| By Tom O'Leary
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's Email 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. If building a list quickly is important to you, perhaps the investment will seem reasonable. Just make sure that your co-registrant partners have visitors who would be relevant to your business and that you calculate the ROI of each lead before spending the money.
Here are some other tactics to gather names and email addresses for your list that have proved to be effective for email marketers:
- Including a check box with online order forms (pre-checked of course)
- Offering free trials and downloads
- Free newsletter offers
- Running online contests
- Coupons or discount incentives for registering details
- Recommendations (encouraging existing subscribers to forward your message to friends who might find it useful or relevant.)
- Providing a sample of the content that the subscriber will receive
- Having subscription-only content (articles, reports, white papers) on your site
To encourage visitors to register their email address and details, it is important to provide clear information about what they are subscribing to, the frequency of contact to expect and privacy information to ensure them that their data will not be released to others. But how much data do you need from subscribers?
What Data Should You Collect?
If you plan to personalize your email messages, which most email marketers do (or should!); then you will obviously need more than just an email address. At the very least, personalization will require a first and last name and email address. Ideally, as marketers, we want as much information from each customer as possible. But there is a delicate balance between gathering information and frustrating users to the point of not filling out the subscription form.
At a minimum, email addresses, first name and last name should be required on registration forms. That said, it would be wise to collect as much information as possible. By making other form fields optional, you can gather additional data without dissuading subscribers who might be hesitant to reveal more than their name and email address.
Research shows that online consumers are likely to give the following information without feeling overly suspicious or invaded:
- Name
- Email
- Work/home/mobile phone
- Address (city, state, country)
- Hobbies/Interests
- Mother's maiden name
- Marital status, age and gender
- Industry classification
More sensitive information, like bank details, nationality, income levels and credit card data is perceived as private and is rarely shared online unless a trusted relationship already exists.
To that end, it might be prudent to request basic information when establishing the relationship and following up later with requests for more information to support your desire to personalize the experience for your customers. It's not dissimilar to intimate personal relationships. It's never wise to ask very very personal questions on the first date. In relationships, we get to know each other over time, and share more information with each other as trust grows. The same is true for professional relationships online.
Making Lists Effective
So, now we have methods to grow our list, but how do we make them effective? Pushing content to recipients who aren't interested in your message will be ineffective over time. It's like clay pigeon shooting in the dark. You might hit some, but you'll miss more. That's why permission marketing is so important. You should only send email to recipients who request you to do so. There are different levels of permission email marketing, and each type of permission results in different response and conversion rates from recipients.
- Standard Opt-in: When somebody gives their email address to a website, without confirming that they are interested in receiving email messages from the site. No confirmation email is sent to the recipient. Standard opt-ins might result in a larger list, but response and conversion rates from standard-opt in lists are low, and can generate significant numbers of complaints (or even accusations of spam!)
- Confirmed Opt-in: With confirmed opt-in subscriptions, the recipient will receive an email notification confirming that they supplied their email address to a site. They aren't required to respond or take any action to stay on the email list. Confirmed opt-in subscriptions receive slightly higher response from recipients, but are still met with complaints and can lead to frustration of recipients.
- Double Opt-in: Double opt-in subscriptions require that the user respond to the confirmation email sent to them if they desire to continue receiving messages from the sender. If the recipient doesn't reply to the confirmation, their name will be taken off the list. Because double opt-in subscriptions require effort on the recipient to respond, and because some won't, the resulting list will be reduced in size. That said, the remaining list is comprised of recipients who confirmed interest in your message and are much more likely to convert into sales. Double opt-in lists have proved to result in fewer bounce-backs, opt-outs and spam complaints as well. Double opt-in lists also result in open rates that are substantially higher than the average, with one in five double opt-in marketers receiving open rates of 60 percent, double the industry average.
For any list to be effective, it needs to be comprised of people who are interested in your message, and contain enough detail to support segmentation and personalization. The more details that you have in your list database, the more creative you can be with the personalization and segmentation of your message. But personal details can be collected over time, as your relationship with your audience grows. One way to ensure that trust is maintained in your relationship with customers, is to be upfront about their ability to opt-out from receiving messages, and to make the opt-out process easy for them. If someone wants to stop receiving your messages, there really is no point to keep them on the list. All it will do is frustrate them and damage your brand's reputation.
The effectiveness of any email list is related entirely to the relevance that your message has to it. If your message isn't relevant to your list, you might as well be sending ice to Eskimos. |
