List building for realtors and entrepreneurs is simple, not easy but not hard either! Everyone talks about the need to build a list if you are going to do any marketing, whether via the internet or by direct mail. Everyone says that you should add to that list on a daily basis. Well, as annoying as they are, I agree with everyone! Having a list, mostly targeted to your industry is the most powerful tool you have in your business. Here are my top ten tips for growing and nurturing your list!

Top 10 List Building Techniques

• NUMBER ONE AND MOST IMPORTANT – READ THIS IF YOU SKIP EVERYTHING ELSE! Make sure you are proud of what you send out to your list, every time. I have a newsletter that focuses on marketing for entrepreneurs and realtors. It takes me about 4 hours, 2 days per month to do my newsletter. I am ALWAYS proud of what I am sending and have very few people request to be removed from my list.
• Having a list means needing a database. Your database can be an excel spreadsheet or huge CRM product, either way you need to be able to contact those people on a regular basis. Include First Name, Last Name, Address 1, City, State, Zip, Email and Phone at a minimum. Find out more about what a small business database is!
• When you are starting out, ADD EVERYONE! – I had a conversation with a client yesterday and he questioned the viability of adding someone you know that has no connection to your business. I have had the most referrals for my business from a friend who has never purchased from me. You never know who your friends and family know who might be a customer.
• As for a business card from EVERYONE you meet. We often give our card to people and forget to ask for theirs. Add those people the day you get them and start them on an autoresponder series (see below) to keep yourself fresh in their mind
• Autoresponders (or drip marketing) are series of messages that you send to people after putting them in your database. They give information about your business and can gently sell your product or service. Most database programs allow you to set up autoresponders, if you are using Outlook, make a task to send out messages for at least the next few weeks to your new person.
• Places to get new list members #1 – I get LOTS of new list members by teaching! Offer a prize and collect business cards or send a sign-up sheet around to all the attendees. Make sure they know they will be added to your list!
• Networking Groups – Go to meetup.com and search for local groups you can join. Talking directly with humans is a GREAT way to get people to add to your database!
• Social Networking – Using Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn and Twitter is a great way to build your list. DO NOT add everyone who “friends” you. From time to time put a link in that encourages them to sign up for your newsletter.
• Your Sphere – I know, you have added EVERYONE from your sphere already but have you thought of your doctor, lawyer, accountant, church members, gym club friends, your spouse’s friends, your kid’s friends parents.
• Last but not least – NEVER SPAM YOUR LIST! EVER! Recently I had someone belittle me because I wouldn’t take an “opportunity” to sell something to my list. Well…I didn’t believe in it, it didn’t match my list and I declined. I have NEVER regretted not sending something to my list and will never send anything I am not proud of!

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How to pick a database – the age-old marketing question. When you are setting up your online and offline small business marketing plans it is confusing to know what database you should use and if it will be able to accommodate your email marketing needs going forward.

I will start with my sad tale….

I have a great database that I really like (www.clpsuite.com) which has served me well for a couple of years. Lately I have had a burning desire to have online credit card ordering capabilities so I started using www.1shoppingcart.com for my credit card processing AND they offered email capabilities. I thought GREAT! I can have my database, my credit card processing AND my database all in one. NOPE. They do a great job at credit card processing but as a database not at all (it is almost impossible to get your people to “opt-in” which means you can no longer communicate with them – a REAL problem!).

So now I have a database with email capabilities and a online credit card processing system. Two is not bad. I guess. RATS!

So for everyone else, what are my database recommendations?

General Databases – You can put your clients in, send a reasonable amount of emails and set up auto-responders or activity plans

• Microsoft Outlook – already on most computers
• Act – I like the sales funnel reports you can get in Act
• Wise Agent – BEST Database for Realtors
• Top Producer – Widely Used Realtor Database

Email Marketing Programs – If you get over about 400 people in your database I highly recommend that you start having your people in a “real” email program. If I had it to do all over again, I would have started with this as I have about a thousand people and getting them all to opt-in has been a nightmare!

• Aweber – This is the one that I (and the internet business mastery guys recommend – see below). Aweber has great email and autoresponder capabilities!
• Constant Contact – This is a friendly email program that is great for beginners

I should have listened to the Internet Business Mastery Guys! They have a great podcast on iTunes and I belong to their Internet Business Mastery Academy which tells you start to finish what to do for each aspect of your internet business. They said that Aweber was for email and 1shoppingcart.com was for credit cards. Lesson learned – I will listen to their advice from now on!!

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CRM for Small Businesses sounds very ominous. It could mean almost anything! What it actually is is Customer Relationship Management. According to Wikipedia’s definition of CRM, it is “a term applied to processes implemented by a company to handle its contact with its customers”. WOW does that sound dry and not fun!

What it means to the small business owner is the way you handle your customers and prospects from the time you learn about them until they become a clients and beyond. It is everything you send them via email, all the invoices you send, how you treat their questions and concerns and how often you contact them.

The most important part of my CRM is my database! It stores all my suspects, prospects and clients in a handy dandy place. I can categorize them according to their industry, where I found them, what products they have bought and notes about the last contact that I had with them. (if you need info on how to start your small business database please read “what is a small business database“).

For today we will just talk about how CRM affects our prospects (people who we know about BUT who have not used our services yet!)

In my business I always strive to have a database that people are excited to be a part of! I don’t spam them or sell their names. I make sure that every time I communicate with them it is something that will be valuable to them. Some things that we do are:

• Send monthly email newsletters with an article about a topic that would appeal to small business owners – this doubles as a marketing piece since it is branded with the Thrive look
• ALWAYS include something extra – I tend to find lots of free technology tools around the internet and include them in my technology tips section
• Don’t forget to send your newsletter to your current clients – boy was this a doozy on our part! We did not send out the newsletter to our current clients since it DOES have a lead generation function but one of them saw it anyways…:) She was so excited about the article that we realized it should go to EVERYONE, not just the people we were trying to sell our services to!
• Send postcards with the Thrive branding – this is more marketing based and just adds another layer of reinforcement that we believe in the service that we provide to our clients
• Auto-responders – we have a series of autoresponders that start as soon as we put a new prospect into our database. This tells about The Thrive Client Contact Program, provides testimonials AND gives them information about lead generation and followup techniques (DO NOT send a series of marketing pieces to your prospects without providing a value to them!)

If you pay attention, it is easy to find ways to contact your prospects in a fun and useful manner that will result in them becoming clients. Just because they are not ready to buy this instant doesn’t mean that you should ignore them – use the time to show a value and build trust so that when they are ready to purchase they are predisposed to working with you!

We would like to invite you to sign up for our Newsletter (and Thrive Followup Emails) – Just sign up to the right!!!

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So you want to make a splash with your new product? Or have you fallen out of touch with your database and need to get back in front of them? You do NOT have to spend a fortune to make a big splash!

I am going to go over the things you can do to get in front of your customers. The VERY first thing you need to do is know WHO your customers are and get them in a database! My database is my lifeline to my clients and prospects. I do not look up their phone numbers there, I am terrible about making notes in the database (I am blessed to have someone to do that for me), but almost everyone who I come in contact with goes in there.

Standard Fare

I use my database to contact my clients all at once. I send emails to everybody every month. I separate whether they are current Thrive clients or not. The non-Thrive clients get an informational sales pitch (more information than sales pitch) and the clients get great info and extra tips and tricks.

To let you know how non-salesy they are, many people thank me for sending out my newsletter – it is that full of information that I think is interesting and marketing related – PLUS my sales pitch. (If you are not currently on my “newsletter” list and would like to receive it, please send me a message on the Sign Up Now page!)

I also send my sphere, target clients and prospects a piece by mail each month. It is generally related to whatever email I sent out. If you do not know what to send, you might want to consider using the Thrive System!!!

Online Ideas

If you are looking for a bang online, you can’t do better than a blog! The search engines love the HTML pages that blogs develop. They are full of words that search engines can reference and are continually updated. They are also affordable. I pay $10.20 a YEAR for this blog as I have most of my websites under the umbrella of one hosting plan. If you would like to find out how it is doing over the first month, please visit Marketing Artfully, my main site.

Another way to get great coverage online is write Ezine articles. I am getting ready to blast out some really good content on Small Business Marketing over there. The nice thing about Ezines is that the company spends LOTS of time and money on the back end to get them referenced in the search engines (especially google).

The final online way to get traffic to you site or blog is to make comments on another site! I get LOTS of traffic from a comment on the high cost of “Rogue” beer. The key was that the rogue beer site owner is a marketing aware guy. This means that his readers are probably marketing aware. Try to find a site that is similar to you but does NOT compete with your site.

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So I was at a Philanthropy lunch today with one of my favorite people, Tammy Leventis of Mail Marketing. On the way over I was telling her to hold on to her hat because we were gearing up to help even more people with the Thrive Program and she was going to be super busy (she provides the printing and mail services for our premier clients).

She was thinking that she should start sending something out too (you think?) BUT she did not have her people in a database. In addition to that she did not know what email program to use. I suggested a couple to her and she said that she would have to wait until she had her people in some kind of order. 

SIGH

If this is your thought you will NEVER have everything ready in order to start. You will never take 3 days of your life to data-entry all your contacts into a program. You will never look up all the emails from all those business cards. You will never start!

So what should you do? Start with what you have! If you use Gmail or Outlook or many other programs, just by typing a letter you will get a list of people by that name that you can email to. When I am sending out “special” emails to my internet friends I use this method. When I am just trying to hit my personal contacts I use this method. The glorious part of it is that all those people are my friends! They never yell at me for sending them anything – sometimes they may delete me without looking at it – but they never scream spammer at me!

The next best thing is to start with an excel or database program (here is a good post to read – What Is A Small Business Database?). Enter 5 people every day. At first it will be easy because you will have a backlog of people, but soon you will have to actually TRY to find people to enter into it! Make it a game to figure out who should be in there – your doctor, vet, lawyer, hairdresser, the mailman, your family, friends, networking contacts, co-workers, even old flames!

Can I make a suggestion? Start with The Thrive Contact System even though you are not ready. Try it and see if you get more business – the majority of our clients do! Make enough money off the people that you DO have in it to hire someone to do your data entry. Stop figuring out why you can’t do lead generating and just start! TODAY!

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So I talk a lot about how to use your small business database. Many small business owners do not know exactly what a database is. It can be as broad as a full-blown contact management system to a Excel spreadsheet with names and emails. I am going to review the good and bads of different kinds of databases. Please feel free to chime in with your opinions!

Excel Spreadsheet – If you do not have your contacts in any order yet, an excel spreadsheet can be a god-send! All you need to do is start collecting names, addresses, emails and maybe even have a field for notes. The benefit of an Excel Spreadsheet is that it is easy, you can cut and paste email addresses into almost any email client and it is super easy to make labels from! The drawback to an Excel spreadsheet is that it is hard to set up times to call people or schedule emails to automatically go out. Click here to download a sample contact spreadsheet!

Outlook – Most computers come with Outlook. It is great for mananging your contacts, exporting mailing lists and sending emails. You can schedule tasks for yourself and there are many add on systems for Outlook out there. Here is a list of some neat add ons (here is a Google Search for Outlook Add Ons).

Databases – A full blown database that you are committed to will change your life! It will tell who you to call, when to call them, who to email, when to send out your letters and so much more. You can set up “campaigns” or “plans” that will send out periodical emails or set up tasks for you to do. Many times these are called CRM or Customer Relation Management.

There are MANY different databases that cost NOTHING (EssentialPIM and FreeCRM are two).

There are great mass market databases like ACT, Goldmine, and Wise Agent for Realtors (my personal recommendation – even for non-realtors!) They generally charge a per month fee and are online. That is great since you can access your clients from anywhere – not so great if your internet is down.

The database I use is CLP – it is a relational database that does LOTS of things but you have to set it up yourself! It has MANY features like HTML emails, project plans, sales force automation and multiple users. It is NOT cheap and it is hard to use sometimes BUT everyone asks so I thought I would tell you!!

Whatever you use, remember that you want to make sure that you can export your contacts out of it in case you want to change vendors. Also – it does you no good if you don’t put your people in it!!!!

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