Email List Growth – Best Tactics Revealed

Results of a study conducted by ExactTarget, Ball State University and the Email Marketers Club were released recently, so lets take a look at this often overlooked form of advertising and lead generation. The research team looked at ways to grow email lists in an attempt to identify the most effective and fastest growing approaches to list growth.

According to the research the fastest growing list growth tactic is encouraging subscribing through text messages. The report indicates that the overall most effecient way to grow email subscriber lists is to collect customers’ email addresses at optimal times when they are fully engaged -with in-store via text messaging, during online shopping, or at the point of sale. These types of onsite list growing procedures rated up to 60% higher than offline methods (which the report says included list rental and mass advertising.

Tamara Gielen, founder of The Email Marketers Club, commented: “There is no silver bullet, and no one tactic that will provide meaningful list growth. Successful list growth strategies employ multiple tactics to drive new subscriptions and compel subscribers to register because of the value of the communication itself.”

Gielen also Twittered about the highlights of the study, which looked at past performance levels and future plans for list growth from 351 email marketers from around the globe:

– Onsite registration took top spot as the best performing list growth tactic. Capturing information through inbound call centers, requests for email addresses at the point of sale and social sharing techniques played runner up.

– The top spots for worst performing list growth tactics was shared by outbound call center attempts to collect email information, list rental, email append and offline advertising.

– The study revealed that B-to-B marketers are more successful when using incentivized registration to bring in subscriptions, while B-to-C marketers found non-incentivized subscriptions to be garner more results.

– Mobile capture (allowing customers to subscribe to emails via mobile phones) is expected to increase faster than any other list growth tactic in 2009 – more than 500 %.

– Enabling subscribers to share email content with their social networks is also on the rise – expected growth is more than 348 % in 2009.

– Finally, a staggering 33% of all email marketers rarely or never evaluate the performance of their subscriber sources – meaning they miss out on information that could be used to improve their list growth.

Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy, said:

“The best performing list growth tactics are built on gathering subscriber data rather than hunting for it. Whether you are a B-to-B or a B-to-C marketer, the best way to grow your subscriber list is to collect information during customer-initiated interactions.”