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Ask an Expert: Advice on Email List Building
03/15/11
This week’s Ask an Expert column focuses on the biggest ongoing challenge email marketers face: how best to grow their email list into a large, responsive file.
Once again, we turn to the experts participating in the Only Influencers email discussion list, an invitation-only list of online marketing experts:
Jordie van Rijn, email marketing consultant, eMailMonday: In my experience: Offer exciting content and thus stop people from (emotionally) unsubscribing. It is the best list-building tactic ever. Otherwise you are trying to fill a leaky bucket. You could add as many subscribers as you like, but if they don't want to receive you messages, it won't translate into lasting value.
Chip House, vice president of industry and relationship marketing, ExactTarget: In our 2009 List Growth Study we surveyed 350 marketers globally and asked them to rank 17 list growth methods on a scale of 1-5 on quality, quantity and ROI. The overwhelming message was, go organic! Near the top were all methods driven by the subscriber where they are already interacting with a brand, such as POS, on web site, Facebook page, etc.
Near the bottom was list rental and append...both of which are inherently non- organic and w/o permission. Also low was outbound calls and mass ads. These methods also ranked lowest in " continuity"-- meaning a low pctg of marketers that try them don't plan on repeating them
Andy Thorpe, deliverability and compliance manager, Pure360: This is a subject I have to 'jibber' about quite a lot :-) and which I have written a lot about, here is the short version...
Obviously go organic...List building is where email, social and SEO work so well.
Sexy marketing like SEO, PPC and social send a lot of SEO friendly traffic to a web-site and most of these links are geared to converting these new prospects into customers straight away.
The people who are interested but not to ready to commit yet and don't convert straight away are often forgotten in the excitement & pressure and are lost as an anonymous site bounce.
By supplying a sign-up form as a secondary call to action and showing relevance to the sign-up, brands have been able to further engage and convince people who don't convert to customer straight away through building rapport & trust.
This can not only create more customers from traffic already earned but can also increase referrals and social shares due to the positive and involved experience of the journey from prospect to customer to fan.
The experience of this journey can also be complimented by social media
Jordan Cohen, vice president, business development, Pontiflex: In today's environment, with so many channels competing for consumers' attention, marketers face the duel challenge of cutting through the clutter with relevant messaging and cutting through the clutter to attract email sign-ups in the first place.
The best of the best are finding ways to do both.
At a recent industry event, an executive from a high-end apparel retailer described his company’s “ubiquity strategy” for marketing.
"We want to be everywhere our customers are, and to communicate with them relevantly across all of those channels,” he said.
A large airline that we work with is similarly employing a ubiquity strategy to drive its acquisition efforts, and is realizing exceptional success. "Sign up and save" is one of the first calls-to-action on its homepage. It runs registration-path and in-banner sign up ads on contextually and demographically relevant 3rd party Web sites. Opting in to its email list (via the Web or SMS) is promoted in magazine ads, on billboards, in the airport, and even on in-flight cocktail napkins. Sign up, sign up, sign up—and reap the rewards of doing so. They ask for opt-in everywhere their current and potential customers are, make it easy and compelling to do so, and it’s working.
Bill Kaplan co-founder and CEO FreshAddress: Organic email list building tactics should be certainly be at the top of everyone's list. As Chip stated, whether it's in your stores, on your Web sites or FB pages, through your call centers, or in your direct mail pieces, one should do everything possible to encourage customers and visitors to subscribe to your communications.
Unfortunately, even after optimizing your organic list building strategies, most companies are left with 50%-75% of their customer/donor files lacking email addresses. And with approximately 30% of the people changing their email addresses each year, companies can ill afford to sit back and watch their current email databases erode without employing additional methods to build their files.
Contrary to Chip's assertion, our clients, which include 25% of the Fortune 50 companies and many leading nonprofits, have generated an incredible ROI on ECOA [Email Change of Address] and Email Appending services and run these programs on a regular basis to reconnect with their lost customers or donors. If performed in a careful and conscientious manner by an experienced and ethical provider, email list building services such as these will generate higher returns than almost any other marketing program available. If you're interested, we have a number of case studies on our site that go into more detail:
John Caldwell: If you're appending email addresses to data you're doing it backwards.
Evidently it's easier to sell, though; I mean one takes thought and consideration while the other just takes money.
If you believe that email is a permission-based medium, which most industry professionals should, then appending email addresses to data is just a fancy name for list buying.
If you don't believe that email is permission-based, you're destined to find out the hard way that you're mistaken.
The size of a sending company or how much they spend doesn't matter to an ISP. "We're getting a lot of complaints from (Name your Fortune 500 company), but they're really big, so buying email lists must be okay. Let their mail through". Riiiight....
Personally, I don't view anyone buying email addresses under any label as "ethical". It may be "legal", but not ethical since list buying doesn't fall under the realm of industry accepted standards of conduct. But, hey, that's just me....
Bill Kaplan: For some on this list. I know the following distinctions between email appending/ECOA services and email list rental might not be considered relevant but there is a huge difference between "buying lists" and the email database services we provide:
1) We only perform ECOA and email append services for our clients' customer or donor files so a pre-existing relationship must be present
2) We only match against carefully vetted, opt-in registrations of individuals that have given their preference to receive third party marketing info. Of course, we're only using this to match against customer/donor files where a prior relationship exists. Additionally, we scrub these matched files against the DMA's "do not email" file, the FCC's domain blocks, our clients' opt-out files, our own opt-out files, along with 15-20 other suppression processes to ensure we have the freshest, most accurate match possible.
3) We deploy a confirmation email, available on either an opt-in or opt-out basis, to the recipients on behalf of our clients to confirm deliverability of the match and give the recipient an opportunity to opt out from any future client communications. Our contracts also require each of our clients to comply with the opt-out requirements in the CAN SPAM legislation.
There are no reputable companies that will sell email lists and, for those companies that perform email list rentals, John's concerns are certainly valid.
Dave Hendricks, chief operating officer, LiveIntent: You want to sign up newsletter clickers if you are building your list, right? A list of non-clickers isn't worth much.
LiveIntent is having tremendous results using our technology to run ads for newsletter signups. Our clients are reporting that they are getting many new subscribers this way. Our publisher clients who are running these ads on behalf of our clients (who are also publishers) are also profiting from this arrangement. So everyone is winning. Publishers monetizing their newsletters, and the advertisers getting valid signups.
Meaning, we place ads for newsletters on other newsletters. This is based on the premise 'if you subscribe to newsletters, you subscribe to newsletters'.
Our clients bid for placement across our network of publishers, on a CPA basis. they pay varying rates per signup. It's all performance based.
One of the things that these newsletter clients do so well is to make it super easy to sign up, whereas so many companies make finding the email subscription box impossible. Make a big box on your site. Sign up here. I would be happy to share more with anyone, off list. Not stats, just point to great sign up pages.
By advertising on other newsletters, with a great call to action, and then having the user land - post click - right where they need to sign up, Publishers and Retailers are signing up high intent newsletter subscribers who, based on their source of signing up, are known to 1) read newsletters and 2) click on things within newsletters. In this case, clicking on an ad in one publishers' newsletter to subscribe to a newsletter from another publisher (or service). You want to sign up newsletter clickers if you are building your list.
Pretty Meta, huh?
Editor’s note: Yeah, yeah. Hendricks’ post is a blatant pitch. He makes an interesting argument, though, so I decided to leave it in. Hendricks: You owe me a beer.
Comments
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Date: 2011-03-18 20:16:49
Subject: Backwards....
@Sravanthi - you seem to have misread my comments both above and below. But thanks for arguing my point to me. :)
Date: 2011-03-16 20:08:52
Subject: Where do you want me to send the beer?
Ken - I applaud your courage in posting this, despite my blatant self-promotion! If you want to come around and visit us, we'll tell you the whole story!
Dave@liveintent.com
Date: 2011-03-16 16:35:12
Subject: Point of Can Spam clarification
Hey Sravanthi: It's not a violation of the Can Spam Act to buy email addresses.
Not wise, maybe. But not illegal.
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Date: 2011-03-16 10:05:06
Subject: You would still be violating the CAN SPAM Act.
Mr. Caldwell, this is in response to "Now, let's say that I have Betty's name, address, phone number, shoe size, and her kids shoe sizes; the only thing that I don't have is her email address. For whatever reason - maybe just to cannibalizing my physical store business becaue I'm weird that way - I decide that I want Betty's email address, too. So if understand Bill correclty, if I claim to have an existing business relationship with Betty and can provide her physical address and whatever other criteria, if I give him money he will give me Betty's email address so that I can "append" it to other data I have for Betty. If I'm correct, we've just taken a long journey to get to exchanging email addresses for money. "
You might have all the details of the customer but if she chose to not give her email address and if you purchased it from elsewhere, then you are still violating the CAN SPAM Act. There could be various reasons behind her not leaving her email address.
1.She doesn't wish to receive any promotional emailer out of personal choice.
2.Her inbox is already cluttered with enough mails and she doesn't want more mails.
3.She is already a regular visitor and is aware of the happenings in the store, so she doesn't want to receive a mail.
4.She wants to keep her inbox free from promotional mailer and newsletter inspite of her liking towards the store.
5.She wants to receive physical mail instead of an email.
6.She might get upset looking at the promotional mailer in her inbox sent without her consent and might stop coming to your store, for all you know.
Date: 2011-03-15 21:39:36
Subject:
I didn't say anything about list rental. I know the difference and it's not something that Im ever confused about; nor do I throw out straw men to obfuscate. But that's just me.... Besides, nowhere did I even mention "rental".
Let's put this in real simple terms. Let's say that I have an email address of bettyjones@somedoman.com belonging to a person that has shopped with me before, thereby providing me her physical address.
There are other things that I might like to know to help me market better to Betty. Is she married? Have kids? Drive a Volvo? Whatever data points that I feel might improve my marketing to Betty better is data worth appending.
Now, let's say that I have Betty's name, address, phone number, shoe size, and her kids shoe sizes; the only thing that I don't have is her email address. For whatever reason - maybe just to cannibalizing my physical store business becaue I'm weird that way - I decide that I want Betty's email address, too.
So if understand Bill correclty, if I claim to have an existing business relationship with Betty and can provide her physical address and whatever other criteria, if I give him money he will give me Betty's email address so that I can "append" it to other data I have for Betty.
If I'm correct, we've just taken a long journey to get to exchanging email addresses for money.