Whether you cater to walk-in customers, online consumers, or businesses, online marketing is an effective way to stay in touch, encourage repeat visits, educate and inform, and grow your business. However, building consumer and business mailing lists takes time and effort. In general, you have two choices: build your own list or purchase a list from a lead generation firm. Make sure that the firm that you decide to purchase your leads from is a reputable firm that has been in business for quite some time. This will allow you to purchase leads that are worth buying. While building your own business and consumer mailing lists has fewer costs involved, there are a few pros and cons involved. Here’s a look.
The Pros of Building Your Own Mailing Lists
Whether building business or consumer mailing lists (or both), doing it on your own is typically less expensive than buying a list. Signing people up can be as simple as putting a signup form by your cash register or an electronic version on your website. Many of the people who sign up for your mailing lists will be existing customers, allowing you to extend your relationship. From there it’s your responsibility to contact these customers and reassure them that you value their business.
The Cons of Building Your Own Mailing Lists
However, the process can be slow and tedious. While having a simple signup sheet by your cash register is easy enough, who’s going to enter that information into your database? How are you going to entice online visitors to sign up (hint: they usually want something in return)? While it’s nice to stay in touch with existing customers, how are new prospects going to find out about your offers? How many people are realistically going to sign up for your business and consumer mailing lists? With just a trickle of subscribers, it’s also easy to get discouraged and not take action. This process can also go wrong in a number of different scenarios and you could end up losing money without having a significant amount of people signing up. Setting the whole process of making forms, handing them out, and entering them into a database requires time and money. Suppose that you get all this done and invest a significant amount of time and money into building your mailing lists but you still aren’t able to build a long list.
The Solution
Robust business and consumer mailing lists don’t happen by accident. Build your list quickly and effectively by buying targeted mailing leads. These leads should be bought from a reputable company that has been in business for quite awhile. By doing so, you can continue your traditional list building efforts and grow your list to a point where it can yield results. This method is also cost effective and provides a higher return on investment for your business.