How to Build an Effective Email Marketing List

Are they early adopters of your new products and services? Do they actively promote your organization? How else do they interact with your company, e.g. social media?

Knowing this means you can measure the progress of your automated marketing tools and if you are providing the right content.

Reward loyalty

When you know who your loyal customers are, reward their behavior. Implement something like a points system that offers discounts or complimentary services for a certain amount of interaction with your social media profiles or website. You can also reward clients for providing you with referrals, sales leads or encouraging other business to check you out.

Ask for direct feedback

In addition to monitoring customers’ replies/interactions, ask them for their opinion on the products and/or services you offer. You can then customize the promotions and content you offer them. This will inevitably increase customer engagement.

Provide personalized content

Show your customers you care about their needs by personalizing messages. Also, consider sending emails from an address that includes a first and last name. This is data thast can easily be taken from your email marketing list (as long as you've collected it in the first place!) Don’t use a generic one like “[email protected]” or “[email protected]”.

The need for an email marketing list built with customer consent

By not asking for a customer’s consent when trying to build your email marketing list, you risk the following consequences:

Negative brand impact

If you keep bombarding people with email newsletters, what do you think that they will eventually think of you? Just because they signed up for a webinar or used their credit card to buy a pair of trainers, it does not always mean that they want a long-term relationship with your business. This means they should not necessarily appear on your email marketing list.

The more you email them, the more negative the feelings about your brand could be fostered. These will only increase with each subsequent email.

Low email deliverability rates

If your emails don’t get much engagement, there is a possibility that it will lower your email deliverability rates and reduce your conversion rates. ISPs use a lack of engagement to judge whether or not your email is classed as spam. So, if you send someone lots of emails that they open, an ISP will know that people want to hear from you.

However, if you keep sending emails that are not opened, this indicates that your emails are considered to be either spam or of low value. This lack of engagement can then cause the ISP to stop delivering your emails to some or all inboxes.

Spam complaints

Some recipients will report email as spam rather than going through the unsubscribe process. They don’t usually consider the ramifications this can have on a business. They simply don’t want to receive any more marketing emails. Reporting an email as spam seems like a quick fix in their eyes.

However, from a digital marketer's perspective, a spam complaint is a serious issue. If you end up with a number of recipients labeling your emails as spam, you could end up getting ‘blacklisted’ by ISPs. This means you will no longer be in a position to send out email communications. Think of how this may impact your brand awareness and lead generation goals.

Breaking the law

In light of regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Canada's anti-spam legislation (CASL), the need to obtain consent from your subscribers has never been more important. Legally, you now need to obtain informed consent to store any user contact information.

This means you can only email people if they have either specifically consented or are an existing customer that has been given a clear way to opt-out. You need to ensure that you have both of these options in place, or you risk severe legal action being levied against your company.