I was stunned at how many people have disappeared and emails are bouncing back.

I’ve have companies opt-in to my online contact system. Which is very good and works real well. But when I got started, way back when I had (and still do) have a non opt-in software sitting on one of my machines.

This had gone un-noticed (I’m amazed I missed this) but nearly half those contacts I had built up over the years had gone.
Their emails had bounced “failure notice”.

It’s vital to build your customer/prospect list. In the internet marketing arena the saying is the money is in the list. So you can imagine my surprise when I looked at the stats from when I started to today. Half my list had gone!

I still have a sizable list, don’t get me wrong. I worked hard to build, with talks, seminars, keynotes and speaking at networking meetings down the years, but it was still a shock.

I’m glad I found this out… especially at this time of year. Why this time of year? Well that’s when I do my planning for the new year to come. I’ve got a pretty good idea as to how things can pan out based on a number of factors… and one of them is the size of my list. I found out three key things doing this exercise:

1. My list is now been cleaned up of companies that are no longer around
2. Those who received my message, only 4 came back and said remove them
3. I think they are still hot on the idea of marketing their way to success

So you could argue that it’s a well targeted list, wouldn’t you say?

When was the last time you checked your database? When was the last time you went through it to identify those
prospects in your list just aren’t tyre-kickers but real potentials?

I would suggest you emaill you database and find out. You could be saving yourself a lot of time and heartache if you do.