If you’ve decided that you’d like to do a better job of marketing your business/cause/non-profit/self/project — Great! Here are your first steps to get started! This can be hard for some people — but it’s worthwhile to go through this process.
- Gather your email addresses into a spreadsheet — Feel free to download this example in Excel. If you are already using an Email Service Provider such as Constant Contact you may already have this step covered. If not, you’ll want to download your email contacts from wherever they live. Some typical places might be: Outlook (Constant Contact has an app which allows you to sync your Outlook contacts!); Gmail; LinkedIn; Hotmail; MSN; Yahoo or your Mac’s address book if you’re using MacMail. Do a little sleuthing and you’ll find instructions on how to download from any of these platforms into a spreadsheet that you can work with.
- Segment Your Lists. Once you have your emails in a spreadsheet you’ll want to create some columns to segment (categorize) your list. The more columns, the better. Typical things people often segment people by: zip code; relationship (friend, family, business associate, customer); age; birthday; anything that makes a contact different from another one is a reason to create a column. Once you have your columns set up — run through your list and put an “X” in every box that makes…
