Email marketing is consistently rated one of the most effective ways to connect with customers. But it takes time to build and manage the list of contacts you need for your email marketing to deliver maximum impact. Here’s how to create and manage an email list of engaged consumers who are interested in your offering.
Why your email list is your most valuable owned marketing channel
Your email list is the one audience asset you genuinely control, making it the most valuable owner marketing channel in your toolkit. Social media platforms change algorithms regularly, whereas an email list stays with you regardless of any platform's decisions. Likewise, it’s more difficult to compete for attention on social media, where scrolling is part of the experience.
That ownership translates into measurable returns: email marketing delivers roughly $44 for every $1 spent, compared to social media's $5. The advantage is structural—email reaches an opted-in audience directly in their inbox, bypassing the algorithms that throttle organic visibility. Campaign Monitor found that email results in 174% more conversions than social media.
Your email list compounds in value over time as your audience stays engaged. It’s something that no platform can take away and no algorithm can reduce. But it does take time to build and active management to maintain.
How to build an email list
If you’re just getting started in email marketing, you’ll want to decide on a platform. A free email marketing tool is usually best when you’re just getting started. Many popular platforms, including Mailchimp, Flodesk, and Constant Contact, are affordable and easy to use.
You can get a head-start on building your list by adding people from your existing customer list who have already given you their email and permission to reach out to them. You might be surprised to discover that the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t require recipients’ consent to send commercial emails. “There is no opt-in requirement,” according to the FTC blog.
However, Global Data Privacy Rules (GDPR) do require opt-in. Plus, many email marketing services require you to verify that the people on your list have given you permission to email them. The best rule if you’re dealing with U.S.-based customers only is to ensure your message is useful, on-brand and relevant to your recipients. This will reduce the chances of them reporting it as spam, even if you didn’t get their express permission to email them.
Email list-building strategies that actually work
Popular email marketing programs make it easy to market your company newsletter or drip email campaign with a custom landing page, free offer, and other tactics. In addition, try these marketing tactics to build a high-value contact list.
Build a landing page to ask people to join your list
Whether you’re promoting a sale or an email newsletter, you can create a landing page that asks people to provide their email addresses to receive the information. Your email marketing software can help you create a landing page so that the colors, style, and branding match your email newsletter. Once you’ve built the landing page, you can start to promote it.
Be strategic about where you place CTAs for people to join your email list. There are moments during the customer journey when you can reach an engaged audience and extend the relationship further. For instance, put a checkbox on your checkout page where someone can opt to join their email list. If someone has already added their email address to receive shipping notifications, selecting the box is an easy yes.
Keep the sign-up process to a minimum. The more information someone has to supply, the less likely they are to finish the form.
Create an offer and share it
The most reliable list-building tactic is offering a genuinely valuable lead magnet—a free resource exchanged for an email address. Discounts, insider early access to sales, and free shipping are also strong magnets.
The most common way to entice people to join your mailing list is by offering them fresh, exclusive content they can’t find anywhere else. This can come in the form of an:
- E-book
- Infographic
- White paper
- Video
- Webinar
Once you have a landing page and a high-quality content asset such as an e-book or video to share, you can advertise it on your blog, social media, and through paid search. Track your results and put your money and time into the channels that deliver the best, most consistent return on investment.
Incorporate opt-in forms on your website
You want to make sure you collect an email address from every website visitor, whether or not they make a purchase. Use your email marketing software to create a form on your website that asks for a name and email address. If they leave your site without buying, you can email them an offer with a coupon to try and bring them back.
A simple signup form is also a strategy that works surprisingly well, especially if you offer the right incentive. “When asking for subscriber data, a simple request for name and email address should be sufficient. Places to embed a sign-up form include the front page of your website, at the end of a blog post, in the footer navigation, and on a contact page,” wrote Constant Contact.
[Read more: 5 Essential Email Marketing Features to Boost Your Results]
Should you buy email addresses?
Don’t waste money purchasing email lists from outside companies. Most of these are out of date. Even if the addresses work, reaching out to customers who have no experience with your company or brand leads to low open rates and unsuccessful campaigns. You might even alienate customers who would have been amenable to hearing from you if they had found you some other way.
Customer segmentation involves breaking up your email marketing list into smaller subgroups based on common characteristics like interests or shopping behavior. Segmented campaigns score 14.31% more opens than non-segmented ones.
How to manage opt-outs and stay CAN-SPAM compliant
No matter how informative and well-targeted your email campaign is, you’re likely to have some readers who opt out. According to the CAN-SPAM Act, you must remove these people from your email list within 10 days, and you cannot reach out to them via email again.
Most email marketing services make it easy for readers to opt out automatically with a link at the bottom of every email. If someone emails you directly and requests to be removed, do it immediately.
How to manage your lead funnel with segmentation
Once you’ve begun to build your list, you’ll want to increase your open and click-through rates by managing it with segmentation. When you use segmentation, you can deliver more personalized emails based on:
- Past purchases.
- The recipient’s position in the sales funnel.
- Emails they have opened before.
You can use tags within your email marketing program to create different audiences and send targeted, relevant content. You can also automatically resend emails to recipients who didn’t open them the first time.
Once you start building your list and digging deeper into your email marketing platform of choice, you’ll realize the possibilities to improve engagement with highly targeted content are virtually endless. You may even want to hire a specialist in content strategy and email marketing to help if you’re ready to step beyond the basics.
How to choose the right email marketing platform for your list size and budget
Email marketing platforms come with many features and capabilities. The two main elements to consider related to your email list are segmentation and pricing.
Segmentation and personalization features are integral to email marketing success. Customer segmentation involves breaking up your email marketing list into smaller subgroups based on common characteristics like interests or shopping behavior. Segmented campaigns score 14.31% more opens than non-segmented ones.
The second consideration is pricing model. Many email marketing platforms offer free plans—but only for up to a certain number of emails. Mailchimp, for instance, is free for up to 250 contacts; EmailOctopus allows 2,500 contacts on their free plan. Depending on how big your contact list, some tools will be more affordable than others. Paid programs also often price based on the number of contacts you have.
Key email list health metrics to track
Along with click through rate, ROI, and other metrics that indicate campaign performance, track stats that tell you whether your email list is healthy or needs maintenance. Here are a few to pay attention to:
- Open rate: the percentage of email recipients who open a given email. A low open rate can be a signal that your list isn’t engaged with your brand or interested in your content.
- Unsubscribe rate: the percentage of contacts that opt out of your email marketing. High unsubscribe rates are worth digging into—it could be that your content isn’t resonating or that you need to refresh your list.
- Deliverability rate: tells you the percentage of emails that successfully reach the inboxes of your subscribers. These are the emails that aren’t caught by spam filters or rejected entirely. A high deliverability rate is a good indicator of a healthy contact list.
- Bounce rate: along with deliverability rate, tells you what percentage of your emails are getting seen. High bounce rates tell you that some of the emails on your list are fake.
- List growth rate: a list growth rate (or decay rate) tells you whether the rate at which your email contact list grows or shrinks. “Believe it or not, there's a natural decay of your email marketing list, and it expires by about 28% every year—which means that it's more important than ever to pay attention to growing your subscriber list and keeping it at a healthy size,” wrote Hubspot.
None of these metrics alone should be cause for concern. However, if you start to see a few of them change simultaneously, it could be time to update your contact list.
Dawn Allcot contributed to this article.
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