Perhaps the most common list-building technique used by internet marketers is what I have called the GCC System - Gather-Capture-Convert. This is what is normally referred to as an “opt-in” system.

One of the difficulties with this system is that it relies on getting visitors to your websites. That’s the old “traffic problem” rearing its ugly head again. Getting traffic is not easy.

This is a major problem if you are appealing to a local market with a relatively limited number of prospects.

An “opt-in” system like this will very likely miss the majority of your target market. Why? Because it is too passive. There is a very good chance that many in your target market will never see your website, in spite of your best efforts to get them there.

This is especially the case with local businesses. For example, let’s say you want to start a local business and entertainment portal. Your portal will feature a directory of local businesses and a bit of local news. Your idea is to turn it into an advertising vehicle for local businesses.

But how will you reach local businesses?

You can try to build traffic to your site by doing SEO. You can spend money on advertising in local media. You can do Pay Per Click on Google, MSN, Yahoo or Facebook. You can try to find local business groups online and get involved in social networking with them.

But somewhere along the line you will probably have to reach these people directly. You need to take a page from the traditional sales play book and do some good old fashioned “direct” marketing. And direct marketing usually means one of three things: cold calling, telephone canvassing or direct mail.

Of these three traditional techniques, the one that fits the online marketing mindset the best is the direct mail approach.

The Direct Mail Approach

In the offline world using direct mail to promote a business-oriented product is a no-brainer. You would pull together a mailing list of as many local business as you could find, then you would develop a mailer or two and send them to everyone on your list.

This is such a common practice in the offline world that its power, effectiveness and legitimacy are just taken for granted. They are rarely ever questioned.

Is it possible to use a similar technique with email campaigns?

First you would decide on your target market - in our local portal example it would include local businesses looking for places to advertise

Second, you would do whatever you could to assemble an email list of these people.

Third, you would send a series of email messages to them.

Pretty simple, right?

Yes and no.

Why This Goes Against the Grain…and Why You Should Do It Anyway

In the world of web marketing, using this approach with email is often frowned upon. In fact I can’t ever remember hearing an internet marketer discuss such a methodology.

Anything other than a straightforward opt-in approach like the Gather-Capture-Convert system gets lumped into the general category of “spam”.

There are good reasons for this. As I have suggested in other places, for the past 10 years or so internet marketers have been almost completely fixated on a relatively small and quite unique market. This market is an interesting mix of independent entrepreneurs, work at home moms, network marketers and get rich quick con artists.

The “opt out” approach would simply not work with this group. Why? Because it is an ever-changing group that is very difficult to define and has an amazingly complex variety of interests. A big part of the marketing job with these people is sifting through their interests and identifying the ones who might be interested in your products.

This is what we might call “niche identification.” There is no better technique for doing this than an opt-in GCC system. People will simply not opt-in if they are not interested in what you have to offer.

Local Businesses Are Different

But niche-identification is not the problem with local business people. Local business people are already niche-identified. Dentists, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, restaurant owners, etc., etc., etc.

The problem with these people is not identifying which niche they belong to. That job is already done for us. The problem with local business people is simply getting your hands on their working email addresses and then tactfully getting your messages in front of them.

The Opt-Out Method Explained

Experience tells us that the only way you can effectively reach most local businesses is by adapting one of the standard offline approaches that have been used by sales and marketing people for decades. And by far the easiest technique to transpose over to the online world is the direct mail model.

This model says you have to get contact information from wherever it is available. You have to pull it from your Rolodex, from your collection of local business cards, from contact lists available from your business associations, from organizations like the local Chamber of Commerce, from brochures and advertising materials you pick up around town or receive in the mail. In other words, from wherever you can find it.

And then you have to assume they want to receive your information unless they tell you otherwise.

In a nutshell the opt-out method requires you to pull together a list of email addresses for your target market - local businesses - and then assume they are on your list until they ask to be taken off.

That is why I call it the “opt-out” method.

Is this Spamming?

As I’ve pointed out in other places, the regulations laid out in the U.S.A. Can-Spam Act of 2003 do not consider this spamming. Those regulations do not say you can only send email campaigns to opt-in subscribers.

What they do say is that you must be truthful in your messages, and you must give people an obvious way to opt-out of receiving future messages.

Another thing these regulations do not say, but that is still blatantly obvious, is that you should not abuse your contacts or send messages to people where it is likely to do more harm than good. Poorly conceived email campaigns can alienate the very people you want to turn into customers.

What most people absolutely hate is receiving messages from anonymous sources who don’t reveal why they are sending these messages to them. “How did this person get my email address?” is one of the first things people ask when they receive unsolicited email messages.

It is almost as if they consider such unsolicited messages an invasion of their privacy.

Almost, but not quite. Because in our testing over the years we have found that the vast majority of people will accept (and perhaps even happily accept) your message if you treat them with respect and do not abuse the privilege of contacting them directly by email.

How To Introduce Yourself

Here is a brief list of what you must do in your very first email to an opt-out list:

1. Tell them who you are. Do NOT be anonymous.
2. Tell them how you got their email address.
3. Tell them why you are contacting them.
4. Tell them you appreciate them reading your message.
5. Tell them you are sorry if they would rather not be on your list.
6. Give them an obvious way to unsubscribe.

And then, most important,

7. Give them an offer that is too good to pass up.

When you do all these things, most people will actually want to be on your list. The few who don’t can simply unsubscribe.

So that is the “opt-out” system in broad general outline. If you are interested in some practical suggestions for implementing an opt-out system like the one I’ve described here you can find them in the ecourse “The Next Web Marketing Gold Mine”. In that course I offer some suggestions for finding addresses, describe a simple system for entering them into your autoresponder, and provide a template for your introductory email message to your new list.

You can subscribe here to the ecourse.