Our question is, what list building is. Is it one of the buildings that belong to Henry List, the real estate mogul? Is Henry List a real estate mogul? Is there even a living person named Henry List? Okay, we will forget about Henry List and give the real answer. List building is a marketing technique where you collect the communication information of people that have a high probability of being interested in the subject matter of your service or product.

Say I own a private school. My students are aged between 11 and 15. All the parents of students between ages 11 and 15 are my potential clients. Therefore I must build a list of their names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses. (Here, we are opening brackets to inform our reader that this is a real case for a client and its success was astonishing. Close brackets.)

There are millions of people living in the city where our school is located. Some of these people have children some of which are aged 11-15. To find the right people we thought of a giveaway. “Tangram: An I.Q. increasing Chinese puzzle designed for children aged 11 to 15.” We opened marketing stands in every shopping mall in the city and gave the presents to people who filled our survey form. After a month, at the end of the list building campaign we had the contact information of thousands of people with one or more children in our target age.

What were the factors making the campaign so successful? First of all let’s look at the giveaway. Tangram is a game known in China for thousands of years and it is fairly a simple game once you get the gist of it. The production budget of a hundred thousand tangram games is less than that of the same amount of pens or pencils. Does it increase I.Q.? It is an I.Q. game, so it should, look how clever Chinese are. We simplified the game a little and wrote that it is for children of our target age. Families of older children were not interested because they thought it was a kids’ game. However parents of younger children filled our survey and took their gifts because they thought their children had very high I.Q. and would enjoy playing the game. These were future students of our school so we built another list with their contact information to be used in a couple of years.

Online list building is not so different from this. Whoever you are targeting, you must find a really attractive giveaway for them and only them. This can be an e-book, part of a treasure map or a free song from your album. To have this gift, they must give you their contact information. Once you have the interest and contact information of a highly probable customer, it is in your hands to make the sale. And if all of these seem like hard work to you all you have to do is to ask for professional help.

Author Bio: Learn the secrets of List Building today!

Category: Marketing
Keywords: List Building