The bottom line is: everyone wants new leads, so everyone needs new lists.

But businesses don’t want just ANY LIST– they want updated lists of cold prospects; pin-point specific opt-in lists; and potential customers who genuinely want what they are looking to sell.

Any business can go buy a few thousand names from Jigsaw and hit the “send” button in an email marketing platform – but the trouble lies in the quality of these lists (and the legality of them as well). We’ve almost always found that purchased lists leave businesses sorely disappointed and looking to point fingers, so we suggest that you look “bigger picture” than just a few thousand names and ask yourself:

• Do you plan to also engage these customers on relevant social networks? How will you find them?
• Do you have a strategy for when half your list is lousy (email appends) and the other half is irritated that they weren’t properly opted-in in the first place?
• Have you thought about your offline records much? Or your “dead” email addresses? Don’t you think these people are still out there?
• Are you willing to risk missing a possible new client just because their information changed?
• Have you thought long-term about your brand identity, email deliverability, and your “good name” as a business? What do these messy “batch and blast” processes mean for your bottom line?

Once you’ve thought these things over, keep an eye out for Part 2 of this series, which’ll give you some great ideas on where to find prospects and how to engage them!

Here at ListEngage we think about this stuff all the time – and have a full-service team that specializes in email appends, data-mining, and matching the absolute best (opt-in) prospects with the absolute best permission-based marketers (aka – you!). Part 2 of this series will be posted shortly, so keep an eye out… but in the meantime email, Facebook or Tweet us if you have any questions.

There’s been a lot of debate recently about the future of email: is it pushing forward stronger than ever or on the verge of extinction, about to be overrun by all-inclusive social networks?

As an e-marketing specialist, I find it hard to imagine the internet without email. No matter what you use email for, I believe that we, as online content consumers, will always need our inboxes to aggregate, create, organize, and search the hundreds of online data points we create daily as we navigate the web. Email is the only private online location where users can store and create content with very few limitations or restrictions. Where else can you manage your social networks, businesses, bills, family, friends, banks, job searches, and more in one location?

At ListEngage, we help our clients with email and social media marketing daily, so we see the benefits and drawbacks of each: email is a great relationship building tool but not a great prospect acquisition channel, while social media, if used intelligently, is ideal for prospect acquisition and qualification but lacks the “direct contact” that opt-in email does.

I’ve been really impressed with a company called Groupon lately, that seems to be using email and social media as a dynamic 1-2 punch for spreading their daily deals and messages. Click here to read more about the union of email and social media, and how Groupon is delivering a winning e-marketing TKO.

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The further we venture into the 21st century, the more we’ll see not only just how important email marketing and online presence will become – but we’ll also begin to see how essential it is to get your message across in the right language as well. We live in a global economy – and it’s hard to sell a product when users can’t understand the language that you’re speaking to them in.

A client of ours, Parametric Technology Corporation, or PTC, is one shining example of how to cater to multiple audiences the right way, by using email marketing. Several years ago, PTC approached ListEngage with a problem: they wanted to send a monthly newsletter to customers around the world, but they didn’t necessarily have a language of choice database for each subscriber. Here’s where we came in: ListEngage helped PTC to design a process that allowed the creation of one newsletter in 10 different languages that would be emailed to subscribers by country. People in Italy would receive the Italian version and their audience in China would receive the Chinese version .

But what if a reader in China received the email in Chinese and wanted to view its content in English? ListEngage helped PTC streamline this problem by creating a “language bar” at the very  top of each email which links  a specific language to a web page version of the newsletter that is posted as a HTML document  in that particular language. So, if a reader in Italy wants to read the newsletter in Spanish, all they have to do is click on “Español” and their  newsletter will pop up for reading right there. The multi-language emails are great for readers and even better for PTC who can connect with more prospects and possible customers with just one click of a button.

PTC “Maintenance Minute” readers can currently enjoy their emails in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Russian.  And though ListEngage doesn’t have the talent to read and translate in 10 different languages, our platform and employees certainly have the expertise to coordinate the “heavy lifting” of getting emails like these out the door in a timely fashion.

James Winokur, Director, Business Development Global Maintenance Support had this to say about the email creation process and ListEngage’s efforts: “[ListEngage] now helps us with all aspects of the 10 language versions of the Maintenance Minute that we send out world-wide on a monthly basis. ListEngage has had a huge impact in our monthly production of this newsletter endeavor and has made this… a success for us.”

Shall I compare thee to a great email list-growth strategy?
You bet!

The two of you “art” fairly similar, I must say.
Our love and my list both started out small, like the darling buds of May.

Then over time, as our love organically grew,
So did my lists-in quality and quantity too!

Like a good little prospect, I subscribed to your love,
And just like the email capture on my website, it fit like a glove.

So on the horizon, what do I see?
Well, more chances to grow us all social-ly,
We can take dance classes, or have dinner with friends,
While my lists will use Twitter as a means to an ends.

Remember my love, thy eternal beauty doth brightly gleam.
And like my list growth strategies, the ROI on your love is Supreme.

Ok, so maybe you’d get backhanded if you actually delivered this sonnet to your True Love this Valentine’s Day– but after you read  ”Why Growing Great Lists is just like Growing Great Love” you might actually agree that the two share some pretty stark  similarities. Could it be that growing any good relationship–whether it’s two people “feeling sparks fly” for the first time or a web visitor signing up for a newsletter for the first time-always begins with a few simple steps?