List Building - Everything You Need To Know

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The most important part of your email marketing campaign is undeniably your list. If your list contains defunct and irrelevant names, there is no point in your marketing message, no matter how neat it is.

Is there an ideal list size? No. In fact, bigger is better. Marketers are perennially looking for ways to grow their lists. We give you some tips.

11 Tips to Grow Your Lists

1. Use a pop up for form capture on your website. A pop up will interrupt the browsing experience and draw the visitor’s attention. Some companies have found this very effective for list building.
2. Place a checkbox that users can check to receive your email communication after a purchase/free trial. If you have a physical point of sale, hand it out there.
3. Keep a form at the end of a blog post/article. Once the visitor has read your CEO’s blog post he may be interested to hear more from you.
4. Gate your most valuable content. Place a form ahead of a whitepaper download/webinar registration/newsletter signup.
5. Place a form on your home page above the fold so that interested prospects can easily subscribe to your emails. Also place it on other popular pages of your website.
6. Let your PPC landing pages have a prominent sign up form.
7. Dispense forms at trade shows and conferences to all your booth visitors. You could also serve it up using a QR code displayed at your booth.
8. Put a form on social media channels to attract sign ups.
9. Put social sharing buttons such as “Tweet”, “Like” on your marketing emails. This will encourage your recipients to share your email across their networks and garner new sign ups. This will put your email campaign irretrievably in the public domain, so use it with discretion.
10. Ask your current subscribers to refer a friend. Your email should lead to a simple landing page so it’s easy for users to refer people.
11. Run a campaign on your website to grow your lists. Make it fun with a contest and free giveaways.

Best Practices for List Building

1. Send out an introductory email to all opt-ins, which sets the context. Tell them what kind of content to expect and how frequently you will send emails. Ask them to click on a link to confirm their interest in your communication. This way you can weed out the bots and fake IDs. Provide a prominent unsubscribe option.
2. Keep your forms short. Just ask for a name and an email ID. This way more people will be tempted to sign in. You can learn more about your users as they progress through your sales funnel.
3. Respect customer privacy. Do not rent out or sell your lists. Along with the form, provide a link to your privacy policy.
4. If you are using a pop up form:

• Remember it can backfire because it is interruptive. Tread carefully.
• Observe the bounce rate. Discontinue the pop up form if the bounce rate is high.
• Use giveaways like free ebooks to encourage people to sign up.
• If visitors typically spend 30 seconds on a page, let the pop up form appear 25 seconds after a visitor arrives on the page.
• Have a prominent close button so people can exit quickly if they so wish.
• Observe the response rate. If it is low tweak the timing/frequency/page on which it appears.
• Test extensively before implementation.

Organically grown opt-in lists will take time to grow, but they are worth it. They provide an engaged audience. Subscribers tend to stay on longer as they are actually interested in your emails.

Why Not Just Buy a List?
While buying lists is an easy solution, there are a number of concerns.

• List quality is suspect. Many addresses may be dead and non-existent. If your list is laden with dead addresses you run the risk of being blacklisted.
• The list may not be suited to your needs. For instance, your company may be focused on selling to B2B companies in North America with over $10 million in revenue. The list seller may promise this but there is no way to check it.
• List fatigue is a common phenomenon. The list seller may have sold the same list to multiple customers. The people in the list may be flooded with mails selling them things. The recipients may unsubscribe or worse mark you as spam.
• List may not be updated. People change jobs and their official email IDs become invalid.

Several email marketing consultants advise against list buying. Mark Brownlow, author of email marketing reports says, “If somebody does offer to sell and send you a bulk list of email addresses, 99 times out of 100 you're getting a spam list.”

Nowadays you can build lists through social networks. LinkedIn is the ideal social network for B2B. It is authentic, rich with data and updated. You can target people based on their conversations and the groups that they belong to. Hire internet research assistants to do this or avail of email appending services from companies such as eGrabber.

Testing Is Crucial

• Test to see which sources give you the maximum number of sign ups. Focus your time, effort and budget on the best sources.
• Test forms with different lead baits, colors and calls to action to see what works.
• Monitor unsubscribe, spam complaints and blocking.
• Observe if any particular source is giving you a large number of complaints. Identify the problem. Is it a spam list? Fix it before it explodes.