CommuniGator
Email List Building
Building and growing your email list
You could have the best creative, a compelling subject line and the most
irresistible call to action, but if you haven’t thought about who you are sending it to, all your hard work is wasted. Gathering data should be a core part of your strategy, so make sure you’re not missing a trick.
A data strategy is an integral part of email marketing campaign planning. Excellent creative can be undermined by a failure to identify those contacts with a high propensity to respond. Invest time and budget in data collection and reap the rewards. The benefits you’ll see are far beyond acquiring new customers, they’ll help you decrease attrition, and cherish current customers.
Within this guide you’ll learn exactly how to reap the benefits of growing your own email lists, we’ll cover the following topics;
Creating the ultimate opt-in pages
Offer multiple opportunities for people to sign-up
The ideal welcome series
Putting an email preference centre into
place
Opt-in pages
and the chance to sign up
Opt-in data is increasingly difficult/expensive to buy or lease from data providers and data collected on your own website is, by its very nature, of better quality (cheaper) and of more value to your business.
How many unique visitors a day do you get to your website? How many of them are you able to communicate with again? Visitors to your website have taken the time to seek you out or have found their way to your website courtesy of the marketing budget invested in SEO and PPC. Don’t let this expense be wasted – capture those visitors on your homepage by offering something of interest, e.g. newsletter/industry hot topics subscription, whitepaper downloads, event registrations or entry to a free draw for an iPod/bottle of champagne/book on relevant topic etc.
What are our tips for creating an opt-in form, do I head you say? Read on and we’ll share our tips...
Keep it simple
Don’t put off potential prospects by presenting them with a lengthy forms asking for details, ranging from mailing address to inside leg measurement.
Keep it simple; first name, last name, email address, company name and telephone number is plenty of information to capture initially. You will be able to gather more information about them and their interests from subsequent email campaigns.
Tell them that by entering their details they are subscribing to receive further information from you – this will help to keep the unsubscribe rate down as they will be expecting/wanting to receive
Technology
Using an email marketing package, like CommuniGator, which includes web capture functionality streamlines this process.
A web capture form is created in the software and included on your website as an iframe. Results are fed directly back to the contact database enabling automated triggered campaigns. For example, a person has subscribed to receive late availability offers for holidays in Spain. In the web capture form they can tick their preferences, e.g. family holidays, tennis holidays, etc.
A triggered email is sent on submission of their details to thank them for subscribing. The
What not to do
Don’t go to the effort of capturing a prospect’s details on your website, feeding them into your contact database and then let that contact sit there with no contact for six months.
Chances are, when you do get round to sending them an email campaign, they will have forgotten that they subscribed, will class the communication as SPAM and hit unsubscribe.
Create several chances to sign up
So you’ve got your well optimised sign-up form, now you need to promote it so people sign up!
An easy way to share your sign up form is on your website, pop it on your homepage and various sub-pages. Highly visited pages like your blog is a great place to start too, but you want to make sure it’s definitely visible, including it in your navigation bar is a great way to do this.
If you send lead nurturing emails to remain in contact with potential customers get them to sign up too, let them know they can receive more industry hints & tips, and news by signing up.
EXAMPLE
Welcome series
You never get a second chance to make a first impression, right?
Well, that’s definitely the case when it comes to emails. So you’ve got these well-built lists and you know what they want to hear from you, you need to ensure you live up to expectations and set the tone for future emails to come, you can do this effectively through a welcome series.
A welcome series should be sent a soon as possible after somebody signs up for your communications, they’re perfect for establishing a solid foundation on which to build your relationship.
Here are some handy tips to follow when creating a series:
Prioritise the customer
This must always be the first thing that needs to be established in the welcome series, what will the customer get from the mailing? Stress the benefit and exclusivity of being part of the send, inform them of the discounts and the useful information that will be provided by your future mailings.
What makes you unique?
Hopefully you know what makes your company
Say thank you!
There’s many newsletters people can sign-up for these days, so make sure you take the time to thank them for choosing to sign up to yours.
Social media
Offer the chance to connect across multiple channels offer links and you could even advertise any offers that are used to promote your social presence.
Preference centres
When sending emails, it’s highly important to listen to and understand your audience, so you can send them relevant content that they’re actually interested in.
There’s nothing worse than having an inbox full of emails that are totally irrelevant to the reader. Preference centres allow you to analyse your audience more efficiently and to gain a better understanding of what they do and don’t want to receive from you.
Rather than unsubscribe from all your
communications, preference centres allow your audience to specify which of your sends they’d like to get. For example, chose between your newsletter, your latest offers, hearing about your events, and webinars. They could select to receive all the above communications or purely one, your newsletter for example.
Statistically, emails based on preferences achieve twice the level of click-throughs over general email campaigns. You also have a better chance of achieving sales, as you are actually speaking to customers about what they are interested in, and let’s not forget that your number of unsubscribes will be significantly reduced, as your recipients relate more to what you are saying.
Which brings me to my point – the unsubscribe process. Generally, unsubscribes are seen as a negative thing. With a preference based unsubscribe centre, this need not be the case. Instead, you can give your readers the chance to unsubscribe from only one topic they are no longer interested in while subscribing to other topics that are currently of interest. So you may not need to lose them as reader completely.
The choice is yours: Build lists so you can send campaigns that are actually relevant to your readers, or carry on sending straightforward campaigns and, in the best case scenario, run the risk of one out of two readers clicking the delete button, and in the worst, hitting unsubscribe!
EXAMPLE
Gator hints and tips
When sending emails it’s highly important to listen to and understand your audience, so you can send them relevant content that they’re actually interested in.
There’s nothing worse than having an inbox full of emails that are totally irrelevant to the reader. Preference centres allow you to analyse your audience more efficiently and to gain a better understanding of what they do and don’t want to receive from you.
Content is king! Deliverability
All the efforts invested will lead to nothing if what you’re sending isn’t up to scratch. Content is king, so make sure you keep your emails interesting, engaging, and relevant. This will increase interaction and decrease the number unsubscribing from your sends.
Want to know more about writing successful content, we have a whole guide dedicated to the topic!
Don’t forget that your ultimate goal should be to get your messages into the inbox, you can’t risk for your email acquisition activities to have a negative impact on your deliverability.
We have a whole guide dedicated to email deliverability, check it out if you want to know the steps to follow to ensure your email lands where you want it to.
About CommuniGator
CommuniGator is one of the leading marketing automation software providers in the UK.
Established in 2005, we’ve gone through a period of evolution as the marketing landscape has changed.
The core platform functionality caters to email marketing with automated welcome series, a HTML editor for designing your emails, templates, responsive design, dynamic groups based on behaviour,
integration with the leading CRM platforms, an event management suite, robust reporting and so the list goes on.
On the marketing automation side we’re able to track prospect activity across the web pages they visit on your website and the email content they consume and take action against. This means you can build up a really detailed profile of who has done what.
To read all the juicy details of what the platform offers and how we can help your business jump on over to our website: www.communigator.co.uk
Give us a call: +44 (0)1483 411 911
This document and it’s contents are proprietary to CommuniGator or its licensors. No part of this document may be copied, reproduced or transmitted to any third party in any form without CommuniGator’s prior written consent.
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