When company’s want to increase sales, the vast majority just start blindly spending money on advertising.  The irony is that advertising has one of the worst returns on investment for marketing dollars spent.

MarketingProfs.com did an extensive study on marketing spending returns on investment.

The design team at Spectruss took the data and made the image below.

 

As you can see, email marketing dominates with SEO being a distant second.  Banner Ads are literally in last place for a return on investment.

Most people get intimidated with email marketing – however it’s exceptionally easy to get started.

Here are some places to collect email addresses to quickly build your list.

 

Facebook Messages

Recently a friend sent me a message asking for my email address.

I instantly gave it to him.

It turns out he is opening up a restaurant and wanted to invite me to the launch party.

Twitter

Twitter has a very low response rate with just getting customers from this platform.  However, they let you set-up “cards” where someone can opt-in to your email list with just one click.

If you are already active on twitter I recommend this strategy.  You can create a twitter card and use it for free.  We will post an in-depth guide to this in the future.

Checkout Receipt

This should be very easy to do with your check-out system especially if you are online.

What’s more important however is that actual customer’s email is exponentially more valuable than an email from a non-customer.  Ramit Sethi from iwillteachyoutoberich.com provided the following statistics:

You can see that it’s extremely valuable to get the email from people who have already trusted you with their money.

Giveaway

Giveaways are a great strategy to build a large email list in a short amount of time.  The key here is to make your giveaway relevant to your core customer.  For instance, if you owned a children’s boutique you don’t want to have a giveaway for a set-of tools.

Landing Page

This is an obvious one that Groupon.com made extremely popular.  The key with a landing page is enticing someone with something VERY valuable.  A limited-time discount code is a great giveaway as well as a free report or checklist.

Don’t overthink what you need to giveaway as an email opt-in.  A lot of people prefer short resource guides compared to large eBooks.

 

All Spectruss sites are fully integrated with the email service provider Mailchimp.

Do you use email in your business? The CAN-SPAM Act establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.

1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

Source: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business