Our first obstacle we encounter on our long trek through the Digital Marketing wilderness is the hike up the list growth mountain. Has increasing your email lists ever felt like a momentously daunting task? It takes constant vigilance, updating and effort to keep your lists in tip top shape. Just like climbing a mountain, you need to take it one step at a time. But is it worth the effort and struggle to make the ascent? DMi Partners’ clients routinely indicate that email is among their most profitable channels, if not their most profitable. In fact, according to Campaign Monitor’s 2018 Email Marketing Industry Report, 59% of marketers see the most ROI from email over any other channel. It is, therefore, not surprising that many email marketers are focused on growing the size of their subscriber base to maximize their investment in email as a channel. However, even the savviest of climbers struggle with the following obstacles to ascending the list growth mountain!

1. Not maximizing existing touchpoints to gain subscribers: The single most valuable source of email subscribers are folks that already are engaging with your brand either via your website, social media or some other channel. It’s crucial to make sure you are giving these visitors every opportunity to provide their email and opt-in to receiving marketing messages.

Anthony Villegas, from our partner UpSellit, highlights the importance of having a strong list growth strategy: “An optimized lead capture strategy can increase new-to-file leads 30-50% and top line revenue 5-15%. By capturing new leads from visitors that are demonstrating interest but not yet ready to purchase, you’re enabling your brand to stay top of mind throughout the purchase process.” Some solutions that our brands have found to be valuable include: lightboxes on high volume landing pages, refer-a-friend functionality, A/B & multivariate testing of lightboxes and forms to optimize conversion, cart abandonment, coupon and other incentives.

2. Adding based on list size: It’s crucial whenever focusing on growing subscriber base, that our clients are mindful of how much email they are sending today. Quickly increasing the volume of sends to a specific email client is frequently a warning sign to an email client such as Gmail that can lead to all email sends being flagged and preventing messages from arriving in even your longstanding subscriber’s inboxes.

Our clients have found that it is crucial to plan out the volume of new subscribers over time as a portion of their overall expected sends to the existing database. New subscribers who engage (open, click, forward, etc.) with emails should continue to receive ongoing messages and be considered as additional ballast to allow for even further growth. Conversely, new subscribers who haven’t engaged with the first set of emails should quickly be pulled into a re-engagement bucket to be sent less frequent messages aimed at getting them to engage.

3. List hygiene: As discussed above, the volume of new subscribers a marketer should plan to add is heavily variable depending on not only the size of the existing list but also the health of the existing list. The existing database should always support the health of your email program by delivering reliable engagement that will ensure clean IP reputation that enables ongoing list growth. However, if there are a large number of subscribers that bounce, unsubscribe, mark as spam or simply never open the existing database may be doing more harm than good.

Our clients routinely set rules to scale back on sending to subscribers who have not engaged (typically opening an email is the best metric to utilize) within say the past 90 days. Our clients have also found value in performing lead validation for all new subscriber channels and performing a one-time lead validation for their existing database (or just the un-engaged portion) when embarking on their list growth campaigns.

4. Cost effective subscriber growth: Clients routinely tell us that they can get a small volume of highly engaged subscribers cost effectively but when they try to scale beyond that segment the price increases dramatically and/or the engagement from the subscribers drops considerably.

Our clients that have had the most success with list growth view their efforts as a top of funnel investment that they need to get right. These clients leverage many tactics such as sweepstakes, offering discounts and giveaways, promoting contests or voting competitions. Similarly these clients typically employ many channels to find these subscribers but maintain their focus on quickly identifying channels that lead to engaged subscribers and moving further investment to those channels from sources with below average engagement.

5. Finding targeted subscribers in the right markets: Like above, it can be difficult to drive opt-ins across a wide audience of potential new subscribers, the work becomes even more difficult when targeting subscribers in more specific target audiences. Our clients often target very specific audiences based on the product niche, core customer age/gender/lifestyle, or the subscriber’s region, state or city (geo-targeting). For these clients with highly targeted audiences the channels that they can leverage can be more limited. Fortunately, there are a number of great channels where email marketers can reliably target for all of the above parameters based on the preferences that potential new subscribers have already indicated about themselves.

As an example, a quick-service restaurant client has been expanding rapidly into new markets and is leveraging email as a valuable channel to get the word out. They’ve developed a schedule that synchs with the planned launch of a new location so that 3 months out from a new location they will begin investing heavily in getting folks to opt-in who provide a zip code that is within a certain radius from the new store location.

6. Improving Personalization: Email personalization has moved over the past couple of years from an optimization tactic to a requirement for effective email marketing. It can, therefore, be daunting to consider that a large volume of new subscribers, potentially from new channels and tactics will start coming through the email journeys with limited to no information to leverage for personalization.

Our clients have found that while it’s important to leverage the information you do have, it’s almost more important to set up the email marketing campaigns to quickly and reliably learn more about the new subscribers to feed their personalization machination. Some of the tools our clients have utilized include:

• Varying the send time to determine time of day that drives the most engagement
• Sending different categories of content in the first handful of sends to see which drives engagement
• Putting different images and text call outs for the same link in an email content piece to track which call outs are driving clicks
• Sending triggered messages based on previous engagements to learn more

It’s important when conducting an ongoing list growth endeavor to not lose sight of the true goal which is to increase proportional engagement across email overall. Bringing on additional subscribers is only valuable if it is increasing the engagement level collectively and not counteracted by seeing a decrease in engagement from regular subscribers.

Our clients have found that one of the most successful ways of ensuring this is by tracking and optimizing their efforts separately by source. By benchmarking key engagements such as open rates, click rates, repeat visitors and any specific website goals they can ensure that not only are they growing their lists but also that they are seeing a corresponding growth in proportional engagement.

At first sight, a pinnacle may look truly daunting, but no great is reward is without great effort. By using some of our helpful list growth tips we hope you will be able to approach your mountain with some confidence. Join us next week as DMi guides you through the complex and murky jungle of the Amazon! DMi signing off!