This current 4 part series has been about social media and email marketing. We talked a little bit about finding the early social media platforms that are in its infancy stages compared to Facebook, Instagram and promoting on them. We also talked about giving away free content to consumers in order to build up a brand. This is an easy way to keep folks on your platforms, so later down the road you can ask for your audience to buy whatever you have to offer at the appropriate time. Today I’m going to talk about exchanging that content for email addresses.
The reason for gaining email addresses is that it is a long term way to keep in touch with your customer-base. Even if you have a successful website where your audience is consistently visiting, you may still need to have another way of reaching them. Lets say your website gets hacked, which is easy in todays online market, you can let your audience know that. It could take awhile for you to get the site up and running and you don’t want everyone thinking that you got rid of it. There could also be a situation where the servers hosting the site goes down for a time period. Again, you want to be able to reach your audience at any point of time to keep them up-to-date on what’s going on. Here are a few ways to gain email addresses from your audience.
Music artists can give away free content on platforms like noisetrade.com or their own personal websites in exchange for an email address. When you collect a person’s email, be sure to get their permission to send them promotional offers and other content. That is extremely important. Those who are not music artist could send out coupons for an email exchange or maybe even some kind of other gift. Writers could give out a free PDF of some sort or give away something like a free chapter of a book, an unpublished article, or something else similar in value. This is the idea of a great exchange of free content for email addresses. Make sure you are keeping up with these email addresses so that when you need to let them know about something big you are doing, you are able to handle that with ease.
If you are just starting out, I suggest you get a mail chimp account. It is an email service provider that allows for the first set of emails to be free. Once you get your email list built up, you will want to upgrade to a more professional service level. So go ahead and get started.
Thanks for reading this weeks Business with Bordeaux blog. For more on these topics you can listen to the Business with Bordeaux Podcast over on Soundcloud.
Thanks and God Bless
