Reading the Clue Train Manifesto is highly recommended prior to building an email list for your online business. If you have never heard of it, you can check it at www.ClueTrain.com. However, if you are already familiar with it, you are also aware of the importance of building trust and relationships with customers, as the manifesto says, “marketing is all about taking part in conversations.”

Online marketers should initially build up a strong relationship with their customers, using proper, meaningful conversations instead of targeting them straight away with one time business transactions only. So before implementing your email list building campaign, you should always try to have a meaningful conversation with your prospects, this process is known as relationship marketing.

Frequently, online marketers tend to forget the ultimate purpose of an online marketing business. Instead of acquiring a targeted email list, they focus on expanding their email marketing list by collecting contact information of prospects that are not interested in their products. Then, they will send generalized emails with pointless marketing messages and hope that the recipients will subscribe to their newsletters or even buy their products. Unfortunately, this strategy is out of date and is starting to no longer work because the undirected emails are perceived as irritating Spam.

If you want to be an online marketing champion, you must communicate with your customers and clients. Get their feedback by talking to them, find out their needs, wishes and wants. Communication is the key in building a relationship with your prospects, initiate a comfortable conversation with people and let them speak, and you will achieve a bigger email contact list in the long run.

You can also optimize your business through conversational marketing. This is where you join blogs, forums, review sites and wikis that motivate conversations related to your products. You can also opt for off-line conversations such as inviting some of your prospects to a venue and initiate real-life conversations with them.

If you keep your focus on building relationships and initiating conversations with your prospects, even before they are on your email list, you will garner some of these benefits:

1. The product or service that you are offering will be individualized and have a genuine voice

2. Increased retention and repeat sales

3. Loyal customers and brand ambassadors will be created

4. Your business’ credibility will be improved

5. You can use customer feedback about your product/service

6. Your company will not be identified as a company that only values profit

By building relationships with your prospects, you are also building chemistry, confidence and commitment with them. In the long run, your business’ revenue will grow and your prospects may become a part of your free promotion campaign, after all, nothing is better than a word of mouth recommendation.

Please do not think that you need to abandon traditional marketing strategies altogether in order to improve your marketing efficiency, many of them still work very well, as they always have, just do not be scared of exploring newer ideas.

Here are some quotes from the Clue Train Manifesto:

“Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.”

“Markets are conversations.”

“Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.”

To build a profitable email list, you should build a relationship with your prospects first, this will then in turn enable you to have a better chance of getting their valuable information (through traditional Internet Squeeze or Capture Page techniques), because they already trust you.