Having engaged, loyal customers who advocate for your brand is nirvana for any marketer. Yet, too many email marketers play the numbers game when it comes to building their email list, buying names and getting caught in the spamming spiral, expecting something to stick. Doing this puts your relationships at risk and isn’t a good practice that will scale your list growth. If you want customers — that engage, convert, and re-convert — you must build a list of quality from the start.  Here are some best practices
to start with.

“Customer, May I?”

Seeking permission from your audience is your first priority. Your best customers are those who want to receive your emails. A simple way to do this is to ask your customers to opt-in via your Website or through your social media pages. Make sure your emails are fully branded so that your customers recognize your messages and don’t suspect spam. Driving email campaigns to a landing page is a great method to ensure consistency. And, if you’re selling services or a product, your transactional follow-up email can include an invite to sign up for future communications, assuming they don’t sign up during the check out process. Once your customer has used your services or product, you have another opportunity to ask for email sign up by asking them to review the product on your site or provide other feedback on their customer experience.

Create a Win-Win

A great way to draw a response and a crowd is to create a contest with a prize that is relevant to your customers. In order to win, your customers must sign up for your email program.  This is a solid way to build your list and get customers excited about your brand. This tactic has worked well on Facebook, leading to quality email addresses that convert. From a social media perspective, everyone likes to share a contest that can lead to winning a prize regardless of the dollar value. Winning is fun.

Buy Lists at Your Own Peril

Considering that the average lifespan of an email address can be anywhere from six months average to a few years, the chances that a person’s email address will change are pretty high.  (With the new Facebook.com email soon to arrive, many may switch faster than they can hit the “Like” button.) So, if you buy lists you automatically have old data. And if you’re buying a lot of lists, you’re sending to a high percentage of invalid email addresses. The Internet service providers (ISPs) will track this and block you in a second. Then you won’t be able to reach any of your names, valid or not.

Re-Engage but Learn How to Let Go

You’ve sent out your best messages, but some customers still aren’t opening, clicking or converting. There are two ways to re-approach them: re-permission (reaching out to customers who have not opened or clicked on your emails in X number of days) or win-back (getting a customer to re-convert through promotional messaging).

Re-engagement comes in many flavors depending on your brand and the volume of your unengaged subscribers. You want to stay mindful of the deliverability aspect.  If you have 300,000 subscribers who haven’t engaged in six months, drip the sends since it’s likely a good number of these recipients are going to be hitting spam and unsubscribe buttons.  Be mindful of what a high spam rate can do to your reputation, very quickly.

It’s important to automate. Develop a best-practices program that tracks the number of recipients who haven’t engaged in X number of days. Then every month, run a segment that identifies each contact who hasn’t opened or clicked in the previous six months and who didn’t receive the last email and send them a last re-engagement email.  If they don’t respond, let them go. Anyone who has not opened or clicked your emails after that much time and effort doesn’t want to hear from you. It’s time to move on.

Check Your Work

How do you know if you’ve done a good job building your list? Review the number of sign ups and, most importantly, how they performed over a one- to three-month period. So let’s say you were able to get 10,000 emails to sign up through Facebook, analyze those 10,000 after one month to see if they’ve opened or clicked your emails and how many times. Discover what kind of engagement you’re getting from this group. If it’s above the average of the overall engagement level, which is probably about a 15 percent open rate, then pat yourself on the back.

Effective list growth is implementing best practices and consistently following them. Engaging customers who want to hear from you and nurturing their interest with valuable, relevant content is critical to your list quality, deliverability and conversion rate. Take the time to set parameters around who you want to reach, automate to track behavior, and analyze your data to determine next steps.  Most importantly, aim for quality and not quantity.

About the author:

Matthew Hayes (@matthewhayes) is the Director of Services Strategy at Lyris, Inc.