Obtaining Email Addresses: Growing Your Lists

In this day and age in marketing, it is vital to constantly be obtaining email addresses from contacts and prospects. While social media has evolved and created a variety of other platforms on which to market, email still remains the most prevalent. Email has three times as many user accounts as Facebook and Twitter combined! That’s 2.9 billion. Email is also already a transactional medium. Customers already get and expect to receive offers and make purchases through email. 44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email.

However, obtaining an email address is not permanent. 7% of Americans create a new email address every 6 months, and 30% of email subscribers change addresses annually. This makes an email address important, but not necessarily forever. It’s critical to grow your email database not only for the simple sake of growth, but also for the natural attrition of addresses over time.

So how do you acquire email addresses?

1. Start a simple campaign with the goal in mind of obtaining more email addresses.
2. Create an initial landing page to direct contacts to and gather information via a form on the page.
3. Incentivize contacts by offering them entry into a contest for an in-demand prize, a cup of coffee, or even a free whitepaper or ebook.
4. Utilize social media and other means of communication for your organization to get word out about the landing page (and incentive).
5. Reward opt-ins. What good is an email address if you can’t send communications to it?

Case in point

Recently, Right On Interactive worked with a client to obtain updated email addresses from current customers as well as the email addresses of prospective customers. Their incentive was the opportunity for “registrants” to be present at the ribbon cutting of their new facility. To get started, we helped them create a form to obtain basic contact information, with the email address as the priority. Then, we added the ROI form to a ROI landing page, which was designed with the organization’s branding in mind. At the event, our client set up stations of computers and tablets set to the landing page to collect even more information from attendees. All of the data collected prior to and during the event was brought into ROI’s Customer Lifecycle Marketing™ platform and was available for future communications.

Simple, yet effective. ROI can help grow your email database today. For more information on Right On Interactive, check out our free whitepaper, How to Select a Lifecycle Marketing Automation Solution: 5 Questions Marketers Should Ask.