Email List Building Tips

To learn more about how to build your email list, see Phase I of Silverpop’s “Retail Email Marketing Study.”

Your email list 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 ways to build your permission-based email list:

• Email Change of Address (ECOA): Keep your addresses up-to-date as customers change ISPs or companies.
• Direct marketing: Be sure to include email registration information to help populate your list.
• Point of sale/salesperson: Capture email addresses at cash registers and other visible locations in your stores. When customers make a purchase, they’re already interested in your brand. They are presenting you with a perfect opportunity to get them on your adress list.
• Product registration: Include a request to add customer email addresses on your standard product registration mail-in card.

Not every method here will work for your company to increase the size of your email list. 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. It takes time and requires integration with every one of your endeavors, online and off. But your efforts to build your email list will most certainly pay off. 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.