1 Simple Idea to Grow Your Email Database

By far email marketing is one of the most effective tools to pass your message across quickly, brilliant way to convert contacts into clients, especially when you have a promotion you want to run.  With the rise of group buying sites like Cobone, GoNabit (now part of livingsocial), dealgobbler or others, more people in the UAE are starting to appreciate the value of email promos and deals.

The trick then is to grow your email database, when you have 100, 500, 1,000 or 10,000 visitors a month on your website, what better way to do so than just offering them to download a whitepaper.  A whitepaper is a document that is written by a subject matter expert, in this case yourself, to help educate your target audience.  A whitepaper main objective is delivering value to your potential clients and educating them, stay away from any form of hard selling.

What should your whitepaper be all about?

Well think of it this way: what are frequent questions that your  potential customers ask? think of all your client meetings, questions you get asked while networking with other people and compile these into a nice “whitepaper”, and make sure you market the whitepaper on your most visited page (typically your homepage), in a prominent and visible location.  If you manage to convert 10% of your traffic, that’s a significant increase in your email database.  You could also use your blog articles, and try to synthesize / summarize a number of these into a well defined subject and put them in a whitepaper.  Write a How-to paper, help your clients or potential clients do things themselves, and so on and so forth.

How long should a whitepaper be?

I have downloaded whitepapers of 10 pages, some of 20 pages, and some of just 3 pages, so I would say: if you can put together something of real value in 3 pages, so be it, if you’d like to elaborate more and provide charts / references to your whitepaper and grow it to 10 pages, fine… all up to you.  But get to it, it would take you probably a few days to put together your first whitepaper, but think of the downloads you would get, the increase of emails in your database, and also, the interaction you would have created on your website.

If you have any thoughts, please feel free to share them in the comments below.