I remember sitting down one night a few years ago, racking my brain how I was going to market this great new product I had got my hands on. In fact it was the first product I ever really marketed.

I had about £800 at my disposal, so I had to decide what was the best way to spend this limited budget.

£800 is all I had if I didn’t spend it wisely and generate a sale, then this great new product I had wouldn’t get anywhere until i had saved up another £800, which at the time would have taken ages! Sound familiar?

After a few hours of deliberation, I decided the risk was too high to spend £800. The amount of calls I had received from advertising companies, lead generation companies, newspapers, magazines etc, etc, all promising me the world…

“Spend your money with us Mr Rickett, we fully understand your product and I totally see how it will be accepted”

“Our database is fantastic, if you didn’t get results, I would be astonished”

“This is exactly what our readers are looking for”

Every call was the same old patter! All they were after is my money, they don’t really care if I get the response I need, they just want to achieve their sales target. Don’t get me wrong their are some great marketing companies out there who will really work with you to achieve your objectives, but you really need to spend some time shopping round before jumping into bed with the first chirpy sales man who calls from the local paper!

After taking all this into consideration,and deciding I to keep my £800 firmly in my back pocket . I set out putting some time and effort in, so that they only risk to me was hard work and not financial.

What I decided to do was collect email addresses of people who were likely to want my product. Yes it took me a few days, but I managed to get my hands on at least 2000 personal email addresses of potential customers and all it had cost was my time!

This was great as what I actually done, was identify fully who were the people who were likely to be interested in what i was offering, collected their email address, so I could send them an email directly advertising exactly what I was offering. Email marketing is very targeted, what other marketing can you cherry pick the people you want to know about what your are offering?

Over the years I have learned a whole range of things, how best to increase your results from email marketing campaigns, text v visual campaigns, how long to word the email, how many click through links do you need in the email, does group emails work or do they need to be personalized?These are all things I will be discussing going forwards, however if there is one bit of advice I can give is go and collect email addresses.

You can find them on the internet, run competitions, be creative, if you can collect the email address of your potential customers, it will make your life so much easier and most importantly reduce your marketing spend by thousands!

Going back to this first product I marketed these 2000 email addresses collected resulted is £20,000 turnover. Admittedly the product I was selling was high value around the £3000 mark, however I would never have achieved these results if I had spent my £800 with the companies mentioned above! Why? Because non of it was so direct and targeted my profile of customer as well as sending emails.

The beauty of email marketing is that it gives you greater control. You can analyze exactly what happens through a campaign, it doesn’t take long to set up, you can send campaigns more than once and it is FREE once you have collected the data!

Get out there, and start collecting email addresses. Every email address you collect is a potential customer, please note though you want personal email addresses, non of that info@ rubbish. Over the next couple of weeks I will be going into detail on exactly what to do when you have the data, till then get collecting! It will save you £1000’s.

Kind Regards

Simon Rickett