- Image by Smithsonian Institution via Flickr
100? 1,000? 10,000? More? By list I mean email, RSS, or even (gasp) snail mail. Someone was asking the other day whether theirs was large enough. And if people would buy things from a free email newsletter.
The answer is that they will buy. Not all of them, but they will – if you have been sending them relevant, useful information and whatever you’re offering is also relevant and useful to them. No chance of selling dentist tools to a list of people who signed up for gardening tips.
There are three things (primarily) that affect the response you get.
Cleanliness
Is your list up-to-date? If it’s an email list you’re using AWeber (which I highly recommend – sign up and I get milkshake money), or another online list management service, this gets taken care of automagically. New signups are added, unsubscribers are removed. If you’ve got a snail mail list, when something comes back, go update your list (or get someone else to do it).
Long ago, I worked for a company that hadn’t done this in a very long time. When they finally decided to do something, the guy they hired called me (I was marketing manager at the time) and said, “You have to come see this.” He took me into a room that was about 10 x 6 feet (roughly 3 x 2 meters). It was FULL of returned mail. They were mailing to companies that had closed, people who had left, and people who were deceased. Big waste of time and money.
Responsiveness
Some people are buyers, some are not. You can have people who are just at the beginning of looking for something (doing research on a new washing machine, for instance), or people who are ready to buy (my washing machine is broken, I need a repair man).
Look to see who’s buying (and who isn’t) – and what they buy. If you see certain people are buying lots of gardening tools from your home improvement site start a separate gardening tools list.
Relevance
See my dentist tools, gardening comment. The important thing isn’t the size of the list as much as how relevant your information is to their needs. If you’ve got a list of 2,000 rabid, raving medieval jousting fans, they will want armor, lances, helmets, and banners – and they will want all of it. Find those people (that tribe of 2,000) and they will buy and buy and buy from you.
When you’re building your mailing list, concentrate on relevance, cleanliness, and responsiveness – not size. Bragging about a list of 150,000 people is fun – but not if 95% of them never open your emails or half your messages bounce.
Email me privately for personal help.
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