Tips on List Acquisition for Effective Email Marketing

While Email Marketing continues to be the highest ROI generating marketing technique, marketers are striving towards optimizing their campaigns in order to get the best results. In order to optimize anything, one needs deep dive right to the root of every opportunity – and the list, of course, forms the foundation of email marketing.

Marketers need to be extremely cautious while creating, nurturing and expanding lists in order to get the best open and click rates for their marketing campaigns. Following is a list of list acquisition best practices:

CREATING LISTS:
Ask for permission before adding subscribers to your list.

Keep the opt-in process quick and simple; collect only those attributes that are most important to your business.

Allow visitors to opt-in to your email lists from more pages that just your home page.

Don’t purchase lists – unsolicited messages have the highest complaint rates and could ruin your reputation.

NURTURING LISTS:
Build your own lists and collect data at every customer touch-point, both online and offline.

Let your subscribers know you won’t sell their information to a third party – post your privacy policy online.

Don’t pre-check the opt-in box to add subscribers to your list automatically.

Provide sample emails so your subscribers know what to expect and the benefits they’ll receive.

Offer subscribers choices such as text only or HTML versions of your message

Allow them to choose the frequency of receiving emails.

Confirm the email addresses of new subscribers by sending a welcome message or using the double opt-in subscription method.

Include a coupon or special incentive in your welcome message as these messages have the highest open and click-through rates.

Be sure the welcome message has the right branding in place and that it contains a link to your privacy policy, an unsubscribe link and other CAN-SPAM requirements.

Ask new subscribers to add you to their list of safe senders on the sign-up ‘Thank You’ page.

Make the subscription process memorable so subscribers remember signing up for your emails.

Remove invalid email addresses from your lists immediately.

Understand the value of each email address.

EXPANDING LISTS:
Track the source of your new subscribers so you know where they are coming from and how they are hearing about your business.

Focus on the quality of your subscribers, not the quantity.

Encourage your subscribers to send your emails to their friends using a Forward-to-Friend (FTF) link in all of your messages.

Don’t automatically add the FTF recipients to your lists instead, include an easy way to subscribe to your email lists in the forwarded versions of the email.

Do let us know if we’ve missed out on any.