Proven Ways to Grow Your Email List

Today I would like to talk about the most important thing for any mailing - the contact database. It’s just great if you already have an experience in email or sms campaigns to your customers and regular subscribers. But what if you have no contact database yet, or mailing list is too small? There are a lot of advices on email list building, so let's consider some of them together.

Add the subscription form to your website or social networks pages:

• offer your customers some gift for subscription
• fill website with such a content that makes visitors subscribe without hesitation
• intrigue client not to skip some share or important information
• motivate with free and helpful content
• make experiments with position of the subscription form on webpage

Have a client questionnaire in your online store? Just use it to collect email contacts:

• make sure that questionnaire is as clear and understandable as possible
• offer something as a gift for clients that provide their personal data
• make some lottery, survey or trivia contest using subscribers email contacts data; inform them about results

How to build an email list? Just group together the contact data from every available source:

• CRM systems (1С, Oracle, Bitrix, Terasoft etc.)
• business cards and booklets
• previous mailings

Be creative:

• if you have shot some videos - add your website address to the end of video; mention there that much more information is available for subscribers
• don’t hesitate to talk about your emailing campaigns. Among your acquaintances there may be those who will get interested
• add "send to friend" option to your email

There is something we would like to warn you: never buy the email contacts databases. There are three main reasons NOT to do this:

1. Illegality
2. It may cause collapse of your relations with clients
3. Communication may not bring desirable results

Let's learn more about them.

Most likely your messages will be marked as spam by subscribers, and they will be absolutely right. You are not pleased when receive useless emails, isn’t? Others are probably feel the same.

The main principle is: mailing should be expected for your client and he must subscribe to it himself. Be careful with email list management: delete the unsubscribed clients from your mailing list in time, clean database from useless contact data, add all the additional info that may help you with mailings.

Imagine that you bought a cat in a poke. It’s good if poor animal will hunt mice but it will rather do something bad and run away. So, "stranger database" may behave like this and damage your relations with subscribers instead of desired benefit. In addition, email address list may be blacklisted. Starting the campaign to these addresses you face the risk of significant damage to your IP address reputation or even getting blacklisted.

How do you think - will you succeed writing message to people you are not familiar with? Probably not. Clients from your real email list will respond the newsletter much better. Those people are ready to receive new information from you; they are actual customers interested in your products and able to make order at any time.

And finally: would you really sell your own email list collected so hard?..

Of course you are busy, so you have to find any ways to make your mailings profitable as faster as possible, but let them be honest. Of course large and effective database is good… but not everyone can quickly build email list he wants to have. Well, why do you think it should be fast? Think first about the quality of the contacts, not quantity. It’s better to build your email marketing lists gradually. Try to realize your ideas motivating clients to subscribe. But if something will fail - feel free to ask we will help you with the best way.