DMR #36: ALITA HARVEY-RODRIGUEZ – How do you best build an authentic list of email subscribers?

David: How do you best build an authentic list of email subscribers? Should you buy an email list or is it best to build one for yourself? And does email marketing also work just as well for B2B? Those are just the three of the questions I intend to ask today's special guest Alita Harvey-Rodriguez. Alita, welcome to DMR. Alita: Hi, David. How are you going? David: Very good, thanks. How are you doing yourself? Alita: I'm very well, thank you. David: Superb. Well, Alita is the founder of Milk it Digital Academy, helping businesses to uncover hidden profits in digital business channels through business development workshops. So Alita, your philosophy is “data beats emotions”. What do you actually mean by that? Alita: Good question. Thank you for asking. It's a question that I get asked a lot. What I mean by "data beats emotion", it's very simple is that we're no longer in an era of business where we can simply rely on our gut feeling in order to make a decision to grow our business in the most profitable way possible. The numbers are all there for us to make decisions in the best way possible. Even if a lot of my clients come to me thinking that they don't have this information and it just takes a couple of hours of asking some really strategic questions to get this information, pulling apart P&L reports, looking at Google Analytics, looking at any kind of insights that they might have within their business and pulling them into a form which we can manipulate and get a solid answer to a question. For example, how much should I be spending on Facebook marketing in order to pull a return? Well, the first thing we need to find out is, actually, is Facebook marketing going to pull a return for you based on industry statistics, also together with existing data within the business. Then we can figure out accurately how much money you actually should be investing for a particular campaign to get a result within 10% either way.