Email list building is an important topic for any email program, as you must make efforts to continue adding to your subscriber list. While there are many tips and tricks for building your email list, let’s focus on some errors many companies make:
5 Common Mistakes with Email List Building
1. Don’t keep the sign-up process fast and simple: This is a big one. If you make the sign-up process complex, you will not get many sign-ups. It’s that simple. Below are some previous posts on email sign-up forms and process.
Nice simple opt-in from New York Life
Flawed sign-up process from SCORE
2. Don’t send a welcome email message: Another huge mistake. When people sign up for your list they are expecting an email welcoming them. This will be one of the highest open rates you will see. Use this opportunity to kick off the relationship on a good note. Below are some previous posts on the topic of welcome messages.
Pro Flowers welcome letter review
Good things from Olive Garden’s welcome email
Sephora screws up their welcome letter
3. Purchase lists: It’s just not a good idea. Unsolicited messages have the highest spam complaint rates and have the opportunity to deteriorate your sending reputation. Focus on building your email lists naturally and you will have much better results from the email channel.
4. Automatically add forward to a friend folks: This is not true permission. But do include an easy way to join your mailing list in the forwarded versions of the email.
5. Don’t offer website sign-up: Sounds elementary, but some big players drop the ball here and don’t leverage their site traffic to build their email list. Here is a post about jewelry retailer Shane Co making this same mistake.
In a future post we’ll provide some more best practices for email list building.
- Forest Bronzan
