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How to Build and Maintain an Email Marketing List

Email Marketing List

You’re selling your services, and it’s important to cast a wide net. One way to do that is to market via email. You can reach a wide audience while drawing new subscribers to your website by sending promotional information directly to a person’s inbox. Below are a few suggestions for building and keeping a strong email following.

Buying and Renting Email Lists

This is not always the best option for getting yourself in front of potential customers, but it’s worth mentioning as among the most common ways to cultivate an email list. These databases are ready-made and often have already been tailored for specific demographics. When you purchase a list, you own those contacts. When you rent, the emails are sent on your behalf.

The upside of this method is speed. You cut out months of list-building in favor of a list that’s ready to roll out as soon as you purchase it. The downside is that purchased email lists are not organic and often fail to drum up the kind of business you want.

If you rent or buy a list, take note of the price and compare. The costlier lists might have been cultivated by way of subscribers opting in, making them more useful to your company. Cheap lists could include unwilling recipients who will flag you as spam.

Make Your Emails Informative

While the main purpose of your emails is to draw people to your website, you should still make the content useful to your recipients. Include more than the standard “about us” template.

Tell your recipients about sales. Be creative. Send news and discussion emails or entertaining blog posts. If you can get a recipient to actually read your email, that’s no small achievement. From there, they’ll find their way to your website one way or another. They might spread the word to their friends, as well.

Slowly, your email list will draw a following of readers who are honestly interested.

Offer Incentives

Customers respond positively to free gifts, even when they cost you very little. You can encourage people to subscribe to your email list by offering a free download – an e-book, music, video or anything else that is easy to distribute. Some businesses allow access to certain parts of their websites by first requiring users to sign up for emails.

Scale it Back

Call it email fatigue. A barrage of business emails, whether regarding mobile debit processing services, electrician t-shirts or any other specialty product, can cause otherwise perfect niche subscribers to resent you. After all the effort you’ve put into strengthening your email list, you would hate to scare off a subscriber by being overbearing.

Surveys have asked people why they’ve unsubscribed to certain lists, and by far the top reason is email frequency. People don’t like to feel like they’re being hounded. Daily email blasts just force your subscribers to clean out their inbox more frequently and with a bit of resentment. Learn to be sparing with your email notes. Only send them when you have something to say. Once your company is identified with spamming, repairing a reputation is tough.

Give Them Options

User preferences are becoming more common. They allow subscribers to choose their level of involvement. Preferences help to prevent spam, and they help your company by honing in on the right demographics.

For example, maybe certain subscribers wouldn’t be interested in company news, but they’d like to hear about sales and promotions. Or maybe they’d like to control the frequency of emails received. If your company is large enough, you might divide email notifications into categories for subscribers.

By merely offering your subscribers a choice, they feel involved and are more likely to stick around and tell their friends.

Use the tips above to develop relationships with your email subscribers. If you can create a base of subscribers, growing your list becomes easier. Maintain a positive image, and an email list can prove to be lucrative to your business.

Image © xavier gallego morel – Fotolia.com

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