Email Marketing List Growth Tips

Building your email marketing list can be a slow task. As you grow your list, make sure that every subscriber has given their permission to be on it. This is the best and safest way of building your list.

Subscribers should have voluntarily signed up to your list through a registration process. Adding email addresses to your list from another source, e.g. a purchased email address list, is a big no-no and may lead to spam complaints. This will be counter-productive for your email marketing campaigns.

One safeguard against spam complaints is to use double opt-ins. With this method the email address is not added to your list immediately when a customer decides to opt in. Instead, another email is sent to the recipient’s address, requesting them to confirm that they wish to opt into your mailing list.

In 2010 Marketing Sherpa conducted an email benchmark survey and found that registration during purchase, for downloads and webinars are by far the most effective ways to grow your email marketing lists. It is therefore important that your registration and subscription process is customer-friendly and captures the information you need at the right times. You can achieve this by:

1. Making it easy for potential customers to find the opt-in

To grow your list successfully the registration area on your website must be easy for a visitor to find. Making the sign-up process prominent on your homepage, above the fold, will satisfy this requirement. All you really need is a clearly written invitation to opt in to your emails, newsletter or offers and a box with a subscribe button where visitors can enter their email address .

2. Only asking for vital information

You should only ask for information at the opt-in stage that you are either legally required to have, or will use for very specific commercial purposes. Most people won't be happy to provide detailed personal information straight away, so ask only for absolutely necessary information at this stage.

The less information a potential customer has to provide the better. Email address is usually enough. Any extra information that might be valuable to you such name, phone number or address can be gathered at a later stage.

Tests have shown that requesting too much information has a negative impact on the customer experience and will result in lower your opt-in rates. You have to strike a balance though as asking for too little information will prevent segmentation later.

3. Offering a benefit or an incentive

People are bombarded with marketing emails these days and it has become a lot harder to get them to opt in to email marketing lists. To make it easier, offer an incentive at sign-up. This can be anything from free but valuable content to discounts on products and services.

4. Making your opt-in it easy to use

It is equally important to inform potential customers about how the subscription process is going to work. While entering an email for sign-up on the homepage is a good idea, it is also helpful for people to know about the rest of the registration process. This is especially important when you use double opt-ins.

Once you have people on board, follow up immediately with information after subscribing. Any confirmation emails should reach subscribers within 10 minutes, so check the delivery settings of your email marketing programme to make sure that there is no delay.

Send subsequent emails with quality information as soon as possible after the first email. To achieve this, it is helpful to design welcome emails which familiarise subscribers with your offers. If you have provided any sign-up incentives, now is the time to deliver upon them.

When building your email marketing list, don't forget to look at opportunities outside your email marketing system, for example networking, trade shows, seminars or other offline and online events. Think outside the box and utilise every opportunity you have to get names, addresses and opt-in agreements.

For more information on email marketing and to learn how you can make more money from your existing subscribers without any extra spending on marketing visit http://www.onlineprofitbooster.com