Building and growing a responsive, quality mailing list can require a dreadful amount of work. Furthermore, once you have built your list, you must nurture and grow it. Whatever you do, do not flood your recipients with advertisements and pointless emails constantly. This is a great way to destroy your precious opt-in list. Honestly, acquiring all of those email address is minuscule part of the email marketing process. It is extremely important to know that you’re building an individual relationship with every person who gives you their email address. If you mess up in the beginning, you are hindering your chances on building a lucrative relationship with your subscribers. On the other hand, do it right and prove your company’s worthiness, and you will both have smiles on your faces for years to come.
There are 3 key elements involved in list building:
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Acquiring The Email Address
This is the easiest task in building a list. The rule here is that you must have the explicit permission from the subscriber to send them emails. Place a check box on your sign-up page or include this in your terms of service. Remember, it’s all about building trust. It is also illegal not to include this statement if you intend on emailing your subscriber according to the CAN-SPAM act in the United States.
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Welcoming Your New Subscriber
We all receive the pointless, and endless flood of emails filling up our inboxes called SPAM. Because of this, it can be difficult to make a person read your email. A well thought out welcome message with good content, will build the foundation for a good email marketing relationship between you and the subscriber. The welcome message will not only build trust, but will verify the validity of each email address, further weeding out the bad seeds. It also acts as a 2nd screening process since 90% of your opt-outs will come in after you send this email, so make it pretty, and make it good!
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Customer Relationship Management
This is the most important element of maintaining a quality opt-in list. It is unfortunate that this is the most overlooked step of list building. I can understand why, as this is by far the most time consuming aspect of nurturing your opt-in list. You must honor all of your subscriber’s personal email preferences. If you have an email marketing service provider or some good server-side software, take advantage of the tracking features. Many will allow you to track bounces, unsubscribing, clicks, and inactivity. This is very useful data and should be analyzed and archived regularly.
Always make sure that you’re holding the interest of your subscribers. If they seem to be fading away and your statistics are declining, send out promotions, special offers, and even surveys to pull them back in.
Most importantly; never give up on your list!
It can take a lot of time and energy to build a great opt-in list. In the end, when you’re staring at page after page of your opt-in subscribers, you will surely look at it as time well spent.