Expert Interview Series: Part 13
Unlocking the Secrets of Email List Building, Growth, & Management
Tom Wozniak Chief Operations Officer at Optizmo Technologies, LLC
While email list building is frequently discussed, few tackle the subject with a positive perspective. Due to various malpractices associated with list building and management, the conversation often revolves around what not to do.
However, that’s only half the story. Email list building, growth, and management are vital elements of your email marketing strategy and deserve more than just a focus on the negative.
We caught up with Tom Wozniak, a highly respected expert in email marketing who has a strong following within the email community, to grab the whole ball of wax. Over to Tom!
For someone just starting with email marketing without any subscribers, isn’t building the list both a temptation and a necessity? How should one navigate the spectrum of choice? How crucial is stake analysis at this point?
Tom: Every new email marketer starts from zero with their list. So, this is a common challenge. Building an email list from the ground up takes time. You start with the basics, by giving visitors to your website, app, etc., the opportunity to subscribe to your list. Make the signup prominent and as easy as possible. Once you are delivering relevant and valuable content to your slowly growing list (this is a must if you’re serious about building a long-term email marketing program), then you can look at ways to kickstart your list signups. Consider partnering with other list owners who reach a similar audience. Either advertise in their newsletters or other email content or discuss them doing a dedicated send promoting your content. This can be a great way to get your content in front of a larger audience and drive new signups.
It’s said that the best acquisition sources are close to a brand’s shopping or customer service activities. But these touchpoints might also add one-time buyers to the list. What’s the value trade-off here?
Tom: Every long-term customer starts as a one-time buyer. Some tail off and may never buy again for a variety of reasons, but others become part of your core long-term customer base. Giving every new buyer the opportunity to become a long-term customer is a logical part of your sales process. Sometimes your email program is what will convince a one-timer buyer to make that second purchase. You can always remove non-responders from your mailing lists at a point in the future, but leverage the opportunity to use email content to build relationships with your new buyers if you want to optimize your long-term customer base.
It’s generally believed that short and simple signup forms work better. However, longer forms, while getting fewer signups, usually bring in more qualified leads. What does a balanced approach look like?
Tom: Start by asking yourself what information you really need from a new signup. Before data privacy became a significant concern for consumers and government agencies, companies could argue that collecting more data was always better. You never know when some innocuous data point could become valuable in your audience targeting efforts down the road. So, many companies erred on the side of collecting more data than was necessary. However, with the emergence of data privacy laws across many states, companies are becoming much more judicious in their data collection practices. So, consider what data points you need to effectively deliver relevant email content to your subscriber list. This will lead naturally to a more streamlined approach to creating forms and gathering data from your new signups.
How can brands with offline operations use them to collect email addresses?
Tom: Most brick-and-mortar retailers try to collect email addresses from customers during the checkout process. But, the key is to offer some value in return for the information. Creating a rewards program or customer club is one way to incentivize customers to sign up and provide an email address, in order to receive special offers or other member benefits through email. Just make sure you are providing a good reason for them to provide an email and clearly spell out what kinds of information you will be sending them.
Email marketers often don’t control where the signup form appears on the website. Do you have any tips on how they can convince the web team to involve them in this decision since email marketers are ultimately responsible for list growth?
Tom: Having silos in a company can create these types of situations, where a website team may feel no incentive to help the email team build their subscriber list by making the signup prominent and simple on the site. One way to head this off is to remind the web team that part of the email program involves driving recipients back to the site to engage in content or make purchases. That should directly impact the web team’s goals. Make it clear that working together benefits both teams.
Besides website signup forms, lead magnets, webinars, and online events, what additional methods can marketers use to build their email lists?
Tom: Partner marketing is a good option. Find other email newsletters or content publishers with whom you share a common audience, then see about having your content promoted in their next email or whether they do dedicated email campaigns for partners. This can be a great way to put your content in front of a large audience of potential subscribers all at once.
The holidays are coming up, and many email marketers focus on re-engaging inactive subscribers to boost responses. However, deliverability challenges peak during this period. Where do you think email marketers go so persistently wrong?
Tom: This is one of those areas where the answer to what to do in a marketing program is ‘it depends’. The best way to approach holiday email campaigns is going to largely come down to a company’s individual business model. For some, it may deliver a very positive ROI to focus on re-engagement efforts. For others, deliverability challenges or other factors may mean that focusing on high-performing customers is the most effective approach. So, it’s important for each marketer to understand their own business model intimately with a detailed analysis of past years’ campaign performance to make the best decisions about how to approach the upcoming season.
When it’s time for a thorough list cleanse, the first step usually is doing a quick list pinging. Since executives may not fully understand daily email operations, they often hesitate to allocate resources beyond basic list pinging. How can email marketers convince management to invest more?
Tom: With inbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo! making requirements more stringent for mailers to reach in the inbox, list hygiene is more important than ever to optimize deliverability. One way to demonstrate the need for assigning adequate resources to overall list hygiene is to show how reduced deliverability would impact overall email campaign performance – particularly conversions. That can make the budgetary decision more connected to potential revenue.
Could you share some lesser-known or often-overlooked techniques for email list cleaning? Also, what tools and automation techniques can be used to streamline the email list cleansing process and improve efficiency?
Tom: List hygiene can include a number of steps, some of which are important for every email marketer and others that become relevant in some cases, but possibly not others:
- Basic email validation – ensuring every email on the list is properly structured.
- Email verification – using an email hygiene partner to verify if email addresses exist and are actively being used.
- Removing unsubscribes – this is an essential step to ensure email compliance.
- Removing bounces – previous hard bounces should always be removed from a send, but what about soft bounces? That is up to each email marketer.
- Removing non-responders – at what point should an email recipient who has never engaged in your campaigns be removed? 6 months? 12 months? The answer really depends on your business model and marketing goals.
- Suppressing other audience segments – email marketers may suppress certain audience segments from specific campaigns either temporarily or permanently, based on their unique business model.
Unsubscribes are often considered healthy because the idea is that uninterested people leaving the list improves its health, avoiding spam complaints and protecting sender reputation. However, this reasoning wrongly assumes that all unsubscribes are voluntary and reflect disinterest. How would you suggest email marketers assess unsubscribes?
Tom: Email marketers should evaluate and analyze their unsubscribes in the same way as responders. Identify patterns in opt-out behavior that can be used to optimize future campaigns. Do certain audience segments opt out at a higher rate? Consider targeting those segments with different email messaging, since they may not find your current content engaging. Do unsubscribes tend to come in at certain times or from certain devices at higher than average rates? Is there any correlation between strong campaign engagement and unsubscribe rates? The key is to think outside the box a bit and understand the lessons these negative marketing signals are teaching you.
How can brands track and measure the performance of their email subscriber acquisition sources over time?
Tom: One of the advantages of email marketing is the ability to track performance at very granular levels, as long as you have your reporting set up appropriately. In terms of email subscriber acquisition, it starts with ensuring you can identify where every subscriber on your list came from and what drove them to sign up in the first place. If you are using a CRM to manage your subscribers, this should be fairly straightforward, allowing you to run reports on subscriber sign-ups by acquisition source.
Finally, to sum up, can you share a few best practices or expert tips on email list building, growth, and management?
Tom: While so many elements of email marketing performance optimization depend on each marketer’s unique business model and campaign strategy, there are certain foundational elements that tend to be valuable in most instances:
- Recognize that there are no shortcuts to building an email list that will remain valuable over the long term.
- Focus on building a list of email subscribers that you can engage with by delivering relevant content. Adding an email to your list is just the first step. Building and maintaining a relationship with them through your email content is a long-term process.
- Monitor your campaign and list performance very closely over time. Watch for indicators that you are or aren’t delivering relevant content.
Susmit Panda
A realist at heart and an idealist at head, Susmit is a content writer at Email Uplers. He has been in the digital marketing industry for half a decade. When not writing, he can be seen squinting at his Kindle, awestruck.
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