Since the introduction of Bill C-28, acquiring new contacts and growing the marketing database has become a major challenge. Without this, our campaigns’ reach gets greatly reduced and our marketing impact gets equally affected.
Constantly trying to grow this marketing list keeps it in good form and thereby allows us to promote our brand to new people.
Here are 7 ways to grow your database:
1. SUBSCRIBE!
Feel free to offer the visitors on your website or in shops a way to find you or to subscribe to receive notifications in future. Newsletter, circular alerts or discounts – all are good opportunities to ask your visitors or customers for permission to communicate with them. By combining several small initiatives for acquisition, you will succeed in maintaining a steady stream of new contacts.
2. ORGANIZE A CONTEST
Organize a contest and promote it on social media. Through participation in the contest (with a field of informed consent), we can add these participants in our database. For a well-crafted contest, we can fully recover the value of the prize offered in acquiring new contacts.
3. CREATE A REFERRAL PROGRAM
Ask your existing contacts from your database to recommend new contacts. If one of your contacts is interested in your offer, it is likely that his friends also are. You can also encourage referrals by offering a prize or a benefit to those who recommend new people.
4. REQUEST FOR INFORMATION, BOOKINGS AND PURCHASES
Make sure to change ALL your query forms and online shopping forms so that they include an email field and a consent request field. Integrate the concept of user profile on your website. Encourage the visitors on your website to create an account to make a purchase, a booking request or even for an information request. This way, you can identify more people on your website. Each new profile will be a new contact for you.
5. PARTNERSHIP
Start a marketing initiative in partnership with a business that is complementary to yours (or a business that targets the same type of customers). This way you can develop joint advertising campaigns and get an indirect access to contacts of your partnering business. The battle is already half won! You will be left with only those contacts that are willing to be directly contacted by your company, which makes it relatively easy as these are the people for whom you keep tempting offers.
6. FACEBOOK LOGIN
Integrate Facebook Login with your website. This technology allows a visitor to access his profile on your website using his Facebook profile. Once authenticated, you can get some information from his Facebook account. So, you can keep this information in your database and reuse it time and again.
7. CREATE SHAREABLE AND DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT
Create interesting content in the form of white papers, eBooks, case studies, etc. Ask your visitors to provide their email addresses to be able to download these documents. Each consented download will increase the number of contacts in your database.
Do not forget to ask for the consent of all new contacts. A targeted database of consenting users is much more effective and legal.
