3 Tips: Succeed Buying Mailing list

Few weeks ago I wrote on how to fail at buying list, now, I have come up with how to succeed at buying lists. After all, buying business lists are an essential part of how some companies and businesses keep their sales pipelines filled with business contacts and B2B leads. So, here are the tips to succeeding in buying lists.

1. Running After Price

Just focusing on the price might not give you the best lists. In most of the cases, business owners prefer to buy mailing list from a list provider that has high price. But, just because one list vendor sells the same list at a cheaper price doesn’t mean that it has lesser quality than the more expensive alternative. In fact it could be a better buy than the more expensive one. So, when picking and buying lists don’t just focus on prices.

2. Privacy-compliance

You really don’t want to be on the receiving end of legal matters when doing business. For example, you buy a telemarketing list and end up calling a prospect that is on the DNC (do not call) roster, and well, things may take a turn for the worst. This can result from accidentally buying lists that have not been properly cleansed for such leads, and of course lists that have not been made in accordance to privacy-compliance rules. So if you want to succeed in buying lists, keep a keen watch on such things.

3. Buy Required Lists

Be selective according to your business requirements, for example, if you are into telemarketing campaign then you need to purchase telemarketing lists, instead of any other lists like direct mailing lists and email lists. Buy only the lists you need for specific campaigns in order to get your money’s worth and get better results by using lists that were made for their intended purposes.

So, these were three tips to succeed your buying lists. Bu8ying lists from other vendors is an appreciated practice but that should be followed certain principles that I have mentioned above. These tips to buying lists should help you when you want to get your money’s worth when you purchase lists for your company.

17 Tweety Tips: Empower Your Business Relationships

Everybody knows that Twitter is an excellent way to meet and connect with businesses and prospects all over the place. Plus, it makes for an excellent platform to promote and strengthen your brand equity. But if you are struggling with making twitter work for you, here are the tips that I guarantee you will gain a better idea of what to do and not.

1. Choose carefully when building followers and when following. Make it a point to connect with prospects and with people who are connected to prospects.

2. Maintain a strong sense of etiquette without being too formal. Stay away from defamation, flaming and spam. Stick close to praise, acceptable humor and value-driven commentary.

3. You don’t only have to speak in corporate tones. Loosen up a little and inject some personality into your tweets from time to time. Fun things that happened at office, special occasions, trips to exotic places and popular industry incidents are good tweeting topics.

4. Tweet regularly and add value to your tweeting. If you don’t tweet a lot you’ll be drowned out by competitors who do.

5. When you receive a new follower, ensure that you send them a thank you tweet as soon as possible. Don’t automate this process. Instead, personalize it. Check their profile out and include interesting details in your message to them.

6. Tweet to the media and try to grab their attention. Successfully doing this will strengthen your brand equity in the eyes of your fellow tweeters.

7. Retweet your followers’ tweets when you share interests or pursue similar goals. They will appreciate the attention and you will receive good karma. Follow them back for bonus karma.

8. Use twitter tools. There are so very many applications that can help you out that you’ll have your hands full trying to figure them out. A good idea is to figure what your goals are and how you intend to achieve them. You can then match tools to specific actions that you need to undertake.

9. Twitter takes time to generate results. Don’t be daunted by the lack of spectacular success early on.

10. Don’t sell stuff on twitter. It’s true that it makes an excellent sales portal, but if you aren’t a big brand wouldn’t suggest leading with a pitch.

11. Establishing a tweet style or theme is great for branding and, if done regularly and attractively, could have the potential to develop into an internet meme. But remember to break it up and include humorous elements from time to time.

12. Place important contacts on a twitter list with a snazzy title and let them know that they’re on there. Think “The Entrepreneurial Elite” as opposed to “SME Executives”.

13. Tweet twice in the morning, tweet twice at night. You may have great content but if only tweet once, chances are you aren’t drawing enough attention to it.

14. Actively search for content or media that concern your followers and tweet it to them. Also send them interesting stuff about YOU.

15. Twitter has the ability to eat up large chunks of your day so set a daily tweeting time quota and stick to it.

16. Subscribe to company blogs and comment on the posts. Make sure you read the post and contribute to or a start a relevant and meaningful discussion. Don’t spam them with your links. Tweet about their posts too.

17. Connect with followers on other social media and tweet about their activity there.

And that’s about it! If you’ve got any suggestions or would like to add a few tips of your own, leave a comment, start a discussion, go wild! Until then, happy tweeting!

Illustrate the Steps Before Sending Mail

After all the precautions and safety measures still most of the business owners suffer the heat of spam. They usually wonder why this happens after all the initiatives. Forget about big business owners, the small business owners are more affected by the term “Spam”.

So, why this is happening? It’s better to understand how these spam filters work and how they detect your mail as they are getting into spam folders instead of inbox. Even the software that the business uses they also find difficult to send the email to the inbox.

Every Email Service Provider (ESP) provider including Constant Contact, iContact and AWeber all face the challenge of getting their users’ messages to the inbox. While the ESP maintains the bulk of the responsibility in getting messages there, content of the emails are crucial to consistently have the message hit the inbox, not the spam folder.

Illustrated below, I explain the levels of spam filtering that take place with each message.

1. ISP Filter:

The first step is to check the major sources of spam and reject offending messages. This would be around 75% work for anti-spam operations. This includes checking for Email Relays, IP reputation, Authentication (Phishing), botnets and simply accepts or denies a sender from proceeding to send their email. When mail is rejected here, a bounce is sent to the sender for later handling.

2. Content Filter:

The next step is to filter the content. This handles about 20% of anti spam operations. The practice is done to check that doesn’t meet their standards, such as malicious attachments, spammy words and even the finger print of the email itself. When mail is rejected here, it’s silent and often the user doesn’t know. Some ISPs may bounce the message back with details, but not always.

3. Personal Filter:

Finally, the Personal Filter is the filter that happens when the recipient’s email software filters the messages on its criteria. These handle about 5% of anti-spam operations. Depending on the email service, the ISP may offer this through a web-based interface or in the case of Outlook, it’s running with the email client. These filters honor any request by the recipient. When mail is rejected here, it’s silent and often the user doesn’t know until they specifically look for the message.

These were the steps that spam filter carries for its process. one thing you can do is asking your recipients to add you in their address book so that next time when you send message it goes to their inbox. by this you can interact with your recipients quiet often and that also avoiding the spam.