The Whitelist

More Email Marketing Best Practices for Building Email Lists

Check out this dialog between a group of noteworthy email marketing experts for advice on building your permission-based, in-house email list. Each has a different point of view, but it’s interesting to note recurring themes…OK, it’s not interesting, it’s critical knowledge.

Throughout this dialog (and not including the sales pitches), there are three points made repeatedly that we should pay attention to:

1) Content that rocks. Admittedly, no one uses that phrase “content that rocks” in this post, but that’s the sum of it. When your content is awesome, when it rocks, when it excites, people share it and that grows your list. It also attracts people who want a piece of that compelling content when they are on your website or at your establishment and they see your promise, the carrot of content you dangle before them. Relevant, targeted, engaging and compelling content is now and long has been an email best practice. Even if this means you must hire an outside copywriter to help, make compelling content a high priority.

2) Search! Meaning organic search for organic growth of your list. You use search marketing to get the traffic to your website. Visitors like what they see, and they also like the promise of compelling content (see #1 above) so they sign up for your emails. Voila! List growth! You’re not using search marketing directly to grow your list; you’re using it to grow your site traffic. But the side benefit of that is more people to pitch your email signup to.

3) Making social part of the effort. Asking for email signups at every point of contact means social too, and it could be that someone is more likely to end up at your Facebook page than your website anyway.

The experts discuss other techniques such as using ECOA to update email addresses, but I’ll leave that detail for you to read if you’re interested. Really the main takeaways from an email marketing best practices perspective are great content, using search and using social.

I should also point out that the post starts out talking about a responsive list, meaning all of this advice is geared towards building a list based on quality, not quantity. And that’s the kind of list that’s going to deliver the ROI.

An Email Marketing Best Practice: Ask for Email Signups in Print

With the publication of our last email marketing newsletter on list building do’s and don’t’s, it seems I’m seeing examples left, right and center! I don’t know if that’s just because I’m paying attention because it’s top of mind, or if it’s because our email newsletter article was so timely, but all these other instances are helping us at ClickMail drive the points home! Here’s to better, and more successful, list building for everyone!

And here’s a technique I hadn’t considered before…

At email marketing vendor ClickMail, we encourage businesses to “sell” their email signups on their websites. You can’t simply ask someone for an email address. You have to tell them what they will get from you in exchange for surrendering that valuable piece of personal information. Quite often, a sample newsletter or email will help you convince a potential subscriber.

But here’s a new twist on that, from Eric Groves, SVP, Global Market Development, Constant Contact, quoted in a recent MarketingSherpa article.

Groves suggests having a print out of a sample email for people to see when you are asking for their email addresses in person, say at your brick-and-mortar location or at a trade show event. That’s a great idea that’s easy to do…super easy to do, in fact.

Always remember that an email address is like a form of currency, and just like someone won’t give you money for no reason, no exchange, nor will they give you their email address without something in return. Anything you can do to make your case, to persuade them that entrusting you with their prized email address is a good thing…and printing out a sample is certainly an easy thing!

Let’s add that to our do’s of list building!

An Example of an Email Marketing Best Practice not Practiced

Don’t you just love serendipity? Or maybe I should say, don’t you just love when you say something to the world, and then you see what you’re proposing being put into action?

That just happened. We at ClickMail, an email marketing vendor, are publishing our newest email marketing newsletter chock full of email marketing best practices for list building tips, and then a great example of one of those tips happens to me in real life. Good! On the other hand, there’s plenty of room for improvement with this example too. Bad! Which drives home the point that it’s not enough to know about email marketing best practices. You must put them into practice.
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Email Marketing Best Practices: The Do's and Don'ts of List Building

Who doesn’t want more names on their in-house email list? As an email marketer, you’d be crazy to think your list was ever big enough.

And therein lies a problem: We sometimes get too focused on the quantity of our email lists, and not the quality. Which doesn’t sound like a problem, until you realize a list based on quantity will decrease your email marketing ROI, negatively impact your email deliverability rate, and have other not-so-nice consequences.

For a list that works, you have to focus on a quality list. Don’t worry! You can still grow your list, just maybe not as quickly or carelessly.
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Best Practices for Email Marketing: Capture Email Addresses on Your Website…Now

One thing about email marketing: It is not a standalone channel. Not by any means. As an email marketing vendor, we at ClickMail continue to teach best practices for email marketing. But if you get too focused on email marketing best practices, you might lose site of the bigger picture, of email’s part in your organization’s overall marketing strategy.

Email can be a complex part of your overall marketing practices and strategy. But you can think of it rather simply as the trifecta of online marketing:
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