Get More Emails: 10 Tips on How to Grow Your List

Once you understand the effectiveness of email marketing, a key goal should be to get more emails. The more email addresses you accumulate, the more customers you will reach and the more revenues you will generate.

Moreover, because you inevitably lose 20% to 30% of your working email addresses over time, offsetting those losses by validating and refreshing your email list should be an ongoing operation.

How can you get more emails on your list? Here are 10 top tips and best practices:

1) Ask for email addresses at every touch point-at your store’s point-of-sale stations, customer service window, trade shows, events, website landing pages, and during the e-commerce checkout process.

2) Promote your newsletter online and offline-an invitation and subscribe button should be displayed prominently on your home page as well as on all social media pages, postings, brochures, emails, direct mail, and other marketing materials.

3) Require email addresses for downloads-present a form with a mandatory email address field for requestors to receive a whitepaper or other free offering.

4) Invite people to join your list from transactional emails-ask for addresses in all order confirmations, download acknowledgements, thank you notes, shipping notifications, customer service messages, information queries, and other account notices.

5) Have your call center and sales staffers ask for email addresses-when you have a contact’s ear and attention, ask for their email address; many people are happy to provide it.

6) Offer email-only specials, promotions, and other incentives-to get a compelling deal, customers and prospects will gladly provide their email addresses.

7) Mine your customers’ networks-make it easy for visitors to forward your content to a friend or share it with their social network, and provide a form or link to enable recipients to sign up.

8) Leverage social media sign-on buttons-enable visitors to sign up via their Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts; all these services offer APIs for this function, and you gain their email addresses as part of the process.

9) Partner with similar websites or newsletters to allow their subscribers to join your list or vice versa-affiliate relationships can be mutually rewarding and yield a trove of addresses.

10) Use email append services-when your company accumulates customer postal addresses through its catalogs or other offline channels, you can potentially match thousands or millions of emails to those customer addresses.

In requesting email addresses, your success will be greater if you clearly communicate how the customer’s email will be used and what they will receive.

If you follow these guidelines and employ the above methodologies, you will invariably see positive results. Let us know how you fare, and please feel free to share your tips on how to get more emails.