Where do the addresses for my email advertising come from?

25.03.2009
Email marketing has been proven to be one of the most efficient forms of online advertising. Having a qualified mailing list to call your own is an important competitive factor. Indeed, every company that has just started using email marketing is facing the same challenge: Where do the email addresses come from? Sending the newsletter that was costly to produce to just a handful of recipients is not fun. So what to do?

Before I delve deeper into this topic, I need to make one important point: The opt-in principle applies to email marketing too. This means that you may only contact those email recipients who have explicitly given their consent to receive such information. Everything else is spam and is therefore damaging and illegal. Important: Permission is not transferable. Therefore, bought or rented address sets are eliminated from the outset, regardless of the perceived counter arguments the list brokers make.

Permission is therefore the currency in the world of email marketing. It is worth fighting for. But by what means? One well-tried and efficient method is to gain addresses via a subscription form on your website. This only works, of course, when the subscription form is easy to find. Subscription options are often integrated into the order process of an online shop. It is important to note that the opt-in may not be preselected. The purchaser needs to give explicit consent, usually by clicking the option “Yes, I would like to receive the monthly newsletter.”

For a website visitor to disclose their email address, the added value of the newsletter subscription has to appear attractive enough, for example, by including interesting (exclusive) content or regular special offers. In addition, the interested party should not be scared off by you asking for too many personal details. In fact, according to law, requests for recipient data should be kept to a minimum. More often than not, it suffices to have the email address as the only compulsory field in the subscription form.

Without question, gaining recipients via a subscription form on your own website is a drawn-out process. But patience pays off through loyal and attentive newsletter readers. Addresses that are generated over short term actions like lotteries are of very little long-term value. This is because the participants are just interested in winning and not in the (marketing) messages of the advertising company.

As soon as the subscription form is online, the permission should also be obtained from existing customers too. It can be assumed that members of this target group would be very willing to subscribe to a regular email newsletter, as existing customers have a strong interest in the company and its products. However, the following applies here too: Do not simply include them in the mailing list. Instead ask them for their permission first. Either by post or over the telephone by a customer service representative.

This process should be supplemented by activities that support the marketing of the newsletter. There are no limits to the imagination in this respect. At Inxmail, for example, we have a link to the newsletter subscription form in the email signatures. During a sales or consultation meeting, our sales and customer service employees explicitly ask interested parties and customers whether they would like to be included in the mailing list. We also market the newsletter using AdWord campaigns.

I cannot finish without mentioning the modern addition to the methods described here. We have recently added a “Share in Facebook” enhancement to our email marketing solution. This is a miracle come true. Using email marketing with recipients whose email addresses are not known to us. In this way, we allow email marketers to increase their sphere of influence for their newsletter many times over.

Of course, it is the aim of all email marketers to get the reader to commit to the newsletter in the long term. Those who do not offer the recipient added value will fail. Subscribers will withdraw their permission after a few issues, will delete the mailings without reading them or, in the worst case scenario, will report the emails as unwanted spam.