Introduction

I’m surprised by the number of business people I’m meeting who fall into one of these categories when it comes to databases:

1.  Don’t have one. They want one. Know they need one. But don’t know where to start and what they should do with it once they have it.

2. Have one. A large one. Collected or inherited. Don’t know how to best use it or leverage it without being pesky or wasting days dealing with frustrating and retarded Outlook newsletter templates etc.

In any case, you need an effective and easy way to collect, consolidate and then connect with the database.  I’m a firm believer in allowing technology to do all the hard work for you.  Gone are the days of expensive direct mail and wasted paper.  Welcome to the world of emails, RSS feeds, blogging and new media. Where one person can effortlessly reach thousands with very little effort.

Part 3 – Connecting

By now you have collected your database and consolidated the details into a suitable platform. Now it’s time to open your mouth and connect with your audience.

It’s a known fact that most people are afraid of public speaking.  The fantastic things about writing is, that you can always delete, edit and take back things you’ve written before the words spew from your mouth and you die of embarrassment and ridicule.

So as we go through these key points of successfully connecting with your audience, remember that you can take your time and there’s very little to be afraid of.  So give it a go!

1.  Don’t be boring! No one liked the boring teacher at school, the boring boss at the staff meetings or the boring shows on TV. You need to inform, entertain and engage your audience. I’ll say it again, DON’T BE BORING

2. Add value! Don’t talk about yourself, your new product or what specials you have to flog. That’s boring and selfish.  Give the audience information that they feel empowered by. e.g. If you’re a mortgage broker, be the first to let your audience know what the RBA cash rates have changed too (again) and how it effects them. Give info and helpful hints away for free and people will love you for it.  (Notice, although I can help people in this area by building them an awesome website, I’m not flogging my wares in this series of newsletters? Instead, I’m helping and giving away info for free)

3. Use New Media. Make sure you use images, videos and audio to get the attention of your audience.  Remember, we’re not all great readers and may want a little entertainment.

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4. Be Consistent. Out of sight, out of mind.  Very simple principle and we’d all agree that it’s important to keep up appearances – yet so many fail to keep regular contact with their audience, customers, clients etc. Don’t be a slacker – be consistent!! Let people who want too, hear from you at LEAST once per fortnight.

Introduction

I’m surprised by the number of business people I’m meeting who fall into one of these categories when it comes to databases:

1.  Don’t have one. They want one. Know they need one. But don’t know where to start and what they should do with it once they have it.

2. Have one. A large one. Collected or inherited. Don’t know how to best use it or leverage it without being pesky or wasting days dealing with frustrating and retarded Outlook newsletter templates etc.

In any case, you need an effective and easy way to collect, consolidate and then connect with the database.  I’m a firm believer in allowing technology to do all the hard work for you.  Gone are the days of expensive direct mail and wasted paper.  Welcome to the world of emails, RSS feeds, blogging and new media. Where one person can effortlessly reach thousands with very little effort.

Part 2 – Consolidating

So you’ve followed Part 1 and you have a stack of email addresses. Hopefully you have put them in an excel spreadsheet colomn so that they can be easily exported to whatever platform will serve you best.

There  are some great online platforms out there to put your database on so you can regularly connect with the people you need to.

Feedburner: Google’s feedburner is a free service that allows people who visit your blog or RSS powered website to Subscribe to get your blog posts via email each time you write one. It’s a little limited in functionality but would suit most people. One of the downsides to feedburner is that you can’t import other people’s email addresses – they need to do that themselves.  Check out feedblitz if you want to import your existing database of addresses (it’s not free though)  www.feedburner.com

Campaign Monitor: If you want send out newsletters not generated from  a blog featured site or published online then Campaign Monitor is a good option.  It allows you to import your contacts and then create a email that will be sent out. The best thing is, it allows you to track who has opened the email etc.  A great way to focus on your followup calls and rate the success of the email.  It’s also got a great function that will allow you to see what your newsletter looks like in many of the email clients out there. e.g. Hotmail, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo mail.  It’ll also tell you if your email is likely to get caught and filtered out by spam filters.  It’s a pay-per-email-address- you- send-to model. www.campaingmonitor.com

Aweber: If you want to create a campaign with a heap of follow-up emails that are automatically sent in timed succession to the recipient then Aweber is a great option.  It integrates a lot of clever tools and is priced fairly reasonable. Again, it’ll allow you to import your collected addresses and continue to add them as you get them.    www.aweber.com

Next week we’ll finish the series with CONNECTING. I’ll give you some creative ways to connect with your database and create some business.

Introduction

I’m surprised by the number of business people I’m meeting who fall into one of these categories when it comes to databases:

1.  Don’t have one. They want one. Know they need one. But don’t know where to start and what they should do with it once they have it.

2. Have one. A large one. Collected or inherited. Don’t know how to best use it or leverage it without being pesky or wasting days dealing with frustrating and retarded Outlook newsletter templates etc.

In any case, you need an effective and easy way to collect, consolidate and then connect with the database.  I’m a firm believer in allowing technology to do all the hard work for you.  Gone are the days of expensive direct mail and wasted paper.  Welcome to the world of emails, RSS feeds, blogging and new media. Where one person can effortlessly reach thousands with very little effort.

Part 1 – Collecting

For those who don’t have a database, you need to collect the data.

Firstly, you must narrow down and decide on which data is critical to get.

Do you need names, postal addresses, phone numbers or just email addresses?   I find that just email addresses are enough – from there you can get most anything else you want from the person if they’re willing to give it.  The less you want, the more likely you are to get it from them.

Depending on your business / organisation type and model you need to collect details in different ways. 

Here are 6 EASY WAYS to get you started on collecting contacts for your database.

1.  Go through your business card file and put all the email addresses in an Excel spreadsheet column.

2. Go through your email inbox and outlook address book and place those email addresses in a spreadsheet the same way.

3. In a retail situation, be sure to have a jar at your counter for people to place their cards in and staff to collect details from anyone that walks in. Perhaps start a discount or point club like Myers do or simply ask people after they’ve made a transaction if they don’t mind if you stay in touch with them. Letting them know that they can unsubscribe at any time.

4. Attend networking events and ask for business cards. Again, straight into the excel spreadsheet at this stage.  If you’re at a trade show and you’ve been collecting cards at your stand, be sure to hook up with another stall holder and exchange spreadsheets via email to see if you missed people that they got to their stand and vice versa.

5. Make the most of spam. This is a cheeky one but you all probably have a friend or two that send out a regular funny email to a heap of people they know or forward one onto you that has a massive list of other people’s email addresses on it.  Put them on your list too! If you’re ever asked, ‘How did you get my address?’ Tell them it was via this mutual friend or contract.

6. If you have a website that gets a bit of traffic, be sure to have a place where people can subscribe to your newsletter etc. But more on that next week.

Next week, I’ll give you some easy ways to consolidate those addresses using a smart online system or two.