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Archive for the ‘List Building’ Category

How to Buy New Subscribers Without Buying Email Lists

Wednesday, March 20th, 2013

Email marketing’s ROI is twice as much as direct mail and three times as much as social media. So why are we not investing in growing our email lists in the same way we do with these other channels? I am not referring to buying lists like we do for direct mail. They certainly are available for email, but even if we put aside the massive deliverability issues that accompany purchased lists (recipients who have not heard of you are likely to mark messages from you as spam, making it harder for your messages to reach the subscribers who are genuinely interested in hearing from you) there is a fundamental problem with the ROI of rented lists. Not only does purchasing lists increase the Investment, but mailing to people who have not shown a previous interest in your brand by subscribing through some channel depresses the Return. You simply cannot buy lists and expect the ROI of email marketing to remain high.

But what if instead of buying email lists, we invest instead in methods designed to encourage more people to willfully subscribe? That is exactly the model that Facebook has come up with, making it very easy for brands on its service to advertise to members expressly to grow their fan base. If your brand has an attractive value proposition, putting it in front of as many targeted prospects as possible makes sense. So yes, you can advertise to grow your email list, the same as you might advertise to sell a product. The only difference is that the ask is less, which should translate into a higher conversion rate for your ads.

Advertising to for subscribers is not a common practice yet, but it should be. Here’s how to do it:

Choosing Media:
There are very few advertising campaigns for which Google Ad Words and Facebook Ads are not a good choice, or at least a starting point. Both have intuitive ad creation and purchase flows, offer ample targeting based on keywords or interests, and are easy to modify as your campaign runs. Best of all, the buy-in price is virtually $0 and both services allow you to set a daily budget. This makes it easy to learn what works and what doesn’t before committing to a larger buy. Facebook also allows for display advertising, which is worth testing if you are looking at specific sites for which your brand is well suited that do not carry text ads. LinkedIn is another candidate for an initial buy. Its setup interface is similar to Facebook’s but the minimum buy-in is higher, at $10/day.

Writing Ad Copy:
The media choices above all allow for pay-for-performance ads. The upside to this model is that if nobody clicks you don’t pay. But the downside is that ads that don’t perform well end up being less profitable for the sites so they run them less frequently or even pull them for poor performance. Ad copy that reads “Sign Up For Our Big Data Integration Newsletter!” ends up being well-targeted since nobody not interested in the newsletter would bother to sign up. But it may not perform well since it does not also offer much insight into how specifically the newsletter will be valuable. The other end of the spectrum might be an ad that promotes “Free Big Data Conference Registration,” and then uses the landing page to inform prospects that someone who signs up for email will win a drawing for the free attendance. This ad will pull a ton of clicks from people interested in big data and going to a conference for free, but they may not end up being the most engaged newsletter subscribers, particularly after 99.x% of them learn that they didn’t win the trip to the show. Find some middle ground that promotes how the newsletter adds value to an interested audience, like “Sign up for the Big Data newsletter your competitors read” or “Breaking news on Big Data delivered daily.”

Remaining topical:
Text ads in particular are very easy to keep fresh and topical. If your newsletters are really good enough to advertise, use your best content in your ads, in near-real-time. “New Tips Every Week” might be an ad you keep in rotation, but try also telegraphing specific copy in upcoming newsletters, like “The Secret to 2x ROI on Thursday – subscribe today.” Pre-promoting compelling content can not only accelerate subscriber growth, but also provide you with an opportunity to meet their anticipation with the very first newsletter they receive, helping to engage them right from the start.

Tracking and Evaluation:
Make sure you put all your externally acquired subscribers into their own group, or into separate groups for each site they came from. This allows you to track their engagement against subscribers who found your list through your current channels. Because you are paying for these new subscribers, making sure they respond to your newsletters strongly enough to justify the expense of acquiring them is critical, as is making sure you are spending money strategically. If your Google subscribers are twice as productive as those you acquired on LinkedIn, shift budget to where it does the most good.

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6 Urgent Reasons to Grow Your Email List

Tuesday, January 29th, 2013

List building is part of every email program, churning along in the background while we go about the business of creating, targeting and sending messages. Recently however some changes to the email landscape have placed a premium on list building. It is time to step up the urgency and look for more resourceful and aggressive ways to continue to grow our email lists. Here is why:

1. Unsubscribes
You lose a very small percentage of your list to unsubscribes with every message. 0.1% seems like a small enough number to ignore, unless you mail a lot. Then you have to multiply it by each message you send to see how many people you are really losing. If your list is 100,000 people and you lose 0.1% each time you mail your weekly newsletter, that’s 5,000 subscribers gone over the course of the year.

2. Spam Filters
Return Path published a report recently with data on Inbox Placement, and found that about 1 in 5 messages never make it to the inbox. Some are bounces, but many more are blocked by local spam filters at the corporate or individual level. Because these messages make it past the ISP or email administrator, they technically show up as “delivered” in most analytics. Once your subscribers banish your messages to the junk folder it is difficult to win back their attention. I think of these as “soft unsubscribes.”

3. Inbox Management Applications
A whole cottage industry of inbox management applications has arisen over the past year, including AOL Alto, unroll.me, TheSwizzle, Inky, Glider and others. Single-minded of purpose, they are programmed to remove unwanted and commercial email from the inbox and place it into special folders for reading later (if at all). Consumers are responding well to them, as the lure of regaining control of their inboxes is great. I anticipate that Inbox Placement rates will continue to decline as these applications take off, meaning that fewer of your “delivered” messages have a chance of being read.

4. Facebook Promoted Posts
Facebook has changed its algorithm recently, resulting in a smaller percentage of fans seeing a brand’s posts in their news feeds. Brands are now encouraged to use Promoted Posts to reach their “earned audience” of Facebook fans. Paying to reach an audience that has already given you permission to reach them through the service is not unprecedented of course. We pay an email service provider for a comparable service. The difference is accountability. With email you know exactly who you are reaching with each message, who is not engaged and what action each subscriber took. With Facebook, the analytics are not at the individual level but at the message level. You know how many people saw a post or clicked on a link, but have no idea who they are. Expect Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks to move to a pay-per-contact model of some sort in the future. As they do, the value of your email list begins to rise in comparison.

5. CRM Retargeting
CRM Retargeting is an application that allows you to target your email subscribers with advertisements outside of the inbox. The most prominent example of this is Facebook’s Custom Audience Ads, which is particularly useful if you have unengaged subscribers, unsubscribes or “soft unsubscribes” who you either not able or not allowed to reach in the inbox. Upload this list to Facebook and contact them that way. The program has proved so popular that – like pay-per-contact above – it is one I expect other sites to replicate.

6. ROI
Email still has by far the highest ROI of any marketing channel. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email generates about $40 in sales for every $1 spent, over three times the ROI of social and twice that of search. Putting money into growing our permission-based email lists will pay off more quickly than paying to find new fans on Facebook or buying targeted keywords. Email budgets typically include expenses for sending mail, but they ought to also include a healthy line item for permission-based list building initiatives.

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Why (and How) to Make it Harder to Subscribe to Your Email List

Monday, September 24th, 2012

Making it harder for someone to subscribe to your email list may sound counterintuitive if you’re feeling generous, and downright foolish if you’re not. For the last decade, you have heard all manner of advice and tactics for making it as easy as possible to add all the names you can find to your house list. Why do we now need to spin 180 degrees and make it harder? Do we suddenly want fewer subscribers?

In a word, sort of. The email game has changed and is no longer strictly about the ROI of any individual message. Rather, the impact of engagement metrics on deliverability and the migration of subscribers’ communication preferences to social media and other channels means that the battleground for modern email marketers is Attention. Brands that learn how to earn and hold attention better will win – in the inbox and everywhere else.

There are a number of ways to lift attention – better content, improved targeting, deeper engagement across all channels. Another way stop trying to attract the attention of people who just are not that into you. By making it a little harder to join your email list, a brand is more likely to attract subscribers who are predisposed to attention. A little added friction between “nice to meet you” and “thanks for joining our email list” will winnow out the underengaged, leaving you with new subscribers who behave like your favorite existing subscribers. Here is how:

1. Telegraph your email content and frequency at signup. The principal reason people unsubscribe from email lists is because content is too frequent. Before they unsubscribe they start ignoring your messages, or moving them to junk, or otherwise compromising your engagement metrics. By letting your would-be subscribers know up front that you intend to email them every day, or 3x per week, or not at all for 3 months and then every other day for 6 weeks in a row, the better prepared they are for your brand’s impact on their inbox. If your frequency is high, you may not win as many subscribers as you would if you didn’t tell people how often you plan to mail them, but the ones who do go ahead and signup have by definition given you the greenlight to proceed according to schedule. That much email? I’m good with that – bring it.

2. Use a Double Opt-In. Double opt-ins are not required by law and many email experts do not advocate them because they add an extra step. That is precisely the reason why I do think they are a good idea. Where they are principally useful for helping to ensure engaged subscribers is when a customer is making a purchase or registering at your website, and have the option to join the email list as part of another process where they are providing their name and contact info. These opt-ins are often overlooked (many are designed to be that way), so a confirmation email informing the customer of what s/he has just done and asking for a final confirmation before joining the list gives those who submitted before they read a welcome second chance to consider joining the list.

3. Use QR Codes and other Offline Signup Forms. QR codes may be a convenience to marketers, but pulling out a phone, launching a seldom-used app, aiming it at a code and then pecking in an email address with your thumb is a lot less convenient to a customer than writing their name and email address on a piece of paper to join a list. So anyone who goes through the trouble obviously likes your brand very much and is exactly the kind of subscriber you would like to attract. Work QR codes and subscribe-by-txt initiatives into all of your terrestrial marketing. It won’t ring up huge volumes of new signups, but you will know the subscribers you are getting are highly engaged. (And you will know they are mobile-active, which helps with targeting later on.)

An important distinction here is to make it a little more difficult to complete the subscription process, not start it. You still want links to your signup page as prominent as ever, and you want to continue to tout the benefits of your emails as loudly as possible. You are not trying to hide the option to subscribe, only to pre-qualify your new subscribers a little better.

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How to Pre-Qualify Prospects in Your Email List Building

Friday, July 20th, 2012

Adding new people to your email list is a never-ending process – or should be, anyway. As we think about where and how to find names to replace the people who change jobs, abandon email addresses or simply unsubscribe, it is important to remember what our objectives are in the first place. Increasing the number of people on your list is not an objective. Rather, improving the performance of your email program is the objective. One of the tactics for achieving that objective is growing your list.

But even a larger list does not necessarily make your email program more successful. Instead of simply adding more people to your list, the email marketer’s job is to recruit more people who behave like the people on the list who have already made email a success. The way to do that is to acquire pre-qualified prospects.

Pre-qualified prospects fit into one of the following two categories:

1. People whose attention you have before you have permission to email to them.
2. People who are in market for your product and therefore predisposed to lend you their attention.

Building your email list with people who fit into either of these two categories will help ensure that your new contacts behave similarly to your existing list, exhibiting similar engagement and propensity to buy.

Below is a graphic detailing a number of different list building tactics, mapping potential volume of new subscribers against how well qualified they are. As the colors suggest, the red section is the one you avoid. Go instead to the green. Explanation of a few of these tactics follows the graphic:

List Purchase: This tactic is in the RED section because despite the volume, many of the names you purchase are not just unqualified, but anti-qualified. Spam traps and spam complaints common to purchased lists can hamstring your sender reputation, impacting your deliverability. The issue with bought lists is not (usually) CAN-SPAM compliance. Whether they are legally obtained or not, many people who have never heard of you before that first email to a purchased list will mark it as SPAM, and that makes it harder for all your messages to reach their targets. And the bigger a list you buy, the more SPAM complaints you are likely to get, compromising your sender reputation further.

Conference Marketing: There are three conference tactics in the graphic – Conference Attendees, Expo Sweepstakes and Expo Sign-In. You can draw a line connecting them all that runs from the red section straight towards the green. If you add a whole list of conference attendees to your database (assuming that by registering for the conference they have agreed to allow exhibitors to contact them by email), your first message to them will be the first time many of these people have heard of you. So like a bought list, you run the risk of a number of SPAM complaints, or at least plummeting engagement metrics. The greater exposure you have at the event – with a high-profile sponsorship or a speaking role – the greater the likelihood that more of the attendees will know your brand (ie. you have their Attention before their Permission) and engage with your message. A sweepstakes at your booth gives explicit permission, but does not necessarily mean your participants are in market. You can improve their likelihood to engage by offering a prize that only qualified prospects would try to win, such as a free month of your services instead of an iPad. And of course people who visit your booth and sign up to receive more information without the incentive of a sweeps are the best qualified of all. Despite their lower numbers, they will likely respond to your contact with even greater engagement than your existing list.

Facebook: Facebook is an especially fertile ground for list building because of the potential to sign up a large volume of people whose attention your brand already enjoys.

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