Email List Building: 5 Tips To Build a High-Quality List
Having the right email list can provide phenomenal results from your email marketing efforts. So, how do you create a high-quality email list? Jordie van Rijn, an independent email and eCRM marketing consultant, provides a few tips in this article.
Imagine two exactly the same businesses. Same product, same marketing campaigns, just one thing is different: their email list. And as a result, they get wildly different results from email marketing. Building the right list will lead to having the right customers.
A quality email list will pay off: Higher open and click-through rates, more engagement, and more conversion, which in turn (should) mean more budget and options to grow. People on a high-quality list of subscribers per definition will be interested in receiving your emails and have the potential to use your products and services.
It’s far more attractive to have a small list of engaged subscribers interested in what you have to say than a huge list of unengaged subscribers who will never read your emails.
This article provides evergreen tips to build high-quality email lists that give you strong results every time.
See More: 4 Ways To Improve Email Marketing Campaign Deliverability
Tips for Building Quality Email Lists
There are many ways to build a quality email list. In this article, we’ll focus on four areas that will make a lasting improvement and are applicable to all cases. So let’s get into it.
1. Zero in on the golden subscribers
Any good marketer knows they should define their target audience in detail before even thinking of starting a marketing campaign. But when it comes to building an email list, often it ends up casting too wide a net. Not all subscribers are created equal.
Average customer value
Source: The art of email segmentation
Even based on an RFM model, you can see a big connection between the value of top customers and inactive ones. If you made the model for yourself, you’d see that other data ties into it. Like subscription source, demographics, products bought and intent. Connect your WIIFM (what’s in it for me) to the ideal customer instead of just everyone.
So an active audience starts with audience development: Know who you want to attract before ramping up the list growth engine.
2. Choose incentives that both repel and attract
Giving something extra — a signup incentive — is an attractive way to get email list subscribers. An added extra is that you can now promote the incentive instead of subscribing to the email list directly. Different incentives will result in different quality subscribers.
How to use incentives
Source: emailmonday
As a marketer, it’s important to consider what kind of email list you want to build and pick the matching incentives. Even more, your should incentives scare away customers you don’t want and attract those you do. There are many ways to use content marketing to build trust with your ideal customer, like answering their questions and presenting how-to guides and tools that will help solve a part of their problems.
3. When you find list growth incentives that work well, double down
I like the idea of doing what works. And if it works more, do more of it. For instance, when you see a blog topic with contextual signup doing well on your blog, the first step would be to write more blogs on the topic. But consider taking it a step further.
Give a webinar (collecting signups there as well) and transform it into an evergreen webinar. That is an automated way to drive more signups. Building a library of content-based signup incentives that won’t age too badly will increase your signups over time.
4. Craft a progressive opt-in flow
Email list-building success and conversion rates depend on your opt-in process. Some tweaks to the process and your forms can easily result in 5 to 10% better opt-in rates.
We want to minimize friction and maximize form conversion rates, but here comes the kicker; it isn’t just about making forms shorter and asking for less information. Pundits say it is a best practice to keep forms short but then end up not asking the important questions and still present a badly converting form!
If you are on that length versus information question, consider there is a great alternative in breaking up your signup two or three steps. First, get the essentials you need to sign up and then continue with asking for important profile and preference questions.
It is progressive profiling but already inside the form. Your thank you page, subscription confirmation email, and welcome emails all make part of this subscription flow.
5. Use real-time email validation
By adding email validation to your forms, you can increase the accuracy of the email addresses you collect. There are a lot of email address problems you’d like to avoid.
Results of email validation
Source: Bouncer
Validation results in a cleaner contact list and fewer bounced or undeliverable emails. In addition, email validation helps protect your sender reputation by preventing mistyped from being added to your list. There are a few different ways to verify an email address. The most common method is to use a regular expression, or regex, to check the accuracy of the email address on submit.
You can also use an email verification service. Those will also check the email formatting with regex but have some more smarts; for instance, they also check if a domain exists and is not a disposable email address, signaling that the address is deliverable.
One thing, though, try to get whichever method you choose to be in real-time to validate as people are filling in the form, as opposed to when they submit.
See More: How Walgreens Used AI To Improve Email Engagement Rates
Email List Building: Final Thoughts
Email list building strategy is one of the easiest to overlook parts of your email and automation success. But with all things the same, an increase of 10% in size or quality directly translates into a 10% better performance of all your email marketing efforts.
Take the time to get it right; an email list of high-quality subscribers is a powerful asset for your business.
What steps have you taken to create a high-quality email list? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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