Sentori email marketing blog

Although it may be tempting to buy or rent email addresses to help increase the reach of your email marketing, this strategy, as we have blogged previously, has a poor return on investment and may even harm your reputation.  Far more effective is to grow your own list organically and here are our top 5 tips to help you improve your efforts.

1. Use an effective signup form on your website

This may sound obvious, but it still amazes us how many organisations get this fundamentally wrong.  Signup is not the time to capture a contact’s full details; in fact, we suggest that your newsletter signup form captures just the email address of the person.  Ideally you want to put as few obstacles in front of the recipient joining your list as possible.  Additional contact information can always be collected later.

If you use signup forms on multiple pages of your website (or indeed on multiple websites), make sure that you use a feature like Sentori’s signup source field so that you can track the individual effectiveness of your forms.

2. Make sure all staff are aware of the importance of collecting email addresses

It is important to educate all staff who have customer and prospect contact about the reasons for collecting email addresses.  Growing your email marketing list should be a goal for the whole business, not just marketing personnel.  If staff are informed about how important and effective the email marketing channel is, they will be far more likely to remember to collect addresses.

3. Email address collection should be a goal of all marketing activity

Whilst the primary goal of most marketing is to feed sales, collecting email addresses for further follow-up should always be an important and well-supported secondary goal.  All marketing materials – print or digital – should promote your newsletter as a valuable resource to your customers and prospects.  Including a simple URL where people can register for updates (such as http://domain.com/newsletter) can help spread the message about your email programme.

4. Place a signup link in the signature of staff emails

A really easy win is to have your staff link to your signup page in the signature of their regular emails.  This way all email communications from your organisation promote your email marketing program.  Try to promote your newsletter as a resource, for example “get great marketing tips in your inbox”, “be the first to hear about our special offers”, etc.

5. Market your email marketing!

Make a dedicated page on your website that is an advertisement for your email newsletter.  Include details and screenshots of the type of content that you send, what benefits recipients can expect to get out of subscribing, and the frequency that you send.  You could also include a feedback form on the page for your contacts to suggest content.