Tips for Building an Email Marketing List

Digital businesses must use a variety of methods and tactics to keep new customers interested and the bottom line happy. Digital business and digital marketing cannot use a single approach and expect to find stable success as the industry changes too fast and reaches too many people for one method to work. Between SEO, physical mailers, email blasts, newsletters, sponsored content, and more, there is an almost endless list of marketing and outreach methods to choose from. However, there is no sense in using all the tools poorly. You must find a balance between doing the same thing well and doing all the things poorly. Not all methods work for every business, but there are many options that any business can adapt to fit its goals. One of the most popular and compatible methods is to use email marketing lists. However, there is more to email lists than just hitting send on a mass email. Below are just a few of the ways any business can build, use, and protect an email marketing list. 

What Is An Email List

A marketing email list is a relatively simple idea. Anytime someone gives a business their email, it is added to a list or multiple sub-lists. These lists are compiled to serve the marketing team better when it is time to send out the next round of targeted ads. Customers can give a business their email in a range of locations and situations. Most customers give a business their email during checkout so they can receive tracking and confirmation information later. Other customers may supply their emails to sign up for a newsletter or take advantage of a special deal you are offering. You should also have one or two fields on each page of your website where customers can supply their email if they want. Customers will also appreciate your company more if you transparently offer clear unsubscribe options so customers can painlessly opt-out of emails. 

Protect What You Have And Will Gain

Too many businesses focus on gaining more and continuously pushing forward, but they do not take the time to protect and solidify what they already have. So much of what digital businesses rely on is all digital data that must be stored on a network, and all networks have vulnerabilities. Instead of taking a risk and leaving your network as is because nothing has gone wrong yet, stop and invest in proper protection and monitoring. Just because nothing has gone wrong yet, doesn’t mean investing in a monitoring system like Cerner Citrix is a wasteful idea and is actually a prudent protection plan. 

Monitoring systems protect against more than just data breaches, too, as you must protect your asset health. Links can break, emails can go out of service, phone numbers can change owners, and more can shift overnight. For businesses that rely on accurate information, you should invest in programs that will keep an eye on your data and routinely check for errors or new flaws. You should always know what data you can bank on and use to guide decisions, but you must keep your data healthy and up to date to use it like that. Your email list will decay over time, as all data does, but with a monitoring program, you can see when data goes bad and quickly remove what is no longer useful. 

Use Your List Properly And Do Not Make Customers Regret It

The customers who willingly give a company their email address already have an inclination they might like the brand and products or have bought something already. Those are the customers who are most interested in your brand, and you should not squander their email by spending low-quality, spam, or irrelevant content. Customers do not want an email per day from their favorite brand, and flooding a customer’s inbox with marketing emails will cost you, customers, over time. Use your email list to target customer groups, promote special deals, and send out well-crafted content that gives customers relevant and useful information.

Email marketing is not a new practice, but you need an email list to send content to your customers. Collecting an email list is not terribly difficult as many customers will willingly hand over their email address, but check out and other sources also collect emails. Once you have data worth protecting, you should invest in programs to monitor and project the data you have worked so hard to collect. Be sure to clean your email lists every so often to remove addresses that no longer work or customers who unsubscribed. A healthy email list can be an incredible tool, but be sure you use it correctly to send customers high-quality content that will help you get more sales rather than driving people away with spam.