EM100 - Micro course on growing email list for great email marketing

Part 1 of email marketing for startup growth course series gave an overview of various elements required for successful email marketing strategy.

Part 2 in this series will talk about growing and managing email list in detail. We will talk specifically about

• What is email list?
• Why purchasing or renting a list is bad for business?
• How to acquire and grow email list organically?
• How to keep it clean?
• How to segment it?

Every email campaign requires a list of email addresses(of customers or potential customers) to which email can be sent. When you start business initially, you will not have any list of email addresses. Without any list, you can not send email. This chicken and egg problem is faced by any new startup.

So the important question is, how you can acquire email addresses and grow the list with time. To start with, you can send mails to your friends and family members. They in turn, can forward the mails to their network. However this method has limited reach and often will not bring you customers.

You need a strategy and action plan to grow your list fast in terms of quantity and quality. How to acquire them?

There are three ways to build a list of email

1. Buy a list - buy from a vendor based on demographic or any other criteria e.g. people in the age of group of 20-30 and who live in a particular city.
2. Rent a list - List provider will send mail on your behalf to your chosen segment. You will not own the list and hence you will never see the email addresses.
3. Opt in list - People have given permission (online or in person like at a trade show etc.) to send emails to them for some specific content e.g. weekly blog updates.

When you rent or purchase a list, vendors may say that this list is completely opt-in. This means that the people on the list opted in to an email communication from someone at some point in time -- like the list provider, for example. What it doesn't mean, however, is that they opted in to receive email communications from your business.

Why you should not use rented or purchased list?

1. Reputable email service providers will not allow you to do it. As it hits the email deliverability, if they are using shared IP addresses. This means that one customer’s bad email list, will suffer other customer's deliverability who are on the same shared IP address.
2. Purchased email list are not at all good. List being on sale means, it is already used by many companies and email addresses are spammed innumerable times, such that they have lost all value.
3. People on the purchased list do not know you. As a result, they will mark your emails as SPAM and your purpose to reach them will not be fruitful.

If you have purchased list, then there is no way to check, whether the email addresses are valid, how many times they have been mailed, or from where they originated. You will risk your reputation and deliverability by using such lists.

Growing your list organically is the most effective way to build a successful mailing list. This way you are in touch with users who are interested in your offer and maintain their engagement.

Email marketing database degrades every year as contacts change their email address or opt out of email communication. So growing and keeping your list clean is paramount for successful email marketing strategy.

So its important that you must constantly add fresh contacts to your email campaigns.

Ways to grow your email list

You must understand your target audience and domain, in order to speed up your email list growth. You should have a clear picture of your customer e.g. Where can you find them? What they do? How old are they? What they like or dislike?

You must also give your users clear message as to why you are asking for their email address. Your users can have one or more of the following questions in mind, while they give their email address.

• What do I get when I give my email id?
• Will you spam me?
• How often will you send me email?
• Will you sell or rent me email id to other companies?
• Will I get any discount or offers?

These concerns you need to answer on your subscription or signup form. You will not have much success with a simple “Enter your email to subscribe for latest content”.

Based on these criteria, you must follow one or more of the following tactics to grow email list.

1. Create epic content - You must create great content, which can engage your users and provide them value. It can be in the form of blog, courses, guides etc. Good content will not only help your users but it will also encourage them to share to their friends and colleagues.
2. Ask users for their email address in exchange for something like free eBook, guides, courses etc.
3. Conduct an online webinar and ask for email during registration.
4. Promote online contests or free giveaways. Let users sign up for them using their email address.
5. Encourage your current email subscribers to share the content with their friends and network. Your emails should have social sharing buttons as well as subscribe link, so that people who receive forwarded mails can subscribe to it as well.
6. Write a guest blog on other sites and provide a link back to your blog subscription page.
7. Put a subscription form on your blog at a prominent position, so that people can view it and subscribe it. Write some good byline in order to get people give their email address.
8. Create dedicated landing pages for various offerings like product trial sign ups, downloading a case study etc.
9. Partner with someone similar in your domain and give them some good content in exchange for exposure.

Every Time people give you their email address, you must clearly mention and follow that you will send them only relevant content and will never spam their inbox.

Cleaning your list

You must periodically clean your list by removing inactive and invalid email addresses. You must segment your list into inactive and active (people who have opened and clicked your messages) based on historical data.

Most of the email marketing software's will do this for you automatically.

Review list of people who have not responded to your messages in past few months. Try to contact them in a different way than the rest of your list. If they still do not respond, then remove them from list. You should consider quality of list rather than size of list.

Segmentation of your list

Segmentation means, you split your list into manageable, meaningful and targeted groups. Some of the ways in which you can segment your lists are

• Customer plan type (basic, advanced, enterprise etc.)
• Demographic information (income, country, gender etc.)
• Customer interest (generally provided at the time of sign up)
• Frequency of email (daily, weekly, monthly)
• Blog or product updates

Segmentation gives you power to send highly targeted communication. Through this you send customers only what they really want.

You can further segment your list based on historical data like

• Active, inactive email addresses.
• Openers and clickers
• Unsubscribers

Most of the email softwares gives you facility to segment your lists in many ways.

Conclusion

Your email list is one of your most valuable resource. You must guard it with your life. Every email address on your list has some value and has potential ROI over short or long term. Your marketing efforts should be driven around email list growth apart from conversions.