3 Rules You Must Break to Expand Your Email Marketing List
By DJ Waldow
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When it comes to email marketing, you
can craft the ideal subject line,
creative copy and a great offer. But if
you don't have an extensive list of
active email subscribers to send your
message to, nothing else really matters.
How do you expand your email list? What
are the rules you should follow?
You can include a "Sign Up For Our Email
Newsletter" link on your site, and you
can collect email addresses when someone
creates an account or makes a purchase.
But if you really want to build a larger
list, consider rejecting -- yes,
rejecting -- some of the traditional
practices of email marketing.
Here are three email marketing rules you
should break, and explanations for why
you should do so:
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1. Never use a popup to collect email addresses.
Remember the early days of the internet when your monitor
would suddenly be flooded with popups, those annoying boxes
that seemed impossible to close without a CTR-ALT_DEL reboot?
Well, popups are still around, but thanks to popup blockers,
people can easily avoid them.
Now, marketers are using a more sophisticated, less
intrusive form of the popup: the popover. A popover is a box
that appears on a website asking viewers if they want to be
added to an email list. These popovers are customizable --
they can be set to appear only after a certain number of
page views, only after a certain time period or only with
people who haven't visited the site in a set number of days.
Many companies are finding success with popovers. Patrick
Starzan, vice president of marketing and distribution at the
comedy video website Funny or Die, says nearly 80 percent of
subscribers signed up in response to the
popovers the site has been using for more than four
years. The popovers appear only after someone has visited at
least three pages on the site, and Starzan says he hasn't
received any negative feedback about them.
Popovers work best if they're simple, direct and include
a bit of humor. So, don't clutter your popover with a lot of
words. Keep the language light and fun, and give people a
reason to opt in.
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2. Always require a double opt-in.
Imagine this: You're ready to buy a new iPad Mini. You walk
into a store, grab the tablet off the shelf, walk to the
register and pull out your credit card. Then, the clerk says,
"Before you give us your money, we're going to send you an
email. Please open it and click the link. Then, and only
then, can you buy this tablet."
Crazy, right? You are ready to buy, but the seller is
putting an obstacle in your way. This scenario reminds me of
the websites that require people to click a link in an email
they have received before they can be confirmed and added to
their email marketing list. As my former sales boss used to
say, "Stop when they say yes."
Not only does a double opt-in create an unnecessary
barrier, but there's also the possibility that the
confirmation email won't reach the intended recipient.
According to Return Path's
Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report for the
second half of 2011, nearly a quarter of all emails never
reach their target. Are you willing to take your chances by
sending out a confirmation email?
Instead, consider sending a welcome or thank you email to
new subscribers after they opt in to your marketing list.
The email confirms that the new subscriber's email address
is valid, and it also can give people an idea of the type of
content they'll be receiving.
3. Never send an email without first getting
explicit permission. One of the biggest
misconceptions about the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 -- the first
national standards for the sending commercial email in the
U.S. -- is that you need permission before sending an email
to someone. While the laws in some countries,
such as Canada, are changing to require permission, it
is still legal to send emails in the U.S. without explicit
consent from the recipient.
Rather than require people to opt in, you can give them
the choice of opting out. When media company KSL.com added a
"group deals" email to its marketing mix, it could have sent
an email asking subscribers to opt in to receive it. Instead,
it decided to send an opt-out email to give people the
opportunity to unsubscribe from the group deals list. It
turned out that most people did not opt out. But if KSL had
chosen to get explicit permission before adding everyone to
the new list, many people might not have taken time to
respond, substantially reducing the audience for the group
deals.
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