This has to be one of the most common issues I see for email marketing; I talk with a client about how I strongly believe that they should use email marketing to reach their buyers and leads and what I get is, “Well, I don’t really have a list to email.”

Huh?

So, let me walk through a few very simple, no-brainer examples of where you can find emails for email marketing:

THE EASY ONES

  1. Previous Buyers

I know this sounds like a common sense, “smack me in the face” example, but a lot of people just overlook this source of leads/subscribers for email marketing.

One reason that I believe most of my clients miss this is because while the buyer is putting their email into the order information, my client forgets about the opportunity to re-engage them for future sales, promos, and events!

THIS IS A HUGE OPPORTUNITY!

Generally speaking, the previous buyers email list exported from previous orders will be the smaller of your lists, but most likely the most engaged, profitable email list.

(SIDE NOTE: (For eCommerce clients) When a buyer is ordering, double check to make sure that your shopping cart process automatically checks off the “Sign-up for Newsletter Option”. And while some may de-select the option, I have yet to experience in negative backlash from emailing them anyway!)

  1. Contact Request or Quote Request

Again, this may seem like a pretty straightforward, but many times this can be overlooked.

The reason I see that this is overlooked is because when the form comes in, someone in sales will normally “work the lead” (whatever that means – usually not much) and follow up with the person who filled out the form, but nothing else is done.

So, if the 100’s if not 1000’s of people who have reached out to get more information or get clarification on a product or service have not be sold and only “get worked”, but don’t get emailed, this is another goldmine.

Find all of these leads or form submission and this will be subscriber/email list #2.

The Sneaky One (from all emails)

  1. Extracting from Email Accounts (Gmail, Outlook, etc)

This one is not at all thought about for most people.

You probably have had 1000’s of interactions in your email account. If you’re like me you probably have a couple of Gmail accounts that you’ve used, maybe an Outlook, old Yahoo/Hotmail email account, etc.

The question remains though; How do I get all of the emails from these email accounts?

I’m glad you’ve asked!

  • Gmail
    1. You can use a couple tools and apps to help you extract.
    2. Check out this link:
      • http://www.labnol.org/internet/extract-gmail-addresses/28037/
        1. Here you can see there is a App that will pull the “Froms”, “CCs”, and even from the body of the emails and stick them in a Google Drive document.
        2. NOTE: There is a free and paid version. I’d highly recommend the paid version as it’ll extract more types of emails that I mention above. Remember the whole goal here is to BUILD your list.
  •  Outlook
  1. Much like the Gmail Tool, there is one for Outlook
  2. Check out this link:
  3. For Yahoo/Hotmaill
    1. For these two sources check this out:

Finally, now that you have 3 different ways and multiple email accounts extracted with data, you’ll need to hop into Excel and make sure that you de-dup the emails from the various lists.

For those of you more advanced in excel, I’d recommend doing a Vlookup of your Buyer’s List and making sure to delete all Buyer emails from your email account extraction and lead pulling (most likely from email/CRM) so that you can have a better result from custom messages to both audiences.

Awesome! Now, that you probably have a good number of leads and emails, start sending!