Size doesn’t really matter!
I have seen so many times lately my peers bragging about how many people they have in their email database and the relatively short time it has taken them to get a database that big. But the question that immediately pops into my head is… what is the quality of the people in that database?
Now I understand that it is not always the person you know who will buy from you, it could be a referral from them to someone in their circle of influence that ultimately leads to a sale, but I can’t help but think that the quality of the person referring and subsequently the quality of the lead, should be the focus, especially if you are looking for growth in your business. I remember my business coach telling me over and over, ‘people refer like’, which means they will refer people like themselves. So if you have a database full of people that are price driven, difficult to deal with shoppers why would you want to receive referrals from them? It only wastes your time and that of your sales team.
Instead we are starting to find success in really getting to know all the people in our database. Who they are, what they like, what they look for and what is important to them. Then we market to them with information that is relevant, timely and will help them.
It is important to remember that increasingly generation y is starting to be in positions of influence and they have grown up being bombarded daily by literally thousands of different forms of advertising, if they be on the backs of taxi’s, in iphone apps, magazines, billboards, emails, online banners, television, radio +++ so what is going to stop them from just deleting or tuning out to these sorts of advertising formats?
Sending out email blasts to 2500 people that you don’t really know much about and telling them things that you don’t really know if they want to know and then not really measuring the results, you have to question the effectiveness of this kind of activity. Doesn’t this really just contribute to the bombardment of advertising that we all receive daily? I know I personally receive upto 10 email newsletters a day and I automatically delete most of them.
Wouldn’t businesses be better to spend the time focusing on analysing their email marketing campaigns in particular to find out who clicked through and then did they buy, what is the return on investment for that campaign? Online advertising makes it so easy to get the results. Imagine being able to report back on your marketing activities with information such as ‘ we have secured 50 new business leads in the last quarter from our email marketing campaigns which has resulted in our website generating 20% more interest than our competitors. Our last email campaign drove 12 new enquiries to our sales team and we have learned that there is a trend in prospects wanting to know more about X product or service?
I want to see more of my peers bragging about these kinds of results instead of the size of their database. I really believe it is not the size that matters it is the quality and how you are measuring it.
Yours in design
Bell-asaurus
