OPTINDATALIST.COM EMAIL MARKETING – Looking Back Over the Past 15 Years

We ended 2012 with the best year we had in our history and 2013 started off barreling full steam ahead. We continued to have month over month growth and our Email List Cleaning and Validation Service was growing at a pace better than I could have ever imagined or expected. A large percentage of our business is from returning, existing customers and customer referrals. We are currently on track to add over 1000 new customers in 2013. Our new customer acquisition rate has exceeded all of our projections and goals. New customer orders have doubled in 2013, as compared to 2012 and our average order revenues have increased over 34% .Our email marketing services and Enterprise ESP Platform, eList Manager have surpassed our annual growth expectations as well, and it’s only September.  We haven’t even entered the holiday marketing season yet and were on track for another record year of growth.

Email Answers continues to be a privately held, debt free company. The foundation of Email Answers was built upon trust, honesty, integrity, transparency and putting our customers first. We strive to provide the best possible services, to all of our customers, at a reasonable and fair price.  I feel that this alone is what has led to our success and continued growth.

Planning for Growth

For the past 9 months we have been planning a massive consolidation, upgrades and additions to our servers, infrastructure and colocation facilities. Over the Labor Day Weekend, we transitioned into a new, state of the art data center. As part of our consolidation and move, we built out our own private cloud, enabling us to provide quicker turnaround times for customer orders and to virtually double our ability to process concurrent email list cleaning and validation orders. This upgrade and build-out has given us the infrastructure and ability to be able to clean and validate over 1 billion email addresses per year for our customers. Based on the fact that nearly 30% of all email addresses are abandoned, change or become undeliverable on an annual basis, we feel that email list validation will be an ongoing service that every business, that sends emails to its customers, will continue to need on an ongoing basis.

What will The Future Bring?

Planning for future growth and where we think Email Answers will be in 3 years is not an easy task. Although history does not ensure future performance, we have to be guided by these variables. Looking at all aspects of our business enables us to try and design a road map to where we want to be over the next 1-3 years. We see excellent revenue opportunities in all of the current services we offer and provide and are attempting to steer ourselves into the future as the market leader.

Most people assume a successful person or company just got lucky or worked hard and made it successful. I can assure you even unsuccessful, failed ventures had hard working people behind them. What most people don’t realize is that for every one success story you hear about, there are 100 failures that you’ll never hear about and success is not a bee line to the top. The road to Success is actually paved with failures and I can personally attest to this fact.

I think Albert Einstein said it best, when talking about success in one of his more poignant quotes that has stayed with me throughout my career, “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value”. No matter what you do, whether its providing a service or selling a product,  strive to make it your mission to deliver fanatical customer service, above and beyond any and all of your customers’ expectations. If you do, success will follow.

Check back in 3 years to see how we did and how accurate my crystal ball was. I bet we’ll all be surprised.

What Matters Most in Email Marketing: Five Questions for 5 Experts – www.optindatalist.com

Do we ever figure email marketing out?

After years of creating email campaigns for races, retailers, restaurants, hotels, and a even a daily email for my old newspaper, I must say no. I still find myself searching for answers.

What’s a good open rate? What’s should we measure? Images or no images?

The questions keep coming, the answers change by the day and the person.

This summer my colleague Kate Hamilton and I reached out to some of the marketers we respect most to get their thoughts on some common email marketing questions. Today we’re sharing their answers here, and the differences in their answers shows you that there are no hard and fast answers when it comes to email marketing (despite what so many experts will tell you).

Here’s a sampling of their thoughts on some common email marketing questions I hear from clients and friends.

1. If you only have time to dig into 1 metric for your email campaigns, what should it be and why?

The purpose of an email campaign (for me) is to get people to click on something, to take some action; because of this the click-thru rate is my #1 metric. Of course if an email doesn’t get opened then no one will click through — so open rate is a close second.

Open rate, because this is the best way to get your message across, and also best way to gauge engagement level of your audience

CTOR. This is my favorite email metric.

[Note:  For the unfamiliar, CTOR stands for Click to Open Rate, the number of unique clicks divided by the number of unique opens. This tells you how many of those who opened your email found your content good enough to read more or dig deeper.]

Who did not view. Why? You can try sending to them with a different title or as text-only.

My two cents:  I love the COTR metric, but all metrics leave something to be desired. None tell you how many people saw the subject line in their email program but didn’t open the full email. That’s still an impression. Opens and click-throughs can drop dramatically if you’re sending several emails a week, and click-throughs can be much higher if you’re sending one email per month loaded with great content. The metric, and what defines success, depends on the overall strategy.

2. What’s your best time-saving advice for email marketers?

Curate! Great content gets read, but you don’t have to write it all! If you create a list of the most important articles, videos or podcasts from the last week (or month) about a topic your clients and prospects are interested in, it can make you look smarter and get more clicks than a well written article of your own.

Use a simple template. A weird, complicated template will cost you many many hours over the years.

My two cents:  After doing this for eight years, I’ve found one of the biggest time-savers is simply having a firm cut-off for including content. Don’t bend because a board member or staff member wants to squeeze something in late. It sets a precedent and will add many hours to the task over the course of the year.

3. What’s your best trick for increasing click-through rates?

Have lots of things to click on! If you have just one or two articles and those topics don’t interest the reader you’ve lost them. If you have a list of articles that you’ve curated from around the web on topics of interest to your audience you’ll see more clicks and fewer unsubscribes.

Leave a “curiosity gap.” The teaser text shouldn’t give too much away.

Make it easy to follow without a lot of text. Provide good, usable content.

4. Are there industries where email marketing isn’t worth the time or money?

I highly doubt it. I was going to say prostitution, but I bet that would be great actually.

Those with super expensive items for sale, such as manufacturing plant equipment. You simply do not have hundreds or thousands of customers to communicate with.

Businesses that sell impulse items such as candy under $1. People just won’t subscribe. Also, businesses that sell aircraft carriers/submarines that cost more than $100,000,000. These decisions aren’t affected by content marketing very much. It’s more about relationships, sales processes, multi-year RFP processes and bribes. …everyone else should do email marketing.

I can’t think of one. Every demographic has a growing mobile segment and uses email to some extent.

Thank you to these experts for sharing some wisdom with us!

With Gmail Overhaul, Not All Mail Is Equal – OptinDataList

For some retailers that rely on emailed promotions, Google Inc. is adding insult to injury.

When the search giant overhauled its free email service three months ago, it set up algorithms to automatically siphon the flow of airfare offers and spa deals away from users’ main inboxes and into an easily bypassed “Promotions” folder.

But there is another wrinkle: For Gmail users that do visit those Promotions folders, the first items they see will often be ads sold by Google.

The ads are different from those that already appear inside users’ opened messages. Instead, they look like emails sitting in an inbox but are shaded yellow and feature informational “i” icons explaining their purpose. Marketers still complain that the ads threaten to draw attention away from the coupons and pitch emails they want their targets to read first.

“People are not very amused by those,” said Tom Monaghan, product manager for the email service at marketing service HubSpot Inc.

Google shows no more than two inbox ads per user, spokeswoman Andrea Freund said. Some users’ inboxes showed no ads after Google tightened its “quality thresholds” for targeting the messages.

“Our goal was to put them someplace that was more relevant, and we thought that was the promotions tab,” she said. “When you’re looking at promotions, you’re looking for deals,” she added. “We do try to clearly label them as ads.”

If past software updates are any indication, Google will likely tread carefully as it introduces the new inbox ads, according to Ben Chestnut, chief executive of email marketing service MailChimp. Too many ads could alienate users, he said.

The ads are compounding the concern over the changes to Gmail, which has more than 425 million active users worldwide. Though Gmail users can’t see the changes when accessing their messages on iPhones, Google’s Web mail application is widely used on desktops. Ms. Freund said more than half of all users have the updated Gmail layout, which the company has been gradually rolling out since May.

Prolific emailers like Delta Air Lines Inc., Gap Inc., Gilt Groupe Inc. and Groupon Inc. have sent step-by-step instructions to their mailing lists on how to move messages out of the Promotions tab and back to Gmail’s “Primary” folder.

Marketers fear the new system could spread and put an unwanted kink in a tried-and-true method of driving sales, not to mention business models that rely on emailed coupons.

“We think other email providers will be adopting this as well,” LivingSocial Chief Marketing Officer Barry Judge said of the new categorization system. “We don’t know when and we don’t know who, but we think they will.”

The reason for the instructions is simple, Mr. Judge said: “We clearly just want users to see our emails.”

“Let’s stay together,” apparel retailer Kate Spade Saturday pleaded in an email to its newsletter subscribers. Gmail’s “new inbox settings may have started filing away your Saturday.com emails into the depths of something called a ‘Promotions’ tab.”

“Ack,” it added.

Google redesigned its service to help users manage email overload, Ms. Freund said. Users can reroute emails they want to land in their regular inbox with a simple drag-and-drop, or by going back to the old layout altogether.

The shift appears to have made a noticeable but small impact on the rate at which recipients open marketers’ pitches. MailChimp last month found the percentage of emails that were opened by its 3 million customers fell by about 1 percentage point for Gmail, to between 12% and 13%.

Analysis from HubSpot showed the percentage of Gmail users who opened clients’ emails slid slightly over the summer, though activity spiked during the weekends. Open rates have declined at the same slow rate since April, suggesting user engagement is suffering from too many emails rather than Gmail.

“There’s a little bit of Chicken Little happening right now over this,” Mr. Monaghan said.

Gilt, an online service that alerts members to deals on luxury goods, said it hasn’t had any problems with Gmail’s new layout. “Having said that, we think the best thing to do is to educate our members,” said Elizabeth Francis, the company’s chief marketing officer.

Groupon Chief Executive Eric Lefkofsky last week said the changes had no “material” impact on his business, because the daily-deals service has shifted away from emailed pitches to offering deals on its website. But just in case, the company sent a batch of emails to subscribers later that week explaining how to move its messages from “promotions” to “primary.”

Gap and Banana Republic sent emails about the new inbox because customers “value personalized and relevant emails,” spokeswoman Edie Kissko said.

OptinDataList.com – How to optimize your marketing emails for mobile

Managing email is already difficult for most users these days, who often open up their email only to find that, of a dozen new messages, nine are spam or irrelevant. Getting your company’s message through the noise is difficult, even more so on mobile, which is swiftly becoming a preferred method for using email.

In the Middle East, it’s even more clear that it’s essential to optimize communications for mobile; over 60% of the population in Saudi Arabia, and 62% in the UAE report owning smartphones. Yet e-marketing mistakes are still widespread, costing companies vital conversions and revenue. Below are a couple of simple, straightforward tips to optimize e-mail marketing for mobile platforms.

1. The five stages of mobile email viewing

Unlike in conventional e-mail marketing, mobile e-marketing funnels the reader through five stages.

• From line: Unlike on computer-based email exchanges such as Outlook, on a mobile phone, users will most likely not be able to see a preview of the email. Mobile phone users care about who sent the email. If the reader doesn’t know you or isn’t interested, they could delete the email or mark you as spam. To avoid this, keep the “from” line simple and clear.
• Subject line: Secondly, there’s the subject line. Many mobile email clients will showcase a subject line underneath the from line, but the number of characters on a mobile email will be limited to 35 characters. Keep your subject line simple, to the point, and less than 35 characters.
• Preview pane and preheader: A number of mobile email clients will allow users to preview a small part of the email’s text. Put your call to action in the preview pane, to entice the reader and push them to open the email. You’ll only have 85 characters or less though, so make the preheader as compelling as possible.
• Viewport: Once the viewer has opened the email, they’re only going to see a portion of your message if they’re using their mobile. You need to ensure that the most important parts of your message are in the viewport, up front and center of the screen. You can use tools and designs to pull the user down, such as images and background colouring or bullet points. But if they leave the email at this point you want to make sure they’ve already received the message.
• Scrolling view: Now that the reader has seen the top portion of the message, the final stage of viewing is getting him or her to scroll down and read the complete message. Here, keep your text clean and simple, and ensure that your call to action is large, well displayed and simple enough for the reader to follow.

2. Tap and swipe only

Smartphones are tap and swipe. Forget the clicks, the keyboards. As many of us with fat fingers know, tapping and swiping on small mobile screen isn’t so easy. A couple of things to bear in mind are:

• Ensure that your buttons are at least 44 pixels square for easy tapping.
• Keep your links and buttons to the center or left of the screen for ease of use.
• Separate links so users don’t accidentally tap more than one at the same time.
• Avoid interactive user interface elements such as hovers.
• Whatever you do, avoid the phrase “click here” on your mobile-optimized emails. Remember, mobile users are tapping.

3. Optimize your layout and graphics

This may seem very obvious, but it’s important to adapt your layout and graphics to the size of a mobile screen. In mobile, messages are scaled down, so go for a single-column layout rather than multiple columns. Use large text sizes and make use of contrast to increase legibility (but don’t overdo it). Make your buttons extra large, so that they’re easy to tap, and consider adding some texture to make the buttons more appealing as well. Finally, don’t forget to use large photos and images that will still look great when optimized for mobile e-marketing.

4. Use responsive design

Responsive design is a technique that can make your job much easier, as it enables the the message to resize itself according to the device being used. This will dramatically cut your design times and reduce the costs needed to develop effective e-marketing campaigns. Most importantly, you won’t miss out on a potential lead by not properly rendering e-mails on a specific device. If you’re not already doing it, go responsive.

Instead of forgetting one of the fastest growing target customer segments out there today, give spam the chop and start properly tailoring marketing for a mobile audience. You may be surprised how much mobile marketing promotes your brand, drives engagement and boosts revenues.

OptinDataList.com – 22% of Opt-in Emails Not Reaching Inboxes

Nearly a quarter (22%) of opt-in marketing emails never made it to inboxes in  the first half of 2013, according to a recent study by Return Path.

Based on a sample of nearly 1 trillion messages sent worldwide, the report  found that 18% of all email messages sent with subscribers’  permission either were blocked or went missing, and another 4% were  delivered to spam or junk folders.

Below, additional key findings from the Email Intelligence Report: Placement Benchmarks 2013.

Global Trends

• Inbox Placement Rates (IPR)—the percentage of sent email delivered to  addressees’ inboxes—declined globally by 4% since 2012, according to the  report. 
• The Asia-Pacific region led the worldwide decline, slipping to an IPR of  64%. 
• On the other hand, American senders slightly improved their IPR to  86%. 
• European marketers had an IPR of 80%, lower than their North American  counterparts, despite improvements in Germany and France. 
• In South America, Brazilian marketers continued to struggle to reach  subscribers, losing more than 40% of their email to blocking or spam folder  delivery.

Rates by Industry

• Several large industries, including retail, posted meaningful IPR gains in  2013. 
• Social networks’ IPR declined to 75%. 
• Non-profit organizations improved their global IPR dramatically in 2013,  placing 90% of their messages in subscribers’ inboxes. 

Gmail

• 86% of American senders’ messages reached the Gmail inbox. 
• Reaching Gmail inboxes was far harder for senders from Brazil (53%  IPR). 
• Only 7% percent of all Gmail messages were routed to the Priority  Inbox. 
• Finance-related mail (17%) was more than twice as likely to reach Gmail’s  Priority Inbox, whereas social networks’ mail (5%) was the least likely among  major categories. 
• Messages that were part of an active conversation, either replies (24%) or  forwards (11%), also reached the Priority Inbox more often. 
• Any message categorized as a “statement” was far more likely to reach the  Priority Inbox (26%), but only 5% of those identified as “coupons” were found  there.

 

OptinDataList.com – Five Ways to Minimize Email List Unsubscribes

Over the course of time, a certain percentage of subscribers will choose to leave your email list despite your best attempts to keep them; and, believe it or not, that is a good thing. It’s the nature of any permission-marketing channel:  The ultimate choice and control over receiving messages rests in the hands of subscribers. Plus, we know from the channel’s nearly 15 years in existence that commercial email works best when it is deeply rooted in permission.

So, your first step is to accept unsubscribes as a fact of life and not take them personally.

That said, you can take some steps to mitigate unsubscribes by not only honoring the cornerstones of permission (choice and control) but also expanding the choice and control options you offer.

Here are five specific steps you can take both to deter email subscribers from leaving your list and to improve their experience of your email program.

1. Offer an ‘opt-down’ as an alternative to opt-out

Probably the best known and most effective deterrent to an email opt-out is a practice known as the “opt-down.” Specifically, to opt down means to reduce email frequency as an alternative to leaving the list altogether. For the subscribers of many retailers, publishers, and other high-volume senders of email, the opt-down provides the breathing room and relief that subscribers need to avoid feeling smothered by a brand in the inbox.

Naturally, as consumers, we have shifting levels of affinity and periods of need for any brand, product, or service. Sometimes we’re in active purchase mode, other times we just want to “keep in touch” until the next time we’re ready to buy. Also, considering the different purchase cycles and frequencies of different products, such as computers vs. shoes, it can be months or even years between purchases.

Being given the option to adjust email frequency to suit our desired level of involvement with a marketer is critical to keeping a relationship with a brand not only alive but also healthy.

Either frequency is a significant reduction in volume from daily and provides enough relief to make subscribers on the fence about staying on the list much more comfortable with sticking around.

2. Provide email message type (category-specific) selections

Opting down in promotional email frequency is a logical choice, but it’s not the only way subscribers can stem the rising tide of email. For many marketers (business-to-business, travel, services), a high volume of email messages is the result not of constant promotional offers but the overall mix of many different message types.

When you combine newsletters, video/blog content, event-related messages, triggered email, and reminders/alerts with promotional offers, sometimes it makes more sense to offer category opt-downs vs. frequency opt-downs.

Because many subscribers will be content to maintain a minimum level of contact rather than unsubscribe completely, giving them an option to remain subscribed to your email newsletter is an excellent option.

3. Include an email change-of-address function

A third way to give subscribers the choice and control they need to avoid leaving your list is to allow them to change or update their email address.

People will need or want to update the email address they’ve given you for many reasons; among the most common:

They change email account providers due to a move or job change.
They revise their chosen subscribed address from a work to a personal email address (or vice versa).
They abandon a consumer email account that is receiving overwhelming, unstoppable amounts of spam for a clean new primary email address.

If your subscribers want to update their email address with you, by all means let them do so.

4. Consider message format choices

With now nearly 60% of all email now being opened on mobile devices, message format and rendering remain a concern. Often, to stay interested and engaged with your email messages, subscribers need to receive your emails in a more easy-to-read format. That means offering them the choice of plain text vs. HTML, or allowing them to indicate the device on which they normally interact with email.

Again, those options can be integrated into your unsubscribe pages to mitigate opt-outs, into an email (or overall account) preferences center, or both.

If you suspect message format and rendering issues might be causing people to leave your list, offering simplified format choices is a must.

5. Communicate beyond email

Finally, just because someone leaves your email list doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to hear from you at all anymore. If he or she has been a customer (transacted with you) prior to opting out of email, make sure to keep in touch through alternative channels, such as direct mail, catalog, and social media.

Track a list member’s buying behavior after the unsubscribe. Chances are, she may simply not be a fan of email as a marketing channel but she is still a fan of your brand.

You don’t want to make the mistake of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” by ceasing all communication to subscribers who opt out of email, but do be selective. Monitoring customer engagement and purchase history across all channels is essential to knowing where and through which it economically pays to continue customer communication, reduce it, or cease it altogether.

I’ll leave you with this to consider: When you treat the email list opt-out as a learning opportunity rather than a loss, you’ll see it in a more positive light and reap additional insight into your subscriber base.

Activating even a few of the ideas above will not only help you keep more email list members but also tell you a lot about where you can improve your programs to prevent opt-outs or complaints in the future.

www.OptinDataList.com – Email Marketing Tactics That Actually Work

OptinDataList.com – Companies looking for the secret to running a successful email marketing campaign should focus on content. That’s because both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies say in new research that email marketing campaigns are most effective when they contain relevant and compelling content.

However, companies are also quick to admit that creating that content is also the hardest part of email marketing campaigns, a new eMarketer report found. Though B2B and B2C companies agree about the importance of content in marketing campaigns, they are not fully in agreement about other effective tactics for email marketing.

B2B businesses say segmenting their email database, integrating email with other marketing tactics and personalizing emails are other effective tactics for email marketing campaigns. B2C companies, on the other hand, say that testing and optimizing their emails is the second-most effective tactic in email marketing campaigns. B2C businesses are in agreement with B2B businesses about the effectiveness of segmenting email databases, integrating email with other marketing tactics and personalizing messages.

Companies are running into problems when it comes to implementing some of those tactics. The eMarketer report found that testing and optimizing email messaging, segmenting email databases and engaging users through social media remain big challenges for companies in email marketing. Integrating email marketing with other marketing means also remains a big challenge for companies, the report found.

“The greatest percentage of marketers still felt challenged to create relevant and compelling content that will really draw in recipients,” the eMarketer report said. “If marketers can create strong content, they believe it really does work at converting consumers.”

Email marketing isn’t going away. 9 services to help – OptinDataList.com

Although you hear far less these days about email marketing than social media strategy or the need for customer analytics technology, it still accounts for about 9.6 percent of the typical company’s digital marketing spend — about the same percentage as those other two areas, according to figures from Gartner.

Separate data forecasts from Forrester size the annual spend for email marketing campaigns at approximately $2.46 billion for 2016, up from $1.5 billion last year. And another recent report, from an analytics vendor called Custora, suggests that email is a far more effective way to drive more sales to ecommerce sites than banner ads, Facebook, Twitter and other social media alternatives.

In that context, is it time for your small business to reconsider it email marketing strategy? Another telling development comes from SumAll, which offers an analytics service that helps small businesses gauge which of their social media marketing efforts are most effective. The last update to the suite adds support for email metrics, specifically those for Constant Contact, MailChimp and SendGrid.

www.OptinDataList.com

www.OptinDataList.com: 3 Easy Ways to Improve Your Email Marketing List

Two years back, the idea that social media would hasten the death of email marketing was hotly debated in blogs and op-eds throughout the digital marketing community. And while I don’t see it often anymore, I will occasionally stumble upon a blog that states, “Yes, email marketing is very much alive and well.”

Need proof? According to a recent survey published on MarketingProfs, email holds more sway in the purchasing process than personal referrals, company social media and blogs, direct mail and more. Email even ranked second (19 percent) among young consumers (those aged 20-30) behind company websites as the preferred way to engage with a brand.

The validating statistics are moot, however, if you’re not aggressively working to improve your email marketing list. Here, I share three easy ways you can get more from your email marketing database.

Append

In February, the United States Postal Service (USPS) announced it will stop delivering first class mail on Saturdays starting this August. Possible ramifications jarred many multichannel marketers enough to begin investigating options to amplify their email efforts.

Email append is a good solution for finding the email addresses of customers on your current postal list. Email append works like this:
Email marketers provide the names and postal addresses of the consumers they want to find addresses for to an email append service provider.
The provider uses algorithms to match the list to databases of opt-in email addresses, names and postal addresses.
The provider sends a permission request to each matched email address, giving the customer the opportunity to opt into email communications.
The provider adds approved email addresses to the customer files, which it returns to the email marketer.

Clean

Having too many bounces, complaints or spam trap hits damages your email reputation, which means your messages could be sent to the junk folder or, worse, blocked. Silverpop provided a snapshot of how industry bounce rates and spam complaint rates compare in its “2013 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study.”

Performing a simple data check to correct misspellings and typos entered during the acquisition phase is one step toward cleaning your list, thereby improving deliverability, says Pamela Vaughan, director of brand strategy for Lititz. Cleaning your list enables you to correct simple syntax and misspelling errors, and it allows you to remove distribution email addresses, like sales@company.com.

Enhance

Personalization is a common email marketing strategy nowadays, but gathering enough data about your customers to make emails personalized can prove tricky. Whenever I’m filling out a form (whether online or on paper), I never enter personal information into the boxes without those pesky “required” asterisks. (Hey, you want my phone number? You’re going to have to work harder than that!) I bet you’re of the same mind.

So how do you gather that data without scaring customers away? Data enhancement. By sending your email list to a data enhancement provider, you can discover demographics (including name, mailing address, age and income), psychographics, buying behavior, lifestyle data and business information, making your personalization efforts a breeze!

OptinDataList.com – Top five ways to organically grow your mailing list

Email marketing is facing an uphill battle with many Americans simply overwhelmed by the number of newsletters and email-based offers they receive. Almost one-fifth – 17 percent – go as far as to create a new email address every six months. Getting users to open your email is even more challenging – 21 percent of users report email as “Spam” even if it isn’t. And 69 percent will mark a message as Spam purely based on the “From” line.

Stop the Bleeding

How do you grow your email list amid an otherwise gloomy landscape? If you’re not losing subscribers, you’re doing something right. Otherwise, before you can grow your list, you need to stop the bleeding. Clean up your email list by removing bounced addresses, those that mark your messages as Spam and users who haven’t opened any of your messages. With an accurate database in tow, reduce unsubscribe rates by keeping your messaging to a minimum and staying true to your customers.

Five Ways to Organically Grow Your Mailing List

Growing your email list organically is advantageous for creating lifelong relationships with your customers. Sure, contests such as a free MacBook would certainly grow your list, but such actions ultimately set you up to fail in the end with uninterested customers. Customers opting into your campaign because they are interested in your product provide your company more value.

Integrate with… Everything!

Integrate your lead-generation efforts throughout your site, physical business (if applicable) and social media. Ensure an opt-in form is on every page of your website, ideally above the fold. Include a sign-up module on your Facebook page and drive traffic to a dedicated opt-in page via Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

If you offer content on your site, consider hiding it behind a simple – yet powerful – email opt-in form. Most users would willingly provide their email address and first name to download an e-book. Add an opt-in form at the end of each blog post and overlay the form on applicable videos. Grab their attention and then capture their information.

Be Honest and Flexible – It Pays Off in the End

When someone opts into your program, you enter into a contract. Hold up your end of the arrangement by keeping to your initial promise. Better yet, allow users to customize the types and frequency of messages they receive. The inherent risk of users unchecking marketing offers is mitigated by their desire to receive informational content that may lead to a purchase.

Offer a Compelling Reason to Subscribe

Very few individuals will willingly provide you with their contact details for “no reason.” Refine messaging around your opt-in forms and offer legitimate benefits to subscribing. Perhaps it’s exclusive newsletter-only discounts, new product announcements, or special content. Consider A/B testing which offers work best for your customers, while minimizing out-of-pocket costs such as fiscal discounts.

Co-host a Webinar

Co-hosting a webinar with a big-name sponsor is not only good for your brand marketing efforts but also to grow your list. Depending on the arrangement, you may even get access to the sponsor’s email marketing list. More common, however, is for the sponsor to host your signup form on their site. This works particularly well if an underdog pairs with a market leader to drive registrations.

Make it Easy with 1-Click Opt-In

Does your lead-generation form pass the 30-second test? If someone cannot sign up for your list in 30 seconds, you are missing out. Taking into account automation, you don’t need more than their first name, company (if B2B) and email. Using progressive profiling, you can collect additional details should they take another action such as downloading a white paper.

One Last Secret…

Increase your ROI by 9 percent by optimizing your emails for image blocking. When you initially view an email, images don’t load by default. And ensure your messages are mobile-friendly, given 35 percent of influential businesspersons check email on their mobile device.