A Direct Marketing Agency - Helping Brands Acquire and Retain Customers

With B2B email list rentals costing on average of $281 per thousand, it is still cost-prohibitive for most businesses to rent email names unless you have an extremely high average order, as well as a healthy margin. With that said, once you HAVE your customer's email addresses, email marketing is an extremely effective way to upsell, cross sell and increase the lifetime value of your customers. Therefore developing strategies to build your permission-based email file via existing channels - web, retail, catalog, etc. - is critical in maximizing your marketing investment.

Collecting email names should be done at every possible customer contact point. Just asking for it is effective if the customer believes there is value in the information they can get from your company (enewsletter, promotions, education). However, sometimes an incentive is necessary and should be tested to maximize results.

I've listed some methods that have been successful for us:

-  Within the Website

• Require registration when accessing certain information on your site, such as research studies, white papers, etc. The more relevant to a particular business customer, the more likely they are to register so consider providing segmented content by target industry.
• Include a newsletter/promotional sign up on your home page and on every page of your website to increase subscription rates
• Ask for email addresses on the order mechanism
• Open a discussion forum for registered users only

-   Through traditional marketing vehicles

• Direct mail postcards, faxes
• Catalog blow-ins, bind-ins, on order form
• From the outside sales force - encourage participation through sales incentives, contests

-   With warranty cards, billing invoices, customer service call-ins, change of address cards

-    At trade show booths

-   Through refer a friend/co-worker programs (viral marketing) with contest or promotion

And also, importantly, it is imperative that any permission-based email marketing programs be done with privacy policies clearly communicated to all.