Working with Your Mailing List

In this lesson we continue speaking about e-mail marketing channel and going to study building your mailing list’s secrets.

Currently, direct marketers effectively use the World Wide Web as a marketing tool. More and more e-mail lists or “e-lists” are emerging on the mar­ket today. And surely the number of marketers using e-mail lists is growing just as rapidly.

There are a number of ways to build an e-mail list on your own. One way is to provide useful content, such as an e-mail newsletter. Another way to gather e-mail addresses is through your own company database. If you want to build an email list of existing customers give them a value proposition that makes them want to be on your email list. The result of your actions should be an opt-in list generated which will offer the best effect for future mailing in comparison to any other ready-made e-list offered for renting.

The true definition of opt-in is that people on an e-list have (a) registered at the website or through some other electronic or paper form and (b) checked the option requesting additional e-mail information.

The last statement is very important because obtaining permission before sending e-mail is critical. Without it, the e-mail is Unsolicited Bulk Email, better known as spam. Be sure to obtain subscriber permission before adding new names to your mailing list.

Another important point to keep in mind is to be selective about who is added to your list or you'll just create more work for yourself.

Don’t think that a simply large list is better and don’t make a mad dash to build the largest email list ever while jeopardizing the quality of the list. This is called GIGO (Garbage In/Garbage Out), and it can backfire.

Choose qualified names out of which a certain percentage will turn into prospects. Out of those prospects, a certain percentage should turn into conversions. When done right, catalogers and retailers enjoy higher sales results because their offers are sent to the right audience. High-tech or professional services firms avoid wasting time, resources and money following up on useless contacts.

Qualify new contacts using the “double opt-in” confirmation technique.

Generally there are several common forms of opt-in e-mail according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opt_in_email :

Unconfirmed opt-in
New subscribers first give their addresses to the list software (for instance, on a Web page), but no steps are taken to make sure that this address actually belongs to the person. This can cause e-mail from the mailing list to be considered spam because simple typos of the email address can cause the email to be sent to someone else.

Confirmed opt-in
A new subscriber asks to be subscribed to the mailing list, but unlike an unconfirmed opt-in, a confirmation e-mail is sent asking if it was really them. The person will not be added to the mailing list unless an explicit step is taken, such as clicking a special Web link or sending back a reply e-mail. The Web link or reply e-mail must contain some sort of secret word or token that cannot be guessed by a malicious person. This ensures that no person can subscribe as someone else out of malice or error.

Double opt-in
The term double opt-in was coined by marketers in the late 90s to differentiate it from what they call single opt-in, where a new subscriber to an e-mail list gets a confirmation e-mail telling them they will begin to receive e-mails if they take no action. This is compared to double opt-in where the new subscriber must respond to the confirmation e-mail to be added to the list.

In practice many companies and e-mail publications require individuals to confirm their initial requests to get onto an email list. That's “double opt-in”, and it can slow your acquisition rate by 50% or more, but typically makes for a much more qualified and responsive e-mail list.

The "single opt-in" approach grows your list faster than double opt-in though the list may not be as responsive and as rich with qualified prospects.

In order to build a list of customers and prospects that includes e-mail addresses you can:

* Collect email addresses from registration cards, point-of-sale, customer service, and sweepstakes. For prospecting purposes, gather email addresses from your website, online white papers offered, from visitors to your trade show booths and from sales calls. Be careful: Just because you already have a person's email address for one reason or another doesn't necessarily mean you have permission to start sending all sorts of email campaigns to them. In all cases, give people an expectation of the value they will receive in return for handing over their email address to you.
* Post a privacy notice on your registration page at your website. People are understandably suspicious of any site they come across on the Internet so it's best to address their concerns up front. Every user is interested in how you will use their personal information.
* Show prospective subscribers a sample of what they are signing up for at your website.
* Keep your registration page simple by asking for minimal information. You can always get more information later by using surveys and incentives once an individual is added to your email list.

Mistakes to avoid

• Don't make it difficult for people to stop hearing from you by email. Make it easy for a person to leave ("opt-out") of any or all email communications. For example, people may still wish to receive your product updates but not your company news. If it's difficult to be removed from your email list, recipients can complain to their ISP or self-appointed spam police who in turn can have you blacklisted. Being blacklisted means the recipient's ISP will automatically filter out any inbound email containing your name or email address.

• Don't promote your company or services through the renting, sponsoring, or bartering of email lists without performing a background check of the list owners and asking how they obtained their email addresses. You could be guilty by association if you are perceived as doing business with a spammer. Furthermore, spam laws are currently getting tougher in this area. Monitor the latest developments in legislation by visiting http://www.spamlaws.com/.

Now you can see the full picture of the e-list creation. Therefore, pay proper attention to the mailing-list obtaining process in order to have success with your email marketing strategy.
What you should remember from this lesson:

1. When building and updating a list of customers and prospects that include e-mail addresses be selective about who is added to your list or you'll just create more work for yourself.