5 Tactics to Ignite Your Email List Growth
Identify where you acquire your most valuable, most engaged opt-ins, and brainstorm how you can get more of them.
Identify where you acquire your most valuable, most engaged opt-ins, and brainstorm how you can get more of them.
Back in January, many email marketers said increasing their lists was their top goal for 2013. Well, spring is here. Is your mailing list growing as fast as your flowers and lawn? If not, it’s time to execute a new plan.
Many marketers have email addresses only for 30 percent or less of their customer and prospect lists. They’re tempted to revert to their direct-mail experience and reach for a quick fix like email append (“e-append”) and list rental/purchase.
But in today’s engagement-based inbox placement world, this “quick fix” approach can give you more headaches than new sales.
If you seek quantity over quality in list growth, you’re practically inviting the ISPs either to block your entire opt-in mailing list or route everything to your recipients’ bulk folders, where they’ll languish in obscurity until the ISPs dump them automatically.
So, what should be in your email list growth plan? Below are five tried-and-true methods to ignite your email list growth, in a safe, permission-based way.
Many websites undersell the email value proposition, using just a link saying “Sign Up for Email” relegated to the home page footer. Worse, the email opt-in call-to-action isn’t even on the page. Make your forms stand out.
If you want to get more opt-ins, make the email invite more visible. Use a benefit-based call-to-action, and test an offer that you subsequently deliver in your welcome series.
Test these locations to see how many more opt-ins you can drive. Test each one alone and in combination with each other.
One opt-in form on a page might drive X, while having two opt-in form placements on a page might drive 1.5X to 2X. At the EEC Summit in 2012, Tommy Hilfiger reported that his company drives 2 percent of all site visitors to opt in by using a dynamic opt-in layer served to new site visitors on site entry.
Here are a few suggestions for collecting more and better addresses:
Don’t ask users to fill out lots of form fields. Keep the form short and simple. You can collect more information later in your welcome series using progressive profiling.
You can also use this process to allow your site registrants to quickly and easily sign up to receive your marketing emails.
My Last Word
Too many marketers still think email list growth is a quantity game. Quality matters more. Identify where you acquire your most valuable, most engaged opt-ins, and brainstorm how you can get more of them.
Test your theories. Implement what works, and eliminate what doesn’t.
Image on home page via Shutterstock.
This column was originally published on April 17, 2013.