How to Build Effective Email Subscription Lists
Description: Online consumers demand relevance, so list builders must focus on building large, highly-relevant lists rather than just gathering a bunch of email addresses. In this article, the author will discuss list size, registration methods, data collection and permission requirements.
BUILDING A SUBSCRIBER LIST IS IMPORTANT for anyone using email to communicate with customers. But compiling an effective list is even more important. Online consumers demand relevance, so list builders must focus on building large, highly-relevant lists rather than just gathering a bunch of email addresses. In this article, the author will discuss list size, registration methods, data collection and permission requirements.
Bigger Is Not Always Better
According to Marketing Sherpa'sEmail Marketing Benchmark Guide, 18 percent of companies with online sales between 25-50 Million have house lists of 100,000-500,000 contacts, while 27 percent in the same earnings bracket manage with lists below 50,000. This shows that you can be as successful with fewer names on your list. The importance of quality in your email list might seem obvious; but many email marketers continue to focus on the size of the list rather than the quality of the leads in it. But the big questions still remain: How do you build the darn thing and what steps can you take to ensure that the names in it will be responsive to your message?
Effective Registration Methods
1.The Call-to-Register:
Regardless of any other tactics used to gather email addresses for your list, a clear call-to-register should be on your web site. For some reason, many websites bury their registration form on the page, making it difficult for visitors to see. Others don't even have an email collection form on their front page. Because Internet users spend very little time making decisions on a website, it is important to make your registration form stand out. Here is an example of a good call-to-register:
As you can see, the call-to-register is at the top of the front page. It gives visitors options to choose what information they want to receive (relevance). Furthermore, it expresses value by attesting that 173,000 marketing, advertising and PR professionals already subscribe to this FREE, practical information. To top it all off, they promise potential subscribers that they will not rent your email to anyone, building trust from the start.
What they don't do, however, is request any more information than the email address of the visitor. We'll talk about data collection later. Beyond having an effective email registration presence on your website, there are other ways to increase subscription rates. Co-registration is one of them.
2. Co-registration
Co-registration is a growing trend amongst online businesses to gain subscribers to their message. Basically, co-registration partners businesses in registration efforts, so that a related product or service provider will ask customers on their site if they would be interested in subscribing to their partners content at the same time. If the content is relevant to their subscribers, there is a good chance that it will be effective. Here is an example of a site that uses co-registration in its subscription form:
As you can see above, when customers are registering for this site's newsletter, they can also register simultaneously for other newsletters with related content (their co-registration partners' newsletters!) Also notice how they have the partner subscriptions pre-checked!
There is some concern about the delay in getting co-registered subscription information from partners incorporated in the house list; as delays in sending welcome messages to new subscribers can affect opt-in rates . That said, it has proved to be a successful tactic for many email marketers.
According to Marketing Sherpa, over 60 percent of co-registration users use between one to five partners for registration purposes. A much smaller percentage use over fifty partners to gather subscribers. Not dissimilar to affiliate partnerships, some marketers prefer fewer, more targeted partnerships while others choose higher exposure to larger audiences.
While most marketers engage in exchange-based co-registration partnerships, some prefer to pay for co-registration names, eliminating the administrative effort to gather names for others in exchange. The cost of a high quality (relevant) subscription name averages around $1-1.5 USD each in paid co-registration services.
