Back in January, many email
marketers said increasing their lists was their top goal for 2013. Well, spring
is here. Is your mailing list growing as fast as your flowers and lawn? If not,
it's time to execute a new plan.
Many marketers have email
addresses only for 30% or less of their customer and prospect lists. They're
tempted to revert to their direct-mail experience and reach for a quick fix
like email append ("e-append") and list rental/purchase.
But in today's engagement-based
inbox placement world, this "quick fix" approach can give you more
headaches than new sales.
If you seek quantity over
quality in list growth, you're practically inviting the ISPs either to block
your entire opt-in mailing list or route everything to your recipients' bulk
folders, where they'll languish in obscurity until the ISPs dump them
automatically.
So, what should be in your
email list growth plan? Below are five tried-and-true methods to ignite your
email list growth, in a safe, permission-based way.
1. Make It Easy to Opt In on
Your Website
Your customers and prospects
must be able to find your opt-in form easily on your home page. This advice has
been around for years, but today's web designers apparently didn't get the
memo. They position Facebook and Twitter icons prominently but send you on a
search-and-rescue mission to find the opt-in field.
Many websites undersell the
email value proposition, using just a link saying "Sign Up for Email"
relegated to the homepage footer. Worse, the email opt-in call-to-action isn't
even on the page. Make your forms stand out.
If you want to get more
opt-ins, make the email invite more visible. Use a benefit-based call-to-action,
and test an offer that you subsequently deliver in your welcome series.
2. Don't Stop at Just One
Add more opt-in forms
throughout your site and in various placements: above the fold (the horizontal
halfway point on your website, like the fold in a newspaper), below the fold,
in the right rail, in left-hand navigation and on a dynamic layer that displays
according to visitors' site activity.
Test these locations to see how
many more opt-ins you can drive, each one alone and in combination with each
other. One opt-in form on a page might drive X, while having two opt-in form
placements on a page might drive 1.5X to 2X.
At the EEC Summit in 2012,
Tommy Hilfiger reported that his company drives 2% of all site visitors to opt
in by using a dynamic opt-in layer served to new site visitors on site entry.
3. Collect Emails at Your
Stores
Ask your customers to opt in
for email at your checkout counter or when requesting an email receipt.
However, be sure you are collecting high-quality names.
You'll have to develop a
request procedure that helps you overcome two big pitfalls of point-of-sale
requests: phony addresses, either provided by reluctant customers who can't say
no to the request or keyed in by sales associates who have to meet email
quotas.
Mistakes, which happen when
sales people misspell a written address, misunderstand a customer's spoken
address or omit a crucial detail like the "@" symbol.
Here are a few suggestions for
collecting more and better addresses:
- Let customers type in their email addresses
on a POS touchpad or credit card terminal.
- Give them an offer or benefit for signing
up in-store.
- Explain what they'll be receiving.
- Get explicit permission before adding the
address.
4. Make It Mobile
Consumer adoption of mobile
sites and apps makes mobile another important collection point for opt-in for
both email and SMS text. The best mobile site home pages have two opt-in forms:
one for email, one for SMS. Remember the constraints that mobile puts on
viewing and data input.
Don't ask users to fill out
lots of form fields. Keep the form short and simple. You can collect more
information later in your welcome series using progressive profiling.
5. Remember Your Social
Networks
Give your Facebook followers a
simple opt-in form page. Call out the benefits and differences between your
social experience and your email communications.
Consider using social login,
also known as social sign-in. This uses existing login information from social
networks such as Facebook or Twitter to sign in to a website without having to
create a separate login account specifically for your website.
You can also use this process to
allow your site registrants to quickly and easily sign up to receive your
marketing emails.
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