For those of you who have done any on-line marketing, you no doubt have heard about how important it is to build 'your list'. Unfortunately, there are some who have taken this basic business concept and found a way to charge for 'systems' to make it 'easy' to create huge lists of contacts. There are others who harvest emails from the Internet and sell them to a gullible public by telling them all these people are just 'waiting' to get your business information. Tens of thousands of dollars are funneled into these false promises each year by people who don't know better.
I'm not saying that there are no reputable list brokers out there. Huge corporations purchase these highly targeted lists to send print material out to all the time, but those fully vetted leads cost quite a lot more than the average small business person can afford. While we will discuss list brokers and schemes in other articles on the site, I would recommend you stay away from them for now and concentrate on building your own list.
The business concept of developing customer lists, and prospective customer lists, is quite sound and have been around for centuries. In fact, customer lists are so valuable, that they are considered an asset when figuring what price you would pay to buy an existing business. That is because the cost of keeping a current customer is a fraction of what it costs to acquire new ones.
What the Internet has given the small business person (and large corporations) is the ability to reach a target audience with automated systems that cost very little when set up and when configured properly. Because of the cost effectiveness, email on-average generates $38 for every $1 spent, which is an astounding 3,800% Return on Investment (ROI), making it one of the most effective options available. More importantly, with 3.9 billion people checking their email everyday in 2020, that cost effectiveness has allowed the small business person to compete on a more level playing field by using the same principles.
It is impossible to be successful online without some form of marketing online by email. And everything you are doing online is related to building and perfecting your list. On-line marketing is about setting up the automated systems to collect email addresses, educate your subscribers, and convert those subscribers into customers.