The Whitelist

More People Subscribe to Your In-House Email List When Engaged

Looking through some old notes, I came across this MarketingSherpa chart from May showing the most effective tactics for growing your in-house email list.

It resonated anew with me today because of the response to a post published by our CEO at the Email Critic blog.  Marco’s post argued for having more than a simple sign up box on your website for encouraging subscriptions. At ClickMail we encourage our email marketing clients to remember that an email address has value. To get the email address, you must offer something in exchange. That’s one reason for suggesting businesses do more than simply have a signup box on their website.

This MarketingSherpa chart says kind of the same thing, if you look at the numbers. Out of the 10 tactics survey respondents could choose from, the top four have something in common. Let’s call it engagement. Each of the top four methods for legitimately acquiring an email address involves the subscriber engaging with the organization at some level. The top four tactics according to the survey are:

1.    Signing up when making a purchase

2.    Submitting an email address in order to get a download

3.    Submitting an email address to register for an online event

4.    Signing up when at a tradeshow

With the first three, the subscriber is getting something. And I suspect with the fourth, they are as well, as tradeshow booths usually have giveaways and raffles to entice people to sign up for emails. And that’s email marketing best practices, to offer something of value to the potential subscriber so they see it as a fair exchange and they sign up.

The two least effective tactics? Social sharing and forward-to-a friend. Neither of these offers any kind of engagement with your organization at all. Hence the difference. You must offer both as part of your email marketing best practices! But this chart shows you can’t rely on them alone, any more than you can rely on a simple signup box alone on your website.

Here’s an email marketing challenge for you: Today, think of three ways to grow your in-house email list that are unusual, but still fall under the realm of permission-based email marketing . You know to use Forward to a Friend, you ask people for email addresses at trade shows, you have a prominent email signup link on your web site…but there are so many other ways to promote your email program and get people signed up.
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Email policies are important.  Not just the email governance policy that protects a company’s corporate interests, but a policy that protects your subscribers from potential email marketing abuse; and your relationship with them as a result.

It’s permission-based email marketing – meaning you got their permission, and your subscribers trusted you enough to hand over their email addresses in the first place. And you as the email marketer must guard that relationship when others in your company want to take advantage of the fast and cheap nature of email marketing for a quick financial fix.

To differentiate it from the Privacy Policy that reassures your subscribers you won’t share their email address, this policy is one that ensures you’ll treat your subscribers with respect. That means:

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The cost-effectiveness of opt-in email marketing can be both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you get a higher ROI from email marketing over other direct marketing methods. But being affordable means we sometimes send out too many emails too often.

It’s like candy that’s quick and easy to grab and it tastes good, so even though we know it’s bad for us and is loaded with empty calories, we succumb to our temptations and eat even more.

So too with opt-in email marketing. It can lead to some quick sales, so we keep going for more. Never mind the long-term effects of emailing too frequently…

What’s that, you ask? How can eating too much candy and emailing more frequently both be bad for you? One leads to weight gain, the other leads to subscriber loss. Email your list too often and you’ll burn out your list and people will either unsubscribe or delete or even report you as spam. Yes, even people who opted in will want out if you’re annoying them with too many messages.

OK, so this is something email marketers do know, but we find it easy to ignore. Especially since there isn’t a clear sign that you are over messaging, right? But guess what, there is.

A good indicator that you might be over messaging your list is your unsubscribe rate. If you see it go up, that could mean you’re emailing people more often than they want to hear from you. Of course, not everyone will unsubscribe. Many people will just delete your emails. So be extra sensitive when the unsubscribe rate does go up, since that’s only a portion of the people you are annoying.

As far as the candy goes, watch the level in the bag or bowl. If it’s going down, obviously your intake is going up!

A few months ago I listened to a speaker talk about emails that were feet long, as in 2 feet, 4 feet. At first, I was confused, then I realized he was talking about as you scroll, that the emails he was referring to really were that long. And he did have an example of one that was 4 feet long!

Picture that as paper: Email doesn’t come in pages the way paper does. A 4 foot long paper document can be 4 or more pages long and therefore manageable. A 4 foot long email is one long piece of paper!

That’s a lot of scrolling! And just because it’s opt-in email marketing doesn’t mean your customers will opt to read it.

I suspect some email marketing departments (or more likely their bosses) figure that’s free real estate so let’s fill it up with everything we could possibly say. Never mind that the customer will either lose their patience or lose their way trying to get through all that text!

But that begs the question of, how long should your email be? Obviously 4 feet is too long! Is 2 feet to long? One foot? Eight inches?

Does it matter? Not so much. In reality, the length of the email doesn’t have to be limited except by common sense.

What does matter is making sure the most important information is “above the fold,” meaning in the area approximately 200 pixels from the top. That’s because after the From address and the subject line, what someone sees in the Preview Pane is what will get them to open your email and interact with it…or not.

It’s also like an ad. Think of the inverted pyramid example I once read about how many people read how far down your ad: At the upside down base of your pyramid, the widest part, you have the most people reading. That’s your headline. But as the pyramid gets narrower and narrower as it goes down the page, fewer and fewer people read.

I suspect the same thing happens with emails, although I don’t have the stats to prove it. Still, that top section is like the top of an ad: It’s the part most people will read.

Make the most of it so they keep reading. Just don’t expect them to read 4 feet worth of anything!