Ask Yellow Dog: Outdated contacts

Last week I received a few great marketing questions after I spoke at a luncheon. Here’s another great question I received that I think may be helpful for you…

What do I do about the piles of biz cards drawing slips and old mailing lists of companies we used to belong to?  I feel like I want to come clean with them and say I did not have a system and now I do. My current company has a monthly email that I ask people if I can add them to but I have not been good at adding them.

It’s never too late to come clean to folks and to reach out to them!  Here’s what I’d suggest:

Send an “announcement” email to your network, pull all those business cards & email addresses and everything and send one email to them (probably as a BCC email and probably you’ll have to do this in clumps) and let them know what you’re doing:

Dear (friends/ family/whatever),

I know it’s been a long time since some of you have heard from me, and I thought it was high time I sent you an update! As some of you may know, I’m working this this great product line and I’d love to share more with you about it…(a couple sentences about it, and a link to your sales page where they can learn more).

If this is of interest to you, I’d love to setup a time to talk about it. We also have a monthly newsletter that goes out and you can signup here (link to it) or just reply to this email and I’ll get you signed up. And if it not, I promise you won’t hear from me again about it!

(Signature)

It’s never too late to come clean, and as I always say: I can’t help you if I don’t know what you need or are up to!