Building an Email Marketing List

Developing an email list for marketing can be quite a challenge. The two most important things you need to strive for are size and quality.

One of the first things you need to do is get permission, that way you will have a much better open rate and the person receiving the email is more likely to trust the source – rather than just delete it.

How can you build your list while maintaining the overall good quality of recipients? Here are a few ideas that will help you start.

Sign Up Form

The first thing you can do, if you don’t have one already, is add a ‘sign up for our newsletters’ form prominently on your website where people can easily fill it in, all you need is a name and email address. If you promote this through your other marketing such as social media, you’ll be amazed at how many people will end up filling it in. To encourage people to sign up, you offer incentives or discounts to anyone who registers.

Guarantee Privacy

Assure your website visitors that you’re not a business who harvests email addresses for unscrupulous purposes. Ensure you have a privacy policy and contact information on your site. If you don’t have one, get one, fast. You’ll be surprised at how many visitors go to your privacy policy page to make sure you’re a real entity.

Pop-up Windows

Pop-up windows can be very effective. We’re not talking about those annoying advertising pop-ups that display all over your computer screen and are impossible to get rid of. We’re talking about a simple small unobtrusive pop-up window that appears when someone is about to leave your site. For example, if you are selling a product from your site, after your customer purchases from you why not use a pop-up window with your opt-in form highlighting the value they’ll get if they sign up for your email?

Online Retailers – Just Ask!

If you are an online retailer you can collect email addresses in a number of ways.

• You can ask for permission to email your customers during the purchase process with a checkbox opting them in.
• You can ask for permission to email your customers after they’ve purchased.

If they’ve just had a positive experience purchasing from you, the chances are that a good portion of them will sign up for your “special offers” and they’ll remember they gave you permission and your response rate should be higher.

Social Media

If you have engaged social media followers then you can promote your email newsletters to this audience as they already know and trust your brand. Providing a little insight into what they will receive in return is a great incentive.

Quality Over Quantity

Don’t get obsessed with big numbers, the numbers will grow if you are consistent and it is way better to have 100 great contacts than 10,000 who may not even open your email. Don’t buy a list just to get the numbers up, it wont work.

Keep In Touch

Once you build your list and start communicating to your recipients remember: you made a promise to them about what you would send them when they joined. Try to avoid straying from that promise, it’s all about trust. If you do stray you will have a greater chance of losing them.