The 'Customer is King' and the 'Money is in the List' Never a truer word spoken, but, if you are starting out you have no list to contact, what do you do?
I have been working in financial services all my working life and for the last 10 years as an Independent Financial Adviser.
We are always looking to source a fresh supply of clients as not all of them come from referrals from existing satisfied clients which is the bese source of course.
On one occasion I was looking to increase my Equity Release business portfolio and I was talked into purchasing a marketing list by my practice principal wow 1,000 hot leads for £600.00 all expressing a need to arrange a product within the service I was able to offer them. The deal, I thought was expensive but my colleague assured me it was reasonable as all the leads had been screened for mail and telephone preference and had a checked telephone number too. He asserted 'you are sure to pick up several take ups from it and will be quids in'
Well I took him at his word and they arrived in some awful data format and it took ages to get them into a form I could use but hey it will be worthwhile as I gain all the new clients. With everything now in the ACT management software it will be a doddle and they will still be there for the next campaign too, excellent.
My mailing was prepared and off went the 1000 or so letters just wait for those eager reply slips to arrive, after all, they were all supposed to have an expressed need for the product presented to them. A week passed and ....... nothing.Oh well have to call all the numbers I guess.
Should be OK,after all, they are HOT targeted leads so I ought to be well received...huh,call after call they responded 'who are you why are you calling' -'why have you written to me' -' where did you get my details' - ' I have completed no survey' - 'go away I'm having my evening meal' - 'don't call again' -- get the drift here do you! The ones that did want to talk to me were either too young for the product or tenants with no home to raise capital from, useless, a chocolate tea pot.Oh yes and at least 20% of the telephone numbers were unobtainable too.
Lesson learned, spent a wased couple of weeks, incurred a large post bill, large phone bill, large purchase cost and income NIL...never again. I will not repeat this mistake with my Internet Marketing Business for sure.
With this lesson learned however on the Company website I insisted on having a capture page installed and ,well, these truly were hot leads, not as many for sure, maybe three or 4 each month but, when you called them they did ask for information and were truly receptive. We are about to introduce a regular newsletter to keep them warmed up even if the first contact failed to produce a result.
A parallel experience yes but point proved I think the so called targeted lists you buy from list sellers are far from targeted and far from fresh oh yes and they will no doubt have been sold to 50 other customers too as fresh virgin leads. Talking from experience I know this to be true. Blasting to the huge E.Mail lists is also not very successful but if the service is really cheap and easy to use no reason why you should not give it a try, it gets the name out there in any case.
Moral is, when you begin to market on the web make the first priority building your own list with an opt in squeeze page and, to achieve a good opt in rat, I suggest that to sweeten the pot for the punters you should offer something for them to collect free of charge.This gift must be something of tangiable value to them too not just any old piece of junk writing.
To find out one of the best ways to build your list click on the link below
http://www.g4usbmarketing.com
You will of course be invited to join my list ,and, as a reward collect your free E.Book entitled List Building with Alex.
Alex has allowed my offer this as a free gift to my site visitors and he is a very successful Internet Marketer based here in England.
Also to succeed in Internet Marketing everyone requires not only a list but in depth tuition please pop over to my other site and take a look at the offerings there. The training received from the Success University is excellent and each student has access to a vast repository of training material in text , vidoe and audio formats.
http://www.g4usbmarketing.biz
Norman Pascoe
norman@g4usbmarketing.com
Blog at http://www.g4usbmarketing.com/blog
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Contributor's Note
This article has been written and based on my own personal experiences. Circumstances may well differ for each individual and not all purveyors of lists will be like the ones I have encountered and may be perfectly responsible in their actions and descriptions.
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