Where do you guys go about finding businesses email addresses to send out a brief marketing email about my web design services?
So far in my short journey ive found the best places to be google local business searches (this usually just gets me to an existing website where i can find contact info). Chamber of commerce websites seem to be a pretty good source too. The business blue book is another good source of info.
Anyone else have any good sources to share?
Plenty of companies offer industry specific lists like this (at a big price, of course), but be aware that major email companies, like CampaignMonitor, still see these as spam lists, so won’t let you use them. Really, no matter how you want to look at this, at the end of the day you are sending out unsolicited email, which in many people’s book is spam.
The best way to gather a mailing list is ‘organically’, with people opting in of their own free will because they like what you have on offer. Marketing people don’t want to hear that, of course, but it’s a much nicer principle to work by.
with strict anti-spamming laws coming up, email marketing is best avoided, specially with anonymous email lists.
Email marketing works best within your customer / well wisher group who would read your email in-case you sent one. other than that its usually deleted / sent to thrash!
building email lists is a waste of time / money according to me as I feel there’s hardly any one reading those emails other than the ones they feel are important to them
Offer a report. People “opt-in” to get the report. It’s called opt-in marketing.
Make the report informative, differentiate your business from competitors, and you’ll generate business. Don’t and you won’t do that well.
Make the report fit in with a marketing campaign and you’ll do well. Don’t and you won’t.
Target the report so it’s what clients want to know and not DIYers who would just as soon make a site themselves, and you’ll succeed. Discuss everything about CSS, PHP, and Jquery and nothing about business objectives and you won’t.
But that’s true of pitching to random businesses as well.