What are some good ways to build my in-house email list? Part II
In the last issue of "The Digital Marketer," we discussed five techniques for building your permission-based email house list. In this issue, we'll round out the list with five more.
Lists can grow in many different ways, but they should all start in the same place: at every significant touch point with your current customers.
The following five techniques are just a few more potential ways to build your permission-based house list:
- Email Change of Address (ECOA): Keep your list
of email addresses up-to-date as customers change ISPs or
companies. Many firms will scan your bounced customer records and
provide you with updated email addresses.
- Direct marketing: Be sure to include your
email registration Web page URL on all your traditional direct
marketing campaigns. The same goes for TV and print
advertising.
- Point of sale/salesperson: Capture addresses
via a sign-up form at cash registers and other visible locations in
your stores. When customers make a purchase at your store, they
already are interested in your brand. What’s more, you have their
undivided attention. They are presenting you with a perfect
opportunity to get them on your list.
- Customer service/technical support
representatives: Have your sales, customer-service and
technical-support people ask for email addresses in the course of
customer communications. A 2004 Shop.org study by Forrester
Research found that only 50 percent of catalog retailers have their
customer service representatives ask for email addresses -- a
"shocking oversight," Forrester said.
- Product registration: Ask for email addresses on your standard product registration mail-in card or Web pages.
Not every method outlined here will work for your company. Try
several different approaches, or elements from various approaches,
until you find the list-building techniques that best complement
your brand strategy.
Great lists aren’t built in a day. List building takes time, and it
requires integration with every one of your endeavors, both online
and offline. Consider that, as you gather names and ask for
permission, you not only add to your list, you preserve it. Email
addresses “churn” constantly, and as soon as you stop building your
list, it will begin to shrink.
Marketers who invest in their house lists reap the rewards.
According to October 2004 Direct Marketing Association figures, the
response rates for email sent to a house list outstrip those for
prospect lists across dimensional and direct mail, catalog and
telemarketing, and the return on investment for email has eclipsed
that of every direct marketing medium except telemarketing.
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