Chapter Twenty-Nine

Your Email Data Base is Your Gold Mine

By Ben Hart

Your email data base is part of your bulk email marketing system.

A data base can simple – just the name and e-mail address.  Or it can have many levels of complexity and sophistication.

The more sophisticated systems allow for trigger events.  So if a prospect makes a first-time purchase, they are automatically moved from the prospect list to a first-time buyer list.  Or, let’s say I am running a conference.  The instant someone registers and pays for the conference, that person is moved to a new list and receives a different set of email communications geared not to sell the conference, but to provide important follow-up information.

If you are running a big general store -- say, a big sports equipment store -- the instant someone buys a golf-related product, that person would be moved to your list of known golf enthusiasts.  But another customer who buys camping gear would go on a list of campers and start receiving your promotions aimed at campers.

The segmenting of your data base by the actions and expressed interests of your prospects and customers allows you to send them highly targeted communications – communications that are exactly in line with their interests.  This is essential for all your marketing.  But you can do this very easily and efficiently with your email marketing system, and by the way you manage your email data base.

You can also combine the tracking features with your data base management.  Some tracking tools allow you to see exactly who is opening your email and who is clicking-through to your landing page.  Someone who is very interested might click through on 10 or 20 separate occasions, and you’ll see that in the tracking report.  For these clearly very-interested prospects, you can send an email asking your prospect if they have any questions they need answered.

The higher-end email marketing systems, the more sophisticated the data base management features.  The more targeted your message and the more personal your message, the better it will do – often by a factor of 100.

CheetahMail and DoubleClick offer amazing tools that will allow to track what your prospects and customers are doing on your website. Google Analytics is also great. Being able to watch what your prospects are actually doing on your site is stunningly powerful information to a skilled marketer.

For example, a phenomenon called “shopping cart” abandonment is a significant problem.

This is when your prospect begins to place an order, but for some reason stops. 

Perhaps the process was too difficult, or their screen froze or something distracted them.  Whatever the reason, the ordering process was interrupted and stopped.  Some studies put “shopping cart abandonment” as high as 25%. 

With a sophisticated data base and behavior tracking system, “shopping cart abandonment” can be a triggering event that would generate an instant email to your “shopping cart” abandoner encouraging her to try again, or perhaps provide alternative ways to pay.

You can turn half your “shopping cart” abandoners into brand new buyers this way.

Not only have you now made that sale – a sale you never would have made without being able to track customer behavior and without the capacity to generate the instant email automatically -- but you now have a new customer who, with proper cultivation, may become a multi-buyer. 

A portion of your multi-buyers will become lifetime customers who will buy thousands of dollars in products and services from you over time.  All these customers could have been lost forever through “shopping cart abandonment,” but were resurrected with your “triggering event” capability of being able to generate an instant email message automatically to your frustrated or distracted shopper. 

Sophisticated marketers should check out the capabilities offered by CheetahMail.com.  It’s marketing power is mind-boggling.

But the bigger point is, the more knowledge you have about the behavior, interests and concerns of your prospects and customers, the more precisely you can target your email messages to address whatever is on your customer’s mind.

What makes Internet marketing so different from other forms of advertising is its potential for interactivity and allowing you to cultivate that all-important relationship with a customer. 

The primary vehicle for that is email.

Some Hosted Email Marketing Services To Check Out

I list here a few of the most reputable third-party hosted email marketing services.  And I list them in order of approximate price-point – least expensive to most expensive.  The approximate costs here are monthly:

                                                           10,000 Names                       100,000 Names

                                                                  Per Month                               Per Month

GetResponse.com                                        $17.95                                     $98

AWeber.com                                               $19.96                                     $109.95

ConstantContact.com                                   $75                                          $450

iContact.com                                                $74                                          $579

Topica.com                                                  $249                                        $1,000

Global IntelliSystems.com                             $130                                        $1,300

EmailLabs.com                                             $500                                        Custom Quote

Vertical Response.com                                 $750                                        $2,600

CheetahMail.com                                         Custom Quote                          Custom Quote

As you can see, there’s a huge range in cost.  The more expensive services usually feature more elaborate tracking features.  CheetahMail is the Ferrari-level service.

For the most part, the costs here account for sending just one email per week. 

What’s envisioned by these services is a weekly e-newsletter put out by a small business.  Costs go up if you are emailing your entire list more than four or six times per month (depending on the service).  Costs shown above will certainly be different by the time you read this.  This list is meant to show you the range of cost, not the exact current cost.

One way to cut your monthly email bill if you have a large list of 100,000 opt-in subscribers or more is to use several different services.

You might store your best customers on the better services and shift your older names who have never bought anything over to the cheap service – where you store them and email them every so often. 

Next Chapter >>>