A Direct Marketing Agency - Helping Brands Acquire and Retain Customers

It made the front page of “Multichannel Merchant” – building a targeted email list is hard to do.  Reportedly, 53% of marketers ranked it as their most challenging task, thanks to a high annual churn rate.  Still, there are techniques to make the job of growing an email database less daunting and when combined as an overall strategy, the results are positive.

• Make use of your website as a tool for email database growth by encouraging opt-in requests.  Design registration forms landing pages and utilize online marketing and search – either search engine marketing or search engine optimization – to drive visitors to your website. 
• Try a co-registration campaign.  The key is to find a non-competitive, partner web site where by merely checking an additional box, the visitor can opt-in to receive emails from both companies.
• Design a niche e-newsletter.  Find news or write articles that are relevant to the products and services your company is marketing and incorporate them into an e-newsletter along with you sales promotions.  The customer sees this information as an added value.
• Use contests that are related to your products and services.  MarketingSherpa reported that online sweepstakes only yield between 1% to 6% rates of high quality lead results, mostly due to web surfers registering simply for a chance to win.  However a contest that offers a prize closely aligned with the company’s products will produce higher quality results due to a higher level of interest.
• Start an online loyalty program.  In order to receive any advantages of being a loyal customer, an email address must be provided, as well as a score of other data.  Since there is a defined benefit to being involved in a loyalty program, it’s not unreasonable to ask more information from the customer.  You can use the data like you would market research results to better define the target audience.
• Rent email lists.