Launching an email marketing program with no list

You are sitting around a conference table discussing new ways to communicate with customers and prospects. Everyone gets excited over an idea.

We are going to directly communicate with our customers and prospects. We need a personal approach to marketing. We want to direct our message to the specific decision maker.

Hmm...How can we deliver our message directly? We can do it by postal mail, email, and phone. Great! Who has this contact information?

............ dead silence....

I have experienced this scenario while sitting around the conference table of Fortune 1000 companies as well as 10-person companies. What do you do next?

Launching a Direct Marketing Program with No Data

I call it the "draw the line in the sand" program. Here is how you begin:

1. Many people get hung up trying to go back through months and even years worth of data to gather the necessary information. If you do this, this project will sit in the procrastination pile for forever. Don't look back, just look forward. "Draw a line in the sand" and go to step

2. You decide today that you want to do a direct marketing program.

3. You decide that it is an important long term initiative and you want to change your processes to support this effort.

4. You establish a launch date for your program; let's say three months from today.

5. You begin to collect name, phone number, mailing address, and email address at every reasonable opportunity.

6. After three months, you may have 50 contacts or you may have 500 contacts. Regardless of the number of contacts, you launch your direct marketing program with the contacts that you have.

7. From your first program you learn what works and what doesn't. Did you forget to collect a piece of information which is critical to your marketing efforts? Did you duplicate efforts by sending the same message to different contacts within a company? This could be good or not. Do you need to maintain your contact information differently?

8. From your first direct marketing program, you refine your process, continue collecting contact information, and do it again.

9. Once you start direct marketing, don't stop. The rules with the Do Not Call List and CAN-SPAM all contain time elements attached to the definition of "if it is OK to communicate with the person." If too much time lapses between communications and business interactions, you no longer have the right to contact the person.