The mailing list is an invaluable tool in your marketing arsenal. It’s an entire list of people who think your brand is interesting enough to let you email them your marketing pitches on a somewhat regular basis. You may be wondering how a company gets consumers or clients to agree to such a thing, and honestly, it’s not always easy. We’ve got a few tried and true tips for making your mailing list bigger and better and we’re going to explore them today.

Before we get started, you’ll need to decide if you’re doing an email or direct mail list. Email is obviously much less expensive, but a direct mail list sometimes makes more sense for certain kinds of businesses. If you’re going to run a direct mail list, I’m going to get back to you. Direct mail is a totally different animal than email that deserves a blog entry of its own, which I will get to before the week is out. For now, I’m going to talk about building and maintaining an email newsletter.

Before you even start to think about email marketing, you must promise to observe the following rules:

1. Email marketing is for opt-in recipients only. Do not send your newsletter to anyone who didn’t agree to sign up for it. If you do, it’s spamming and it can get you in trouble with the law, your web host, your internet service provider, and it generally reflects badly on your brand.

2. All email marketing transmissions must come with an easy-to-use unsubscribe link. Not allowing people to leave your newsletter will also make you a spammer, potentially landing you in hot water and definitely fostering animosity with customers.

3. Use your newsletter strategically and sparingly. Do not email your newsletter contacts constantly. For most businesses a monthly newsletter is reasonable. If you have very compelling content, you might be able to get away with a weekly or daily message, but if you’re going to make your messages more frequent, keep in mind that you may have a harder time keeping people subscribed and getting people signed up. It’s also a good idea to let subscribers know if they can expect frequent messages so they know what they’re signing up for. For most companies, a monthly newsletter promoting a new product or service or offering a special deal is the way to go. This allows you to remind your customers or clients to spend money with you, gives them impetus to do so and, most importantly, doesn’t get on their nerves.

So how do you get all these fans of your brand signed up to receive your emails? There are many ways to go about this, but the following are tried and true in my experience.

1. Give something away. People love free stuff. If you can do a monthly or weekly drawing from your newsletter list for a free gift, you’re likely to attract more subscribers. Be sure to let your customers or clients know they’re eligible to get a free gift by joining your newsletter.

2. Offer special deals and discounts. Everyone loves the idea of being in on a special offer. Send your contacts a special coupon code or deal along with your newsletter. Be sure to tell potential newsletter subscribers about the access to exclusive deals when they subscribe. This company offers site visitors an instant 15% discount for joining the newsletter. That’s an offer that just about guarantees every paying customer is going to join up, since they’ll want to save at check out.

3. Offer interesting content. If you’re a subject matter expert on a topic that interests your customers or clients, offer them free information with your newsletter. This professional and personal coaching consultant offers newsletter subscribers access to a free book when they sign up. A company selling dog leashes might offer a newsletter providing pet parenting tips. A company selling gourmet hot sauces might have a recipe newsletter.

Whatever hook you use to interest people in your newsletter, make it easy for people to sign up. This means you should have a sign up form on every page of your site. Not a link to a separate sign up page, a form that justs asks for an email address and has the user click “submit”. You want as few barriers as possible to getting onto your newsletter. Take it from big companies like Crate and Barrel and Overstock.com. A link to a newsletter sign up is not nearly as effective as an actual sign up on each and every page of your site.

Once you’ve built up your list, you can not only use it to market your own company, you can use your list as a cross-promotion tool. The bigger your list is, the better position you’re in to cross-promote with another company with a big list. When you send out those deals and discounts you can mention promotions for your partner and they’ll do the same for you. This can add up to thousands of free eyeballs for your brand without spending a penny.

You may not always be in the mood to write, but even if you don’t do it every day, your business needs a blog. Blogs are good for a number of things. Here are just a few:

1. They’re sticky. A sticky site is a site that keeps visitors coming back. If you’ve got frequently updated content, visitors will be back to check out what you’ve got. If you’re running a retail site you may only have new items seasonally or even less often, so you’re going to need another reason to keep your site on your customers’ minds and a blog is a great way to do it. While many business blogs focus entirely on what’s new with the business, your blog needn’t do this. Blogging about something related to your business that your customers are likely to find interesting is a great way to keep them glued to your site. If you sell pet grooming services you could do a photo blog of cute cats and dogs. If you sell clothing, a blog with fashion tips might be a good fit. If you sell a service like interior design you might want to start a blog about design trends or home decor if your clients are mostly residential.

2. They provide search engine optimization. Everyone wants the search engines to love their website, and search engines love content. If you want the search engines to show you some love, give ‘em what they want and start writing. Fresh, interesting content on your site will keep the search engines coming back and paying attention to you, which means it’ll be easier for customers to find your site when they’re doing a search. It’s like free advertising!

3. It provides a cross-promotion vehicle. We had to throw that one in there, right? Since we believe cross-promotion is a terrific way to market your brand, we’re all for having as many tools at your disposal as possible to do this. Agreeing to write a post about your marketing partner(s) in exchange for their promise to do the same gives you a no-cost means of trading marketing power with a partner. Posting about a partner doesn’t mean driving customers away from your own business. Choose a marketing partner with a product or service complementary to your own. For extra points, you and your cross-promotion partner might consider giving each other coupon codes to post along with the blog entries.

If you’re not sure how to get a blog onto your company website, there are a few options. My favorite is Wordpress. It’s a free, open-source program you can install on your own web server and you can customize it to look just like the rest of your website. (We actually use Wordpress to host this blog.) You will need PHP and MySQL to run Wordpress, but many web hosts offer those along with their hosting packages. If you don’t have PHP and MySQL, or you aren’t up to installing software yourself, trust me, it’s pretty easy to do. You might want to explore some of the free hosted blogs such as Blogger or Wordpress’s free hosted blog option.

Further Reading:
Hubspot says “How to Build World’s Most Valuable Brand? Don’t Advertise! Use Inbound Marketing“

Spending money on your marketing efforts is a great way to build brand awareness, but it’s not the only way to do it. By pairing with a well-suited cross-promotion partner, you and your partner can enhance your respective brands’ visibility on the cheap, or even without spending a dime. Here are a few ways to do it:

1. Mailing List Cross-Promotion
To use this strategy you’re going to need two things:

• a base of customers who subscribe to your company’s email newsletter

• a company to partner with who also has a base of customers subscribing to their newsletter

For this to be effective you’ll want to pair with a company whose customer demographic is similar to your own, but a product line that isn’t the same as your’s. For example, a company selling baby clothing might want to partner with a company that sells diaper bags. Both companies sell to parents with babies or small children, but they aren’t selling the same thing. These companies can agree to mention a coupon code for one another’s online shops when they send out their next newsletter. This gets the apparel vendor’s name in front of the diaper bag company’s customers and vice versa. Ideally, companies who cross-promote this way will want to have similarly-sized newsletter subscriber bases. It’s not really fair for a company with 100 newsletter readers to engage in this type of trade with a company with 1000 readers.

2. Business Blog Cross-Promotion
If you blog regularly for your business, all you need to find is another business owner who does the same and has a customer demographic similar to your own. You and your cross-promotion partner can agree to write a review of each other’s online stores in your blogs. This will get your company name in front of their blog readers and vice versa. It’s important to find a business blogger who has a blog readership similarly-sized to your own so the exchange is a fair one.

3. Promo or Sample Swaps
If you regularly mail out products to your customers, find another company with a similar customer demographic who mails out a similar amount of orders regularly. You and your partner can exchange promotional postcards, product brochures, product samples or other collateral to slip into your orders.

If you’re going to promote this way, it is best if you can provide your cross-promotion partner with something their customers are less likely to throw away, like a pen with your company name and web address on it, or a magnet. Some printed promotional materials are pricier than others, but there are lots of places online with pretty extensive catalogs and a variety of prices for items like this.

If you’re really on a budget, you can make your own promotional goodies that are a little more memorable than a flyer. For example, you could buy a large bag of candy and make stickers with your logo and web address and adhere your stickers to the candy wrappers. This sneaky form of building brand awareness gets your company name noticed in a way that makes it harder for the consumer to tune out.

4. Co-Sponsor A Product Giveaway
Product giveaways are a terrific way to build up your newsletter subscriber base. You can bring even more consumer eyeballs to check out your product giveaway and register for your newsletter by organizing a product giveaway with a partner. Here’s an example of how this might work:

Say you’re a spa goods retailer. Your customers are probably women interested in luxury items. You decide to partner up with a jewelry maker because she has a similar audience. Your partner sends you a pair of earrings and a necklace and you send her a bottle of shower gel and a bottle of moisturizer. Now you’ve got some jewelry and your own spa goods with which to put together a gift basket for your newsletter sweepstakes. Your partner has your spa goods and her own jewelry for her gift basket.

After you and your partner put together your gift baskets, take photos of them and put up a sweepstakes page on your websites inviting customers to sign up for your newsletter and automatically be entered in a drawing to win free gifts from you and your jewelry designing cross-promotion partner. You can mention to your visitors that they can double their changes of winning by visiting your partner’s website and joining her mailing list too.

At the end of the day you and your cross-promotion partner have brought your customers’ attention to each other’s brands and you’ve both increased your newsletter subscriber base. You both now have a built-in audience to send out news about discounts, sales and new products.

5. Exchange Coupon Codes
We’re all familiar with the idea of link exchanges; sometimes you’ll visit a business website and see they have a page of links. The thinking here is that this contributes to search engine optimization and maybe attracts a few human visitors along the way. What’s more likely to draw human visitors are coupons. This is similar to having a links page and doing a link exchange, but instead of just giving your visitors a long boring list of links, you’re pointing them towards savings with shops they might enjoy.

To do this type of promotion, you’ll need to set up a coupons page on your own website. After that, you’ll have to select some partner(s) with product lines that would appeal to your own customers. You’ll need your partner(s) to set up coupon pages on their sites too. Once you’ve got your pages set up, you and your partner(s) can provide each other with coupon codes to your online stores. Customers coming to shop with your partner(s) will find their coupon pages and that’s how they’ll find you. You’ve also given them a little push to actually make a purchase, since they have a coupon code in hand.

If all this seems overwhelming, don’t get discouraged. It takes time to increase brand awareness, but doing a little every day will go a long way in the end. In the mean time, we invite you to create a Brand Torrent profile so companies looking for a cross-promotion partner like you will be able to find you.