The Whitelist

How to Build Your List

As an email marketer, you’re always looking to add more names to your email list. But as with many things in life, we sometimes get too focused on quantity over quality.

Which doesn’t sound like a problem in the world of email marketing, until you realize a list based on quantity will decrease your email marketing ROI and even negatively impact your email deliverability rate.

In our last post, we wrote about the benefits to culling your list for more email marketing ROI. But let’s get back to basics and talk about list building.

For a list that will yield valuable email marketing ROI, you have to focus on a quality list (which doesn’t always correlate to quantity).

Do:

• Have something of value to offer in exchange for their email address. Think of it as a quid pro quo exchange. Everyone wins, if you do it right.
• Sell your email signups: Make the reason to sign up for your emails compelling. Don’t just ask for an email address without specifying why.
• Ask people to sign up in multiple locations: Where do you have a web presence besides your website? Make sure an email sign-up link or box is available and visible everywhere.
• Offer great content that people will share. This will lead to more sign-ups (and keep your current subscribers)!

On the other hand,

Don’t:

• Add everyone your company comes into contact with to your database.
• Use sweepstakes that get you plenty of names from people who want to win…but who never want to hear from you again.
• Use third-party or co-registration techniques.

It might not be the fastest way to a massive list, but the list you’ll end up with will be full of subscribers who want to hear from you.

Make sure you remember that behind every email address is a person. Who values their privacy, and guards their information fiercely. Maintain their trust by delivering what you promised, and thank them for subscribing to your emails!

For Email Deliverability, Sometimes Less (on your Lists) Means More

So, you’ve crossed all your email marketing t’s and dotted all your email marketing best practices i’s with a targeted, relevant offer sent only to subscribers who opted in to your campaigns.

Then you learn a major ISP has blocked your IP address due to spam complaints. Before you know it, your email deliverability is plummeting and you can’t get an accurate sense for how effective your email marketing campaign was.

How could this be? Your subscribers opted-in, after all!

Well, the reasons are multiple-fold. Sometimes, an email subscriber will forget opting in and rather than clicking “Unsubscribe,” they may just opt to hit that pesky “report spam” button, without an awareness that your beautifully crafted email marketing message is indeed a message they chose to receive. The reasons behind this have a lot to do with failing to obey email marketing best practices (and listening to your subscribers’ preferences) in the first place. (But that’s another blog post). In the meantime, your email deliverability starts to suffer.

The best thing to do now is to take a good hard look at your email list, take a deep breath, and start cutting. It’s hard. You don’t want to voluntarily trim the increasingly large (and growing) subscriber list you’ve worked so hard to cultivate with all of your email marketing genius. Oftentimes, making a cut can yield higher email deliverability rates. In the case of email deliverability, it’s not always quantity that matters. Consider focusing certain ad campaigns only on subscribers who have made a purchase. In other similar case studies, this strategy has consistently yielded close to 100% inbox delivery. If you need help with list segmentation, you’re in luck! We covered it in detail in our September issue of the ClickMail Marketer!

Emailing to fewer, but more engaged, subscribers can be the difference between $0 and generating a return on investment from the subscribers who really are interested in your email marketing messages. Because the other alternative is that your valuable customers may never see your email due to failed email deliverability.

In navigating today’s world of email marketing and email deliverability, be prepared to face the choice between reaching some valuable customers, or reaching no customers at all.

List Segmentation for Big Payoffs

In the fast moving world of email marketing, if your email marketing messages are specific and relevant to your subscribers’ individual needs, your email marketing campaign will stand out from the rest. And it’s impossible to attain targeted messaging and individual relevance with just one message that goes out to one big list. This means it’s time to segment your lists by one or more grouping options like demographic and/or interest.

It might seem like a huge challenge to segment your list but it doesn’t have to be. In the latest issue of the ClickMail Marketer, we outline the top grouping options for optimal list segmentation, and give you reasons why these options are among the most effective. After all, the main purpose of list segmentation is to yield a highly relevant and targeted email campaign, which means a better sender reputation for you! And having a good sender reputation leads to increased email deliverability, more email opens, higher click-through rates, enhanced customer loyalty, decreased unsubscribes, and increased sales. In other words, everything you want out of your email marketing campaigns.

If you’re not sure how to get started with your list segmentation strategy or implementation, check out the September issue of the ClickMail Marketer. And if it still sounds difficult (or if you’d rather not take it on yourself), let ClickMail help. ClickMail can even point you towards ESP options that enable list segmentation. List segmentation is an investment now that will definitely pay off later. Find out how to get started in the September ClickMail Marketer.