Market Til The Money Runs Out

I haven’t tallied the number of holiday shopping promotions I’ve received via email over the past few weeks, but it seems like many more than in past years. Companies know that consumers have a limited amount of funds that they are going to spend somewhere, so they are pulling out all of the stops early to grab as much of the pie as possible.

The connection I want to highlight in this blog post is that in order to be able to market to prospects (very inexpensively) through email marketing, an investment needs to be made to create the database in the first place. SEO, SEM and Social Media can each play a vital role in developing your list.

Obviously it’s preferred to convert a high percentage of your paid search leads into customers, but it’s equally important to build a database of folks that you can remarket to later on.

Begin investing in your database in a methodical way. Figure out the response rates and average order size you realize from your email blasts and then figure out how large the list needs to grow to in order to attain your sales objectives for 2011 and beyond. Next, determine which marketing channels are most cost effective for your business and begin to grow your list. None of this is easy, but it’s the best way to secure your long term success.