The Best and Worst Email Marketing: Growing Your List

Email marketing is only as good as the quality of your recipient list. Each year there is a natural decay that happens in email marketing lists that reduces the effectiveness of email as an influencer. People leave their companies, get married and change their names—life happens. In B2B marketing, on average lists only retain 75% of their members after one year due to turnover at companies and other factors. As a result, marketing lists have a tendency to expire at a rate of about 25% a year. If you aren’t replenishing your list with new, interested prospects each year, your email marketing will likely bottom out. So how do you keep your list full in the face of inevitable decay? There are two ways marketers tend to grow their email lists. The bad way and the good way. In order for you to learn the best techniques for conversions, we’re listing both the bad and the good ways to grow your list.

Growing Your Email List the Bad Way

Many marketers try to increase their reach by buying third-party email lists. We advise you against doing that. Buying a third-party list, even from a reputable vendor, comes with a number of risks.

• You can alienate recipients. If people haven’t expressly signed up to receive emails from you, they aren’t going to be very happy to get them. This is the antithesis to inbound marketing, which is based on attracting quality visitors and leads by providing value rather than interrupting them with irrelevant ads or marketing messages
• You could get blacklisted or marked for spam. One of the biggest reasons not to buy an email list is that it can negatively affect your deliverability rate.
• Bought recipients aren’t as engaged as opt-in recipients. Emails sent to opt-in recipients will always have a higher click-through rate than purchased lists, and the leads generated from those lists will typically be of higher quality.
• It undermines your inbound marketing strategy. Inbound marketing is about attracting leads to your website through useful, valuable content rather than harassing prospective customers with ads or direct mail. If you use a purchased list as a separate method you’re undercutting the work that has gone into building your company’s reputation as a helpful inbound marketer.

Growing Your Email List the Good Way

Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on building useful, interesting content to attract subscribers and leads. The basic idea is to provide value, make it relevant, and the subscribers will come. Tactically speaking, the best way to start generating leads through inbound marketing is to launch a blog and start creating good, search-friendly, content.

• Don’t hide your subscribe box. If you’re creating good inbound content, your blog and website will become a magnet for potential subscribers. Make sure that those readers can easily find your subscribe box. It’s worth A/B testing the placement of the subscriber box on your site. You can start by placing an email submission field in the top of your blog and remove any other distractions.
• Consider partnerships. Co-host a webinar or another marketing event with a company that is in a related but non-competitive space. Make the webinar informative and encourage participants to opt-in to hear more from each company. Capitalizing on each company’s existing reach can help you grow your number of engaged subscribers.

So there you have it! The best email marketing techniques to grow your list can be achieved once you know to avoid the bad ways to grow your email marketing list.

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