Opt-in list solutions: growing, improving, and cleaning

While practicing email marketing probably the most important and often problems that email marketers have to resolve are the problems tied to email list building and management. The process of building the list is hard enough, and is not just simple gathering thousands of emails and immediately sending messages after that. The thing email marketer should always remember that there is a unique personality behind every email address. The personal approach to each subscriber or client is absolutely necessary for a doing well email marketing business. Email marketer should build such a relationship that would be based on mutual trust and esteem.

It is very important how you start to build your email marketing list. The beginning determines rather you will attain the needed and so much desired results or not. Try to pay your attention on how you get the addresses for your contact list, how you greet your new-comers, and how you run the relationship after the subscription.

There are a lot of different ways to collect new email addresses for your list. The most important detail is permission. You should know that the fundamental rule of building of each email marketing list is to get permission first. There are rules which restrict the activity of unconscientious email marketers, so to obtain the explicit permission to add the email address to your list is a vital option that never should be ignored. Following this simple rule will guarantee you from violating someone’s rights, the same as the US CAN-SPAM Act or any similar law.

You always have to maintain the interest in your email messages. The best way to start grow this interest is to chose right welcome. Some of email marketers may consider the first welcome their first email sent, but it is not quite right. The welcome starts already on the sign-in page, and namely opt-in page became the decisive factor. What is really important to remember, that you have to design it for your visitors (and maybe future subscribes), but not for you who already knows everything about it. Try to view it with the potential subscriber’s eyes.

Never reduce the attention to the subscriber after the sign-in procedure is finished. The actions you undertake have a great impact on how long the subscriber would like to present on your list. Consider extra motivating sources such as bonuses and so on to keep in touch with you subscribers. Otherwise the number of your active subscribers will lessen with every minute. What will be the result? – Of course a big, but “dirty” email marketing list, where the quantity plays bigger role then quality. Thus, such email marketing list is not useful.

We would like to purpose you some strategies to clear you list out of inactive email addresses.

1. The first step is to determine which are nonresponders and segment the list on two big categories, one of which should contain the emails with no actions that could be associated with them.

2. The second step is to create a list of nonresponders, so that later we would be able to send them a “re-opt-in” email.

3. Then send an email with the following elements included:

• Text format (to determine whether HTML caused email blocking)
• Subject line: Special Notice Regarding Your Subscription
• Personalized greeting and subscriber details
• Date when the subscriber joined the list
• Re-opt-in link
• Link to recent issues or current offer
• An unsubscribe link

4. Consider monitoring the replies on your re-opt-in messages

5. In most cases there won’t be any replies at all, but before you delete an email address from your list you should be sure it is inactive address. Only after you are absolutely confident, you may delete all the dead emails from the original list.

Following such simple strategies to accomplish strategies will definitely help you obtain an up-to-date and valuable email marketing list.

Friday, September 24th, 2010 : Mailing List : No Comments