data your brand is collecting allows you to push forward a more personalized, relevant customer experience. Choose to ignore data in your acquisition marketing efforts and you miss the biggest opportunity of all.

How do your sales and marketing teams define the sales funnel? If their views aren’t compatible and streamlined, you likely have a problem. Don’t fret though. Your team is just a few important steps away from maximizing their sales opportunities.

Develop the Most Qualified Lead

There seems to be a traditional rift between marketing and sales personnel when it comes to defining the sales funnel. It could be attributed to the number of steps required to qualify a lead or it may be due to the economic friction “generated by the need to divide the total budget.”

Ultimately, one of the biggest roadblocks to alignment is the different view each team has of the sales funnel. Therefore, it is up to the two camps to agree on what defines the most qualified lead.

There are generally four types of leads based on the level to which a customer is a good fit and interested:

Any savvy businessperson knows that email has become an essential method of delivering marketing messages. Permission marketing, however, is a specific type of marketing aimed at communicating with customers who have already indicated an interest in your product by opting in via your website, Facebook page, or another vehicle.

Even though you may have “permission” to send marketing messages, there are some specific steps you should take to make your marketing strategy as productive as possible.

Pinpoint “WIIFM”

One of the first things that your customers will want to know is ‘what’s in it for me?’

Nearly 15 years ago, internet marketing pioneer Seth Godin said in Fast Company , "Consumers will grant a company permission to communicate only if they know what's in it for them.” So essentially it all comes down to rewarding consumers for paying attention to your message. Whether you offer industry tips, links to helpful information, discounts on products or services, or something else, consumers are all about getting something for letting you develop a relationship with them.

Build Your Target List

Building relationships with customers requires you to both hone in on who will bring you the most profit, as well as define those who are most likely to influence other customers. You want and NEED these people on your permission marketing target list.

Email marketing is a primary factor in generating leads and initiating a call to action. But how can you make your campaign the best it can be?

Start with a Solid Email-Marketing List

A well cultivated and relevant list is the most valuable tool any email marketer can have. This means a list that has been carefully compiled, consisting of contacts of a true opted-in nature (not one that has been purchased) and genuinely want to hear from you. It is also important to keep your list up to date. Proper list cleansing and maintenance will ensure the best deliverability possible.

According to the September 2012 Business2Business post, “Get to Know Your Email Marketing List a Little Better,” the size of your marketing list is not nearly as important as the quality.

If you don’t take time to get to know the people in your list, you stand the risk of sending irrelevant, untimely, and potentially boring emails to the majority of your subscribers. This will result in poor engagement—sometimes referred to as email fatigue—and will lead to declining open rates and click-throughs, and ultimately poor sales.

Give Your Message the Creativity it Deserves

In order to produce a truly creative and targeted email, marketers must take into account several key components. The message’s subject line, body content and graphics all come into play.

The subject line should be engaging and include a strong call to action. After all, the first thing viewers will want to know is “what’s in it for me”. The first impression is invaluable. Marketers should make sure to tell subscribers what they want up front, what they will get in return, and then reinforce it several times throughout the email. By grabbing the subscriber’s attention from the start and layering their call to action several times, marketers will increase the strength of the first impression.