Best Practices for Email List Building
Obtain an email service provider.
Honestly, before we even begin, it is vital that you have an email marketing provider. One who you are familiar with and who can easily assist you in building your email lists.
It is crucial that your email marketing provider has the following functionality.
- A collection of sign-up forms.
- The power to send sign-ups to various lists.
- The ability to monitor and report the efficiency of each sign-up form.
- The function to segment and tag your subscribers.
- The ability to forward automated messages based on these segments and lists.
Only then will you have everything in place to begin creating your email list.
Keep Your List Healthy
A healthy email list is created when you have people who are willing and happy to hear from you. Often these people have already engaged with your brand and have taken the next step into providing their contact details and consent for email marketing. Only these types of contacts will give you elevated conversion rates and generate powerful results.
Did you know 30% of subscribers switch their email addresses each year? So, despite how long and hard you have been accumulating emails, you need to erase any inactive subscribers and keep your list fresh and up to date. Ideally, this should be done annually.
The majority of email marketing solutions will make this as easy as possible and even suggest purging old or inactive subscribers from your lists.
Focus on quality not quantity.
Never Purchase an Email List
Nearly all marketers are looking for ways to create an email list fast. We know first-hand, whether you get a list for free or if you purchase one, you generally will not see many (if any) results. It may be fast, but it doesn’t work!
There are a lot of shady characters on the internet who will sell you email lists containing thousands of so-called “quality” contacts that are ideal for your company. However, you know deep down they are not, you are just hoping that some of them maybe 2% won’t be that bad, right?
Here is why it isn’t such a great idea.
Others are Doing It
If you are purchasing an email list, there is a big chance that others in your industry are purchasing the same list.
That email list could possibly be spam trap or have spam traps. This means if you were to email those contacts, the senders email address and IP address is blacklisted as spam.
Those contacts may not be spam traps. However, they are not reliable leads for your company, and they can mark you as spam. Consider having 100,000 people marking you down as spam, your sender reputation will be ruined.
If you collect too many spam complaints your email service provider will close your account. So, your target of creating an email list will never be achieved.
Legal Issues
GDPR is an EU data protection law, and you are violating it. Those contacts did not opt into your list. If there is no evidence of their sign-up consent you can be given a hefty fine.
Waste of Money
Finally, you will have spent a reasonable amount of money obtaining that list and mailing your campaign to the contacts on it. However, instead of sales from your email marketing actions, you will get the reverse.
If you want to finish the email marketing race before you have begun, purchase an email list.
However, if you would like to learn more about how to create a good quality email list, click here to read our blog “How to Build your Email List”.