Building an Opt-In E-Mail List
Looking to build an e-mail list from scratch? Want better list growth? A few tips on building an opt-in e-mail list.
Looking to build an e-mail list from scratch? Want better list growth? A few tips on building an opt-in e-mail list.
If you’re lucky enough to have a robust house list that grows significantly each month, good for you. If you’re looking to build a list from scratch or would like better list growth, here are a few tips gleaned from recent client work.
Start by developing an acquisition marketing plan, basically, a blueprint for how you’ll find, approach, and sell your target audience on giving you their email addresses. As with any marketing plan, you want the quantitative, such as the number of new email addresses to add each month, as well as the qualitative, including where you’ll find these people.
This is especially important if you’re building a list from scratch. Start the acquisition process before you publish your first email; there’s no sense creating an email newsletter (or other type of email communication) if there’s no one to send it to. If you’re already publishing, don’t be deterred. Put a formal plan in place and work to implement it. Building a list is an ongoing project.
The more the person writing the plan knows about your target audience, the better the plan will be. First, decide whom you want to reach. Include an overview of all existing touch points (online and off-) with customers and prospects. Also determine how much you can afford to spend to get an email address.
Next, what type of content will your email provide? If you’re doing email marketing, obviously there’ll be some type of promotion involved. To engage recipients, you content that offers readers value. With a content plan, you can further identify recipient benefits and hone where to reach interested readers.
Third, look at what competitors are doing online, specifically, how they gather email addresses. This may directly lead to some acquisition resources. Better, it allows you to see what types of tactics work for others.
Finally, identify specific tactics to build an opt-in list. Included may be:
One topic that always arises when I talk email acquisition is appending. Appending is the process of taking your existing customer list and “matching” email addresses to it from a larger database. There are two flavors of permission-based append:
If you must append, get an explicit opt-in. A negative option opt-out may be enticing, but if you want results, this isn’t the shortcut it may seem.
When initiating plan, start with the quantitative: how many email addresses you want to acquire each month. Then, look at the qualitative piece. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack, figuring out what types of venues your target audience hangs out in and how much it would cost to get a presence there to invite them to opt in to your email.
Give it a try and let me know how it works!
Best,
Jeanne