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.
