Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com’s Smart Email Marketing Guide
The simplest and most effective key to maintaining quality and relevance is by allowing your subscribers themselves to set and maintain their own preferences. You can do this by creating a preference center, either on your website or within your Email Service Provider (ESP).
You will obviously want to allow subscribers to update their email address. This will maintain quality. You should also allow them to choose and modify the kinds of emails they receive, and to unsubscribe from whichever lists they want. This will ensure relevance. Also, if you allow them to choose between text or HTML emails and perhaps set the frequency at which they want to receive email, then you’ll have much higher open rates, and far fewer spam complaints.
But how do you go about acquiring subscribers to your list? After all, a preference center is useless if there are no email addresses to set preferences for! Well, you really have two choices: organic growth vs paid. Organic is through the ’sign up for our newsletter’ field on your website, or the ‘receive regular updates’ option on your registration for, or any other means by which subscribers make the active choice to receive your emails. Paid acquisition usually involves purchasing or renting a list of emails, but may also involve co-registration, or sponsoring an event – after which you receive a list of attendee emails.
Paid acquisition is generally less fruitful as far as metric are concerned. The reason is obvious – these people aren’t expecting to receive your email, they may not be aware of who you are, and they may not even be the slightest bit interested in what you’re promoting. In terms of what we’ve been discussing, the relevance is very low. Not only that, but you have to follow rather strict guidelines when sending unsolicited emails, in order to comply with current anti-spam regulations. So it’s clearly in your best interest to prioritize your efforts around organic list growth, even though paid acquisition may seem the easiest route at first! So what are some effective ways to organically grow your list?
The single most effective way to build your list is to promote a registration field on your website – every single page of it. Make the requirements minimal, an email address and name, or even just an email address if possible. As you engage them in ongoing email ‘conversation’, you can prompt them to update their profiles to receive more relevant promotions.
Another place to gather subscribers is on registration forms. Event registrations, whitepaper downloads, etc, should all include a check box saying something to the effect of ‘yes, I’d like to receive further information on xyz’. But contrary to popular practice, do not pre-check the box. This is called ‘implied opt-in’, and does not comply with anti-spam regulations.
Do you use a Pay-Per-Click campaign to bring search traffic to your website? Why not build a landing page? Offer the free evaluation of your product (or whatever else you offer), and allow them to subscribe there as well, even if they don’t want to commit to the evaluation.
There are so many ways to build your quality subscriber list, so feel free to be creative! One real estate agent I know allowed visitors to provide their email address and general area, and they were sent regular updates on new houses for sale in the area. Was it effective? Well, my wife and I bought a house we found through those emails, so definitely!
Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com’s Smart Email Marketing Guide
