Growing your Email Marketing Database
Building, growing, and nurturing an email marketing subscriber base can appear to be a difficult endeavor for any marketer, but there are some simple and effective methods to help develop an email marketing database.
Website
Customers arrive at your website to purchase, research, or compare. It is important to build prominent email sign-up opportunities throughout the website to capture information. Incentivising registration with an offer or clearly articulating the benefits of signing up can greatly increase the registration volumes.
Social Media
Social media and email are complementary channels. An email database can be used to grow social media “likes” while social media can be leveraged to increase an email marketing database. Encouraging social followers to sign up to a database with competitions and/or offers can help increase the subscription base.
Referral Campaigns
Utilising existing subscribers and social media followers through refer-a-friend campaigns can be a compelling method of increasing your subscription rates. Incentivising your existing subscribers with offers and/or competitions will reward loyalty while growing your database.
In-store data collection
Capturing data in-store or at point-of-sale (POS) is an effective and simple method of increasing subscription volumes. Encourage your customers to opt in to your database by offering an immediate discount at the point of sale, for example: Sign up for a 10% discount on your purchase! Savvy digital marketers can take advantage of in-store kiosks or hand-held devices to capture customer information.
In short, it is important to build sign-up opportunities for your prospects and customers at any touch-point in their engagement with your business. Make sign-up simple, set clear expectations with your potential subscribers, and ensure your email marketing is relevant and in line with those expectations and you will quickly build a strong, engaged subscriber database.
About the Author:
G’day Bob,
My name is Davide and from Rome (Italy). Although Italian, I lived in Australia for 5 years and actually came back to Rome just a couple of months ago. I will be leaving here for a while. I am telling you this just because I checked out your profile, at the end of the post, and says you worked in Australia.
Anyway, thanks for this post. Great stuff…it is not easy at all to build up an email marketing database. We have a big nice email sign up form, that is right but I think this is not enough. As you rightly said, they have to see a real benefit in order to give you their email address. It is always about the benefit for the reader/buyer/follower etc.
You know at the moment my biggest struggle is understanding what to give as an incentive/free gift. Our traffic comes from people interested in getting free high quality information, but apart from that I still have to figure out how to lead them to sign up.
Hi Davide,
While incentives or free gifts are a great way to encourage people to sign up, they may not always be a viable option.
I would suggest adding in a sample of the content that would be made available to them through email and/or very clearly articulating the benefits of receiving email messages.
In this case, the quality of the content can be the incentive for signing up.