This is so important yet few businesses do it. Whether you are a shop, office, pub, restaurant, surgery – even a website, you need to build a list of people who enter your premises, access your website, or even call you for information about your goods and services.

Building a contact list allows you to easily reach out to an audience that is already aware of what you do and are interested in your product or service. Once you have a list properly following up those contacts is where the money comes in.

You don’t need to cold call and pester them, far from it! You can offer free newsletters, competitions, hints and tips, special offers even a VIP membership, all these help to get your customers to give you their contact information – especially their mobile phone number and email addresses.

Once you have their details, you can follow up with them on auto-pilot. You can do customer surveys, offer coupons and discounts, and also run promotional offers to increase repeat sales.

Doing email or mobile SMS text marketing is ecologically sound and cost effective. It eliminates the need to create mountains of paper mail that ultimately ends up in your customers’ bin rather than generating more sales.

Whilst emails reach your potential customers on their desktop and will be waiting there for them when they login. A mobile phone is almost always as arms reach and answered immediately. Remember they opted in to receive your promotions, so this is a “permission-based” form of marketing that will help take your profits to the next level if done right.

Building a “mobile” contact list is an extremely profitable form of marketing, that I deal with in another article.

So don’t brush off this amazing profit-boosting, cost-effective method of advertising that could turn your entire business around.