List Building Best Practices: A two-part series (part two)
Posted by Rob Ropars on March 23rd, 2009
In part one of this story we discussed some of the ways you can build your list. Did you miss part one? If so, please click here to read that posting before continuing.
And without further ado…Five more tips for list building…
5-Point of Sale – If you are in a retail environment and use a point of sale system with a keyboard, your vendors may have already incorporated an e-mail field into their system. If they have not, it may be easy for them to add the field (make sure they provide enough characters in the field for long addresses to avoid truncation). Strongly encourage staff and/or incentivize them to actively request and capture this information. Some of our customers have had good results by offering employees a monthly reward of a gift certificate for the employee gathering the most names.
6-CRM – Many organizations use a variety of tools to help manage the relationship they have with their clients, and to insure that information is being shared throughout the organization. Make sure that the email address field is on the initial data entry screen, and that the individuals collecting this information from customers are actively encouraged and perhaps even incentivized to ask callers for their email address and permission for the company to mail them in the future.
7-Forms – Most companies have a wide variety of forms that customers fill out in order to do business or conduct a transaction. Prominently featuring an email field on these forms, along with a checkbox to opt-in to corporate email communications can yield a large number of new addresses. Your ESP should have an easy way to mass import or data enter individual records (SubscriberMail offers both options).
8-Counter Forms - Customers waiting at a sales or order counter should have the opportunity to add email addresses to a form if it’s provided. Have a local print shop print these in pads as opposed to sheets (as they are less likely to be misplaced or taken away as a piece of scratch paper, plus they are highly visible). As another example, restaurants can utilize these forms at diners’ tables. These can also be used at events if you sponsor something remote from your store/office. Let people showing up sign up at the event.
9-Kiosks - In addition to point of sale, call-ins and counter opportunities, consider having kiosks set up around your location to allow visitors to enter their data directly into your web site form. They may not be ready to buy today, but this allows them to give you permission to try and get them back through the door later.
Conclusion:
There’s an old adage about inertia and things in motion tending to stay in motion. At SubscriberMail, we’ve found this also applies to new subscribers. You may well find (as some of our clients have recently discovered) that a new subscriber is much more likely to open, click and convert to sale than a regular customer who’s been receiving your email for months or years. They’re out there waiting for you: open your doors and invite them in!
In today’s economic climate, maximizing the ROI of marketing efforts has become paramount. In addition to ongoing list hygiene best practices, you should be pursuing ways to improve the size of your opt-in file. The more quality opt-ins you acquire (noting that I mean opt-in not purchased/rented lists of so-called “opt-ins”), the more potential buyers at your disposal.
