Three Strategies to add 1,000 GREAT Contacts to your Email List [Repost]
Email is far from dead. According to the Direct Marketing Association, 58% of all direct consumer revenue comes from email campaigns. Hopefully, you have a monthly email discipline that generates consistent business. Our database connection program generates 25-30% open rates and consistently delivers 3-5 monthly consultations for each of our Mortgage Planners.
Beyond immediate business, your email list is the only thing you really own. A substantial social media following is great, but algorithms change, and you have very little control over what happens to Facebook. Your company marketing only extends as far as your employment. Owning and managing your database is a crucial step to becoming a business owner.
What are the three quickest ways to grow your email list today?
Get the data from your phone.
We often add contacts to our phones when we are on the move. The problem most Real Estate Pros have is that we don’t follow that up by adding them to our email drip system. The solution is to export your phone contacts and get them into your email drip.
You may not have many email addresses in your phone, but if 25% of your 1,000 contacts have emails. That is 250 new contacts with a 25% open rate that is over 60 people seeing your message every month.
The Action Plan: After much trial and error, we are using Contacts Backup for iPhone to export your entire address book easily. From there, delete your favorite pizza joint, ex, and co-workers — finally, import into your email system.
Mine your current email system.
You get emails all day long from your kid’s sports teams, school functions, and friends. Unfortunately, most of us do a lousy job translating that into our work email marketing. If you are like most of our clients, you have 200-300 email addresses in your current inbox that are not receiving emails monthly. The 300 email addresses translate to another 75 monthly views.
The Action Plan: Scan the last 6 months of emails and add email addresses to your Mail Contacts. Some platforms like Gmail do this for you. Export to CSV, open in Excel, clean it up and import it to your email system.
Export your Linkedin Contacts.
Approximately 40% of Linkedin Contacts have phone numbers and email addresses that are public. It is a B2B platform, after all. However, if you have done the work, you are connected to potential homeowners on that platform. Our newest MLO had 2,000 LI connections that yielded 700 new possible client email addresses.
The Action Plan: Log into LinkedIn and follow the Export process. In a day or so, you will have a CSV file you can convert to Excel. Delete your co-workers and friendly competitors and import them to your email system.
Most decent email programs automatically de-duplicate your records. We like Mailchimp for its ease of use, help with compliance and its reasonable cost structure. By adding 1,000 new contacts, you can expect 200-250 monthly views of your content. Considering most consumers have a mortgage event every 7 years, you just added 140 potential transactions per year.
Email disclosure: Finally, make sure you are compliant with CAN-SPAM regulations. Including an easy unsubscribe and only emailing folks you have a relationship with or have opted-in to receive emails. Consequently, If you spam a list, you risk substantial financial penalties. Or even worse, the blacklisting of your domain.