The Whitelist

In direct mail, they say success depends on three things: your offer, your creative and your list. The same is true of email marketing. And the best email list is your in-house one. That’s because it’s permission-based email marketing. Those people have some kind of relationship with you already and are more receptive to your emails as a result.

But building that in-house list takes time! It’s tempting to go out and rent a list of 50,000 rather than slowly build a quality list of 500!

But as long as you’re consistently doing little things to add qualified names to your list, over time it will grow into one of your most valued email marketing resources. As an email marketing company, we have lots of suggestions for easy steps you can take to start growing your email list. Here are the first six:

1.    Make sure the email content is relevant and useful
2.    Include a forward-to-a-friend link in every email
3.    Include a button/link to the email signup page on every page of your Web site
4.    Include two subscription buttons/links on your home page
5.    Make sure you have a signup page on your Web site that these link to. Don’t just have a signup box, with no reason for signing up
6.    Sell the idea of signing up for the newsletter on the email signup page. Tell them the frequency, what they can expect to get, the benefits of signing up, etc.

Watch for the next six tips on Wednesday!

Tags: Email marketing tools, Permission based email marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 10:13 am and is filed under Permission based email marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.