In Building your e-mail address list - Part 1, I explain how to build your e-mail list from past customers, friends and referrals.

Once you’ve added all the people you know to your e-mailing list, it’s time to start adding people you’ve never even met. These are folks who’ve visited your website and want to learn more about you.

To gather their e-mail address, you need to:

• Put a professional contact form page on your website. Use a “Contact me” menu option or button in the upper right-hand corner of every page to link to your form. Don’t just show your e-mail address - make it easy for potential customers to contact you by e-mail.
• Put an e-mail newsletter sign-up form on every page of your website. Link to the sign-up form from your Facebook page, and put a link to it at the bottom of e-mails you send out daily.

The two tools I recommend for this are Wufoo and Vertical Response. Wufoo lets you create a professional contact form on your website, then collects the e-mail addresses in an easy-to-use file you can import into Vertical Response. Vertical Response lets you create a professional e-mail newsletter sign-up form you can put on every page, collects e-mail addresses, and automatically adds them to your e-mail newsletter list.

Sound confusing? Here are the steps:

1. Open a free Vertical Response account. Upload every e-mail address you have into your master list.
2. While in the List tab, create a new e-mail newsletter opt-in form. design the form, then copy and paste the code into every page on your website. If you aren’t comfortable modifying your website, you should have your web designer do it for you.
3. At the bottom of every e-mail you send out (even for personal notes), put a link to the e-mail newsletter opt-in form. You’ll be surprised how many people will take the time to click the link and join your mailing list.
4. Open a free Wufoo account. Design a contact page, then copy and paste the code into your contact page on your website. If you already have a contact page (some website templates have them pre-installed), whenever you answer an e-mail, make sure you manually copy the e-mail address to your vertical response master e-mail list.
5. When you’re ready to send your first e-mail newsletter in Vertical Response, you’ll have a master list including past customers, friends, family, anyone who has contacted you, and anyone who signed up for your email newsletter. If you use Wufoo, you can easily download the list of everyone who has contacted you from your website, then upload it into your Vertical response master list (don’t worry - Vertical Response weeds out the duplicates automatically).

Note that while both Wufoo and Vertical Response are free to use, when it is time to send out an e-mail newsletter, Vertical Response charges 1.5 cents per e-mail sent. Since they also throw out duplicates, that is a pretty good bargain.

If you are diligent about building your e-mail marketing list, you should see it grow by dozens of people every month. Because it is inexpensive to send e-mail newsletters to these folks, you’ll soon find that your e-mail list is your most important marketing tool.

UPDATE:

I just received this great link from Vertical Response to an article called 29 Ways to Collect E-Mail Addresses for Your Business. This is a great list you can copy and check off for your studio.

Tags: e-mail marketing

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.